A friend asked me if I had punted this newsletter given how infrequently I was sharing the dispatches of my brain with the few hundred people who subscribe to this newsletter. (Really, it’s more like a hundred-ish people who actually read it so thank you to that community theater-sized audience for sticking with me.) I had two answers. First, I’ve been really busy! It’s been nice to work on a few different pieces at different elevations over the last month or so, and there’s one big piece coming out in a couple weeks that I’m going to talk about ad nauseam so just emotionally prepare your inboxes.
The other is that I’m hitting newsletter fatigue. I think I subscribe to something like 150 Substacks. The majority of them are run by friends or acquaintances or writers I admire, though even those I rarely read. There are a few that I open or bookmark the minute they hit my inbox: Max Read’s Read Max, Sam Valenti’s Herb Sunday, John Ganz’s Unpopular Front. My colleagues Tahirah Hairston and Terry Nguyễn are also appointment reading when I see their installments come in. (Apologies to my friends whose newsletters I didn’t mention, I promise I get to them eventually.)
I read those because they represent a level of curiosity that I don’t see from many contemporary writers who are famous on the internet for their newsletters. What is especially appealing about people like Read and Ganz—neither of whom I know, but both of whom I respect as stylists and writers—is that they both present their ideas without sounding like they’re pre-digesting their thoughts for a social media audience. For Read, who is no longer on Twitter, that was an ostensibly deliberate decision; for Ganz, who is by turns bellicose and hilarious on Twitter, it is, to his credit, because he doesn’t seem to care about anything but his scholarship.
But there is another class of newsletter writer that is seemingly notable for nothing more than writing a newsletter beloved by other newsletter writers and their tight ring of prestige media friends. It’s probably (definitely) counterproductive to name the ones I’m irritated by, but what I’ll say is that when I inevitably click into one of them I’m struck by the incuriosity that seems to be their collective defining characteristic. Most of the time it’s navel gazing par excellence, the kind of thing I would have self-satisfyingly posted to a Wordpress site a decade ago and now hope no one ever digs up. It feels as thought the Big Newsletter Writers have become more insufferable than the Big Podcast Hosts, which is a tough population to eclipse just based on how irritating podcast people are. (Except the ones I listen to which are all good.)
Now, I’m risking a similar insularity here by talking about a topic that, like, 5,000 real people actually care about. In fact, I’m already sort of getting bored writing this newsletter because of this preemptive anxiety I have about dedicating a few hundred words to something so myopic. But I do think this is a small lens-big picture axis, i.e. what does the media newsletter economy say about the value of curiosity in the disastrous-for-writing year 2024?
Which yes, brings us to Hate Read from the popular Substack Deez Links. I’m aware that by even sitting down to think about the “pop up newsletter” that dominated media Twitter for 48 hours, Delia Cai, the newsletter’s mastermind, has already won. But you know what, I’m already here, so I’m going to talk about it.
As an unalloyed hater myself, I loved the premise of Cai’s experiment. But I also have high expectations for hating on things. I need blistering takes on, like, modern parenting and meal prepping, the kind of things that make you sound insane and standoffish if you said them at a party where you know exactly 20% of the attendees. Hating has to come with stakes, otherwise you are not a true hater.
The two pieces that got Hate Read really bumping in my neck of the woods were on menswear and media parties. Both great topics! Both ripe for some raw hating of the highest order. The resulting pieces got passed around like notes at a high school lunchroom and I was excited to read them and seethe.
But as I went through the pieces, I was struck by how anodyne and poorly argued they were. The worst thing you can call a hater is boring, where the opinions are not the hot takes of a deranged individual but the milquetoast opinions of someone within a standard deviation of the average civilian. The harshest critiques in the menswear essay were about Aimé Leon Dore, which is about as dangerous as taking a shot at Lauren Oyler these days.
So the takes are boring, but I also admit to having a more discerning hater palette than most so that can be forgiven. But I was also struck by how badly written and argued the early viral pieces were. These anonymous dispatches were presumably written by Cai’s cadre of established media types, the people who have been paid to write their thoughts down for the last decade. But half of the sentences lack any sort of inner logic, and seem more interested in trying to get a zinger off like a drivetime radio host. This example was glowingly shared by more than a few high profile writers and editors:
The fact that ALD—a brand whose whole cinematic universe can be distilled down to “What if we dressed like 9/11 never happened?”—is at the forefront of menswear says a lot about how dire things have gotten and how bereft we are of actual creativity.
What does this even mean? This is the kind of sentence that, if it were in a draft I sent to an editor, I would be hit with the devastating single character Google Doc comment: “?” This is flexing gone wrong, someone mistaking a joke construction for an original thought.
But then, why did that line make it into several of the de rigueur newsletters and Twitter feeds from both legacy media publications and marquee individuals? Is it perhaps because, instead of engaging with the prose itself, these people are more interested in signal boosting the work of a friend and colleague? Does good and bad not really matter anymore? Is this just the cool kids’ table at Clandestino? Speaking as someone who was busy [Stevie Wonder voice] working for the City my first few years in New York, I didn’t end up making lifelong media friends interning at Vice or Gawker or the Awl who are now, like, senior staffers at major magazines or exist at the weird nexus of influencer and writer. That’s a very personal gripe born out of some out-group envy, but still, it’s always funny when you see the wagons circle.
But outside of the fact that it’s fine and normal to support work from people you’re familiar with, there is a part of me that wonders if the binding circle of ironic detachment is really what’s bothering me. As a noted freelance journalist said to me about the Hate Read discourse, “More than anything [good essay writing requires] a sense of curiosity about one’s own beliefs.” What we get in this series is solipsism mistaken for introspection. And sure, there’s the argument that it shouldn’t really matter if someone is considering the wider context of their perspectives when they write about how they hate the Barbie movie or boygenius. But you wouldn’t know that these were just playful little larks by the fawning response from Twitter accounts with the golden media person ratio of between 12,000 and 30,000 followers.
This is similar to the criticism of Lauren Oyler’s, who has faced both fawning interviews and scorching takedowns during the rollout of her debut essay collection. Her explanation seems to consistently be, “I’m just kidding! God, can’t you take a joke?” which of course is a good way to remain liquid in your arguments, never committing to something for fear it will be the wrong opinion. Cai’s defense is that all of this is trying to bring back some of the internet’s “fun,” where people just fired off takes without much to them.
I mean I get it. These are basically blogs, and the format is sort of insulated from criticism since we’re reading what amounts to a public diary of interior musings. Perhaps expecting more of them is sort of like me wanting to play well in a pickup game, something my friend Cam gives me a lot of good-natured grief for. Sometimes you hit a lot of air balls and trip over your own feet. But hey, these things don’t matter as much as you think they do.
And those two examples were freaking Jonathan Swift when compared to the nightclubbing one!
omg thank god someone articulated why that shit was so underwhelming/missed the mark. THANK YOU