Everybody deserves a literate life. Or, rather, each and everyone of us deserves to try this whole reading-and-writing thing at an advanced level1 before deciding “it’s not for me.” (If you’re a monolingual English speaker, this is also true for foreign languages.) One might think that this goes without saying, but one would be wrong. If you’d like for literary culture to continue to exist—and I’m not just talking about so-called Literary Fiction, so if you love to read but think every book in the “general fiction” section at the bookstore is about rich people getting divorced, this statement also applies to you—your hackles should go up every time you hear someone say that literature study is only for privileged people, or that it’s only for soft-handed eggheads.
Even if privileged people are overrepresented in today’s literary culture, this doesn’t mean that literature study is inherently for privileged people no matter what. It just means that various policy decisions have made advanced study less accessible than it used to be. To give a counterexample, it’s impossible to separate the vibrance of literary culture in New York in the 20th century from the free tuition and egalitarian admissions policies at public institutions like City College. If we seriously want our literary culture to include as many voices and stories as possible—and I think we should—everyone should have the opportunity to study literature and the other arts at an advanced level at little or no cost.
We’re coming up on yet another season of my least favorite reality show, College Admissions: Lust for Glory. On the off chance that any high school students are reading this, I’d like to offer a little advice. None of you are going to believe me—I wouldn’t have believed any of this when I was seventeen—but I’ll say it anyway: In the long run, the people you know are more important than the college you attend or the major you choose.
It is true that attending certain colleges and choosing certain majors makes it easier to meet important people. I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t. The biggest advantage of going to a school like Yale or Stanford is that you get to meet a lot of important people along the way. It’s not the only advantage, but in my opinion it’s the biggest. And it’s also an advantage of majoring in a field like business or marketing: more likely than not, meeting important people is built into the program.
Nonetheless, even if you go to a relatively unknown college and major in a field other than business, finance, marketing, or communications, you can still meet people—you just have to work a little harder. (This isn’t a newsletter of networking tips, but one thing I’d recommend is reaching out to someone in a field you’re interested in and asking for an informational interview.) What’s more, if you do really well at a relatively unknown college, you have a good chance of getting into a name-brand graduate school. For what it’s worth, I probably would not have gotten into [the top-ranked public university where I got my master’s] if I’d applied as an undergraduate.
I haven’t really used social media for a couple of months. I had a private Twitter account for part of last year and part of this year, just for the purpose of following people whose posts I genuinely liked, but I logged out of it a while ago. Three general observations:
Unlike the last time I fully logged off (the first half of 2022, when I wrote “On Logging Off”), I haven’t really been feeling the urge to log back in. Part of this, I think, is that after the Elon Musk takeover, most of the people I followed either started newsletters or started posting more frequently on said newsletters. If I found myself wondering what Person X was thinking, they had more likely than not written about it in a newsletter. (More on newsletters below.)
I don’t think that logging of, in and of itself, has made me a happier or better-functioning person—it’s not like I logged off and instantly felt happier. That said, in the medium term, I’ve been feeling less nihilistic. Some of this might be due to longer days and two recent positive life events, so your mileage may vary.
Unless you are literally being paid money to do so, there is no advantage to keeping up with every nano-trend or tempest in a teapot that will be forgotten within a week. As I’ve written before (see footnote 5), I’ve never been a fan of the old saw that Twitter2 is not real life. Nonetheless, it is empirically true that (1) most people in this country, let alone this planet, are not on Twitter; (2) eighty percent of the tweets come from ten percent of the user base; and (3) the most active Twitter users are not a nationally or globally representative sample. When you see someone on Twitter working themselves into a frenzy over (for example) the significance of being a “pleasure to have in class,” you might think, Wait, I’ve never worried about this before; is this a thing I should be worried about? Is everybody but me worrying about this? Will I look like an idiot for not worrying about this? Is everybody making fun of me for this behind my back? The answers are “no,” “no,” “don’t be ridiculous,” and “no, but we will if you keep worrying about this.”
With Twitter, and with social media in general, I always felt like I had to do a cost-benefit analysis. On the one hand, social media really did enrich my life in certain ways. I would never have read The Last Samurai, Dark Money, Reign of Terror, The Haunting of Hill House, No One Is Talking About This, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, or any of Rachel Wetzsteon’s poems if not for social media. On the other hand, social media could also make my life less pleasant. Other people’s lives, too; persistent low-grade irritability and nihilism do not make me particularly fun to be around. Sometimes I could maximize the benefits and minimize the drawbacks by being strict about who I followed and by muting annoying people, words, and phrases with impunity. Sometimes, however, that wasn’t enough. At this point, the benefits are not compelling enough for me to put in the work necessary to minimize the drawbacks.
I have very ambivalent feelings on how Substack and other similar platforms have affected our literary culture. As far as I can tell, the newsletter explosion, if one can even call it that, is due to three major factors:3
A surplus of writers and a dearth of editors at legitimate publications that actually pay their writers.
The unwillingness of established publications to pay for pieces perceived as too niche, too inside-baseball, or too weird.
An unstable media landscape—remember Buzzfeed News? New Gawker? the Outline? Old Deadspin? the Awl? Old Gawker?
It would be fair to say that a full-time writer turning to Substack is trying to make the best of a bad situation. But this creates a new set of problems. Readers forget to renew their subscriptions. The payment processor’s computer breaks down. A major social media platform gets bought by the most petulant man in the known universe and starts blocking, down-rating, or throttling links to websites with which the colony of termites this man has in place of a brain has decided to start an ill-defined beef.
Additionally, the landscape of good nonfiction and essay writing becomes increasingly atomized. More and more, you have to seek this stuff out. I can open up the latest London Review of Books or New Yorker or Harper’s and be assured that I’m going to find at least one or two good articles, but there isn’t really an equivalent for Substackers and other writers who aren’t affiliated with an existing publication. There are some well-curated daily or daily-ish online roundups—Bookforum had a pretty good one, and I hope they’ll be bringing it back; there’s also the Washington Review of Books. Neither one, however, focuses specifically on independent writers.
The hell of it is, Twitter was the closest thing we had to this hypothetical central hub. One writer I already followed might share the work of a writer with whom I’d been unfamiliar, which would in turn lead me to discover other writers.
I’d say more about this, but if I write another word about Twitter, I’ll start sounding like the kind of guy who never lets you forget that he’s over his ex. Have a great week, everyone.
We’ll provisionally define “advanced level” as anything more advanced than the level you’d need to master in order to meet the everyday demands of citizenship in a Westernized country. You don’t need to be familiar with this stuff in order to sign a lease, renew your license, buy groceries, understand newspaper articles, or do your taxes.
Or X.com or whatever we’re supposed to call it.
Some people will insist that content-moderation policies are a fourth factor; indeed, Substack has taken on a reputation in the last couple of years as a “home for the canceled.” (If you were looking for the most annoying possible combination of words in the English language, congratulations, you’ve found it.) I guess this is a factor in some individual cases, but my hunch is that it isn’t as prevalent as the three factors I outlined above. It seems likely that “I started a Substack because I got laid off from my fifth consecutive media gig” is a more common justification than “I started a Substack because I got deplatformed.” I’ll gladly revise this if there is any solid research that proves me wrong.