Politics | Recovery | Current Obsessions
What makes something so bad it's good is usually some level of humanity... [T]here's never gonna be a "Waterworld" made by AI. There's never gonna be something that's just a huge swing and a miss. Like, "Waterworld" and "Battlefield Earth" were both made out of one person's ego, which makes them kind of beautiful disasters. Should anyone have the power and influence to make movies that bad? I don't know, but they're human movies.
That's from my interview with Parker Malloy last week about my piece in The New Republic called How the Radical Right Captured the Culture.
You can read that interview here.
The piece is about the influence conservatives have had on mass culture and, more than that, about the collapse of the systems that once made pop culture more resilient and occasionally revolutionary.
Over two months, I did hours of interviews. I talked the ears off of friends as I wrestled the ideas into place. I pulled a couple of all-nighters and leaned on a few folks for support when I felt like I’d completely lost the thread.
I had a patient, line-by-line editor (Emily Cooke), a sharp-eyed fact-checker, and an assigning editor (Michael Tomasky) who wrangled me a princely sum for the piece: $8,000. That’s almost double what I usually get per word for short online op-eds, thanks to its placement on the website and in print.
I’m telling you all this partly because I’m proud. And also because I think readers deserve to know what goes into a piece like that—financially, emotionally, practically.
I could not have written this piece for my newsletter. Yet it’s also the kind of piece few publications are paying for lately.
As you know, I left Substack recently. I left for many reasons, including my belief that it is tricking us into thinking that journalism has a future. But Substack is just the most immediately perilous lane on a broader freeway that I’m pretty sure is headed over a cliff.
Newsletters won’t save journalism. They can’t.
Not because newsletters in themselves are bad. Parker’s newsletter (published on Substack!) is vital. Subscribe to it, give her your money.
Some of the best writing out there is from writers striking out on their own. I would link to examples, but I have many friends trying to pay the rent doing newsletters, and I don’t want to imply by omission that any of them are less than stellar. This is part of the problem.
Legacy journalism has failed us as a country and failed a lot of my friends, personally. So, many of them have turned to newsletters as an alternative. That exodus has created something that it is so personality- and brand-driven, so geared to the success of one person at a time, it scares me.
Newsletters are atomizing. They incentivize speed and volume. The newsletter ecosystem isn’t built to support doing big things, or doing things slowly, or doing things collectively. Or doing big things collectively, slowly.
Big projects need editing. They need infrastructure. They benefit from the writer not worrying about what happens if they get sick or lose another gig. Or if their big swing is a miss. (Some big swings have to be!)
There are newsletters that support longform work. There are collective newsletters—I write for one!* But many of the collective, long-form-supporting newsletters aren’t really “newsletters” anymore. They have staff. They have support. They have scaffolding. They’ve reinvented the newspaper or the magazine on a slimmer budget and without a design team. I wish them luck. Maybe one of them will hire me. (I would like a job. Or, really, I'd like fewer jobs.)
But I already have a connection to a great publication. So if you’re wondering how to support the kind of work I want to keep doing—the kind that needs time and room and friction and care—consider this:
Subscribe to The New Republic. It’s $10 a year. Eighty cents a month. For just the price of a paper cup that could hold some coffee, amiright?
Supporting TNR supports longform journalism by freelancers. It supports a staff who have salaries and sick leave. It makes space for a community to build something bigger than themselves.
I’d still love for you to become a paying subscriber here, too. (You can do that here!) This newsletter brings in about a mortgage payment a year, and I appreciate every bit of support. It’s where I think out loud, share what I’m building, and stay in conversation.
But I want to be honest: More than likes or subscribers or virality, what I really want is a media system that works. A system that values both writing and the often-invisible process that allows good writing to flourish.
Writing is more than a single writer. I can’t do this alone—and no one should have to.
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Related:
If you liked the New Republic piece, or like this newsletter, or you’ve just been thinking a lot about how we survive the creative economy as it currently exists—I’ve got a podcast debuting next week that you might like as well, Past Due.
It’s about the perverse logic of modern creative work, and how to build a life that doesn’t destroy you. We’ve got a new (in-progress) website and our Patreon is live—it’s not too early to join there! Or subscribe to the YouTube channel! Or both!
I have a new workshop that picks up on the problem of staying human in an economy that pushes you to be a machine: The Slow Burn, for writers who want to keep writing without flaming out. It starts May 3—you can find out more here.
And there’s the science-fiction podcast, Space the Nation, too! Now covering Andor, if not my mortgage. You can listen to our discussion of “Waterworld” here.
I also wrote a piece recently about the anniversary of mom’s death and her economic legacy (a theme is developing) for Flaming Hydra here.
Now, I have to figure out how to write my next column.
(Like I said, fewer jobs, please.)
Thanks for being here. Thanks for reading.
—Ana
* My Hydra colleague Talia Levin wrote a great piece about the panic one feels when your writing muscles are sprained and your income depends on keeping writing.
Fear of the white screen consumed me. As the gap grew wider and wider, I fell into a spiral of self-recrimination and shame, until a carapace of anxiety hardened all around me. I believed I would never get the words back. I watched my bank account dip lower, as people unsubscribed from my newsletter after weeks of drought; the anxiety heightened, but no matter how hard I strained, I could not write. In a capitalist society, your worth is tied so tightly to what you’re able to produce that I doubted the value of my own life. Failurefailurefailure was the inner thrum of my thoughts. I moved through the world sluggishly, a writer without words, feeling as useful as a cup without a bottom. I didn’t know what to do except thrash and flail in these putrid storm waters that sought to pull me under.
I know that feeling.