Uhhh…

Josh Barro I first noticed as a Matt Yglesias supporting character second to Michael Tae Sweeney

With Trump he was like “I can’t be a Republican anymore” but he is a pointillist portrait of all the reasons people couldn’t be Democrats anymore since 1995 if not 1985

He was proud of being a gay man in conservative circles and it was kind of hilarious how this wasn’t left-style @gaywonk shit but being accepted as gay in environments where conservatives would go into reverie about what made men attractive and he could interrupt with authority to say “no really, this man is/isn’t attractive”

Which I appreciated all the more after the personality change when I realized I could do the same thing, and Matt Yglesias had left Vox so we didn’t have to hope to regroup around Jesse fucking Singal

hotelconcierge, like me if I referenced post-postwar pop culture not as a testament to where the zeitgeist was at X point in time but as a sort of OCD fever dream obligate structure we all HAD to accommodate

kontextmaschine:

(So I realize I’ve been shit-talking other writers a bit recently. And hey, that’s actually a pretty traditional way to break yourself as a writer, by tearing others apart. So let’s make that an occasional series. Here’s entries 1 and 1.5 on Fredrik de Boer, 2 on Ozy Frantz. Might as well keep doing it until sempai notices me.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates will never say in 100 words what he could in 300, and will never say in those 300 words anything new or interesting enough to justify 100.

He’s endlessly fascinated with himself, convinced the most banal observations and experiences are transmuted to gold by his involvement. I can’t count how many times he’s invoked “in college I realized my juvenile ideas had been immature and self-flattering” as some mark of distinction rather than the baseline minimum, a foundation on which actual insight can be built.

Or presenting himself as some clear-sighted visionary for reading books on the Civil War and dragging his kids out to battlefields and historic sites - which I’m pretty sure History Dads have been doing since Lee surrendered at Appomattox - and then turning it into who knows how many articles, blog posts, book proposals in which he sucks his own thumb - among other parts - over the brilliant insight that The Civil War Was About Slavery.

The thing is I’ve seen this before. Another thing he keeps coming back to is his childhood, being raised by a black nationalist father - the kind of guy big on discipline, effort, and racial pride who would be easily recognized as a conservative in an environment where his ethnic identity was THE nationality. And I really respect those guys, and a lot of it is for their ability to instill a sense of confidence and drive in their kids that propels them into a solid middle- to upper-middle class life coming from an environment where a lot of people don’t even come close.

But when those kids get there… I’ve run into a few of them. And boy are they convinced they have wisdom to bestow, and boy does it get a little ridiculous sometimes. “Son, I grew up on the streets, so I’mma tell you how to be a creative-class yuppie, son.”

Honestly a lot of time it seems like they’ve absorbed wisdom as an aesthetic, a style, and confused that with actually being wise. Now that’s a trap anyone can fall into - I spent a while mistaking people for smart when they were really just fans of spaceships and Science!, myself - but a big part of the path to actual wisdom is dragging yourself back out again.

Now I suppose the obvious counter would be I’m just repeating an old racist trope, of Black intellectuals as just simian imitators puffing themselves up above themselves. So, then, when you look at, say Spike Lee movies or ‘90s Fox sitcoms or contemporary black feminist blogs where “the ~enlightened brother~” is a stock comic trope, that’s just… internalized racism, right? Pf, nah. What it is is your low expectations, seeing someone go through the motions and taking that as good enough. ☯✟ Follow for more soft bigotry ✟☯

Now that’s his subject matter, when it comes to style - as a person, I’d put him in the 99th or 98th percentile of writers; as a professional writer he’s still above average, but making him the flagship brand of a magazine that’s constantly selling itself on its history publishing the greats of American letters? I think he needed another good five or ten years of polish before he could even contend for that level, but he’s sure not going to get it getting published in front-cover packages for what he’s turning in now, and then praised to the heavens as some kind of Second Coming. When in an earlier one of these I said Freddie de Boer was finding his voice in venom, I’m talking about things like the line about Coates’ “creepshow commenters asking him to forgive their sins”.

You see from the pulpit to the sidewalk to the, uh, movie theater, black America has kept up a tradition and practice of public rhetoric that’s really fallen out of white life. And Coates draws on that. He’s clearly angling to speak with “prophetic voice”, basically in a cadence and idiom derived from the black church, that preeminent organizing institution of African-American life, with preaching as an accessible path to esteem and power for the clever and the loquacious, preachers as a leadership corps in social activism and public life.

The thing is, again Coates is familiar with the preacherly cadence but doesn’t seem to have internalized how and why it works. It’s like when you ask a kid to draw a future airplane and they put wings everywhere, wings where they won’t generate lift, wings that would foul the air of other wings. Honestly, I think it might have to do with picking it up from a father who had in him a captive audience rather than from the actual church from preachers with an eye towards keeping souls in the pews.

You see, the preacherly cadence, like all good cadences, is about rising and falling action, building your audience up and then bringing them back down, concentrating your energy and then releasing it in a focused beam. But Coates knows how to build intensity, but not how to bring it back down again. Instead of escalating from a baseline escalation becomes the baseline, devaluing his starting point by comparison, offering no local maxima and thus no climactic moments. He knows how to build a theme through repetition - his recent work littered with the increasingly stale buzzphrase du jour, “black bodies” - but not how to break or twist the repetition and pour all that energy you’ve built up into an original, novel thought.

The end result is a plodding drone of a tone, piling words on words on words unto infinity, it’s writing as prog rock. The preacherly cadence is at root an oral form, but you can tell his first medium is text, if he ever tried to speak this stuff in front of an audience he’d at least notice them tuning out halfway through, notice that he was just making himself hoarse without eliciting more of a response.

And really, that’s the telling bit. That’s the part that gives away the game, that the promotion of Ta-Nehisi Coates, all the self-congratulatory media attempts these past few years to put black figures up front in the public eye, it’s not about putting power in black hands but as a maneuver in a status games among whites, that these guys aren’t being looked to as thinkers but as mascots.

(There’s an old joke from when the Republicans were the “black party”, but even then more in thematics than in actual power - “What do you call a black man at the [annual fundraising] Lincoln Day dinner? The keynote speaker.” [related])

Because really, what is whiter - what could possibly be whiter - than trying to distance yourself from your whiteness, trying to show how with-it you are, by latching on to some black celebrity, praising him to the heavens, wielding your fandom as a talisman, and not even noticing that you’ve managed to pick a guy with no goddamn sense of rhythm?

I am aware of this, seen it several times, and it’s why I don’t leave tumblr for twitter

because my superpower is apparently noticing when the past bangs warnings like “selling out” and “the faustian bargain” into the culture

I remember when Kangaroo Cocksucker’s excuse for leaving tumblr for twitter was he wouldn’t get stuck in the same self-referential loops all the time and since then he’s said the same depthless things in different words about comics, politics, vidya, barbecue, gay self-doubt and Maine on a 4 day cycle to increasing acclaim, even balancing for winter depression

this maybe counts as a hatchet job, I’ll tag it as such

The quick version is pointing out his graceful slides into and out of movements and moments, the way he poses humility while he actively tries to become a kingmaker - in everyone currently important’s comments all the time making intelligent points, making posts whose real point I can tell is to link to some upstart and baptize them as within the “/ourguy/ but acceptable” circle

The way he namedrops more and more as the years go on, the time I was at a libertarian establishment event in the 2000s and at the afterparty we related these sophisticated insights and outrages to each other and I wondered who was going to first mention we OBVIOUSLY all got this from him but no one

The way the skeleton key to him is his sports posts, about golf course design and high school football and about his postwar utopia San Fernando Valley childhood where all the Protestant and Catholic and Jewish kids were casually American together and that’s what made everyone think the blacks would work too

And that didn’t work so that’s the fall of man and so much of his stuff, from the genetics/haplotypes stuff he used to push harder to the culture war he genteelly draws from now is aimed at building a justification to cut off the blacks as ballast so it can be his postwar utopia childhood again

inb4 “you should do a hatchet job on X”

I only do them on people I already read and take seriously.

You have to, that’s the point of a hatchet job, there’s this tension between the text of “this person and their work are trash” and the subtext of “I respect this person’s work enough to make it a subject of my work”

rendakuenthusiast:

I find it super-adorable when Megan McArdle writes about food and doing boring domesticity-related things with her husband :3

Remember when she was “Jane Galt”, the libertarian blogger but like a girl

who would inevitably follow up like Rod Dreher like

“Update 7: I want to clarify that I do not *actually* think (thing that is a reasonable, predictable, and tbh funny take on the words I said)”

(remember that like libertarian woman from the ‘90s newsletters who would do an advice column on how to respond to common challenges, and do it well but there was this subtext like she’d once lost something to Marilyn vos Savant?)

(So I realize I’ve been shit-talking other writers a bit recently. And hey, that’s actually a pretty traditional way to break yourself as a writer, by tearing others apart. So let’s make that an occasional series. Here’s entries 1 and 1.5 on Fredrik de Boer, 2 on Ozy Frantz. Might as well keep doing it until sempai notices me.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates will never say in 100 words what he could in 300, and will never say in those 300 words anything new or interesting enough to justify 100.

He’s endlessly fascinated with himself, convinced the most banal observations and experiences are transmuted to gold by his involvement. I can’t count how many times he’s invoked “in college I realized my juvenile ideas had been immature and self-flattering” as some mark of distinction rather than the baseline minimum, a foundation on which actual insight can be built.

Or presenting himself as some clear-sighted visionary for reading books on the Civil War and dragging his kids out to battlefields and historic sites - which I’m pretty sure History Dads have been doing since Lee surrendered at Appomattox - and then turning it into who knows how many articles, blog posts, book proposals in which he sucks his own thumb - among other parts - over the brilliant insight that The Civil War Was About Slavery.

The thing is I’ve seen this before. Another thing he keeps coming back to is his childhood, being raised by a black nationalist father - the kind of guy big on discipline, effort, and racial pride who would be easily recognized as a conservative in an environment where his ethnic identity was THE nationality. And I really respect those guys, and a lot of it is for their ability to instill a sense of confidence and drive in their kids that propels them into a solid middle- to upper-middle class life coming from an environment where a lot of people don’t even come close.

But when those kids get there… I’ve run into a few of them. And boy are they convinced they have wisdom to bestow, and boy does it get a little ridiculous sometimes. “Son, I grew up on the streets, so I’mma tell you how to be a creative-class yuppie, son.”

Honestly a lot of time it seems like they’ve absorbed wisdom as an aesthetic, a style, and confused that with actually being wise. Now that’s a trap anyone can fall into - I spent a while mistaking people for smart when they were really just fans of spaceships and Science!, myself - but a big part of the path to actual wisdom is dragging yourself back out again.

Now I suppose the obvious counter would be I’m just repeating an old racist trope, of Black intellectuals as just simian imitators puffing themselves up above themselves. So, then, when you look at, say Spike Lee movies or ‘90s Fox sitcoms or contemporary black feminist blogs where “the ~enlightened brother~” is a stock comic trope, that’s just… internalized racism, right? Pf, nah. What it is is your low expectations, seeing someone go through the motions and taking that as good enough. ☯✟ Follow for more soft bigotry ✟☯

Now that’s his subject matter, when it comes to style - as a person, I’d put him in the 99th or 98th percentile of writers; as a professional writer he’s still above average, but making him the flagship brand of a magazine that’s constantly selling itself on its history publishing the greats of American letters? I think he needed another good five or ten years of polish before he could even contend for that level, but he’s sure not going to get it getting published in front-cover packages for what he’s turning in now, and then praised to the heavens as some kind of Second Coming. When in an earlier one of these I said Freddie de Boer was finding his voice in venom, I’m talking about things like the line about Coates’ “creepshow commenters asking him to forgive their sins”.

You see from the pulpit to the sidewalk to the, uh, movie theater, black America has kept up a tradition and practice of public rhetoric that’s really fallen out of white life. And Coates draws on that. He’s clearly angling to speak with “prophetic voice”, basically in a cadence and idiom derived from the black church, that preeminent organizing institution of African-American life, with preaching as an accessible path to esteem and power for the clever and the loquacious, preachers as a leadership corps in social activism and public life.

The thing is, again Coates is familiar with the preacherly cadence but doesn’t seem to have internalized how and why it works. It’s like when you ask a kid to draw a future airplane and they put wings everywhere, wings where they won’t generate lift, wings that would foul the air of other wings. Honestly, I think it might have to do with picking it up from a father who had in him a captive audience rather than from the actual church from preachers with an eye towards keeping souls in the pews.

You see, the preacherly cadence, like all good cadences, is about rising and falling action, building your audience up and then bringing them back down, concentrating your energy and then releasing it in a focused beam. But Coates knows how to build intensity, but not how to bring it back down again. Instead of escalating from a baseline escalation becomes the baseline, devaluing his starting point by comparison, offering no local maxima and thus no climactic moments. He knows how to build a theme through repetition - his recent work littered with the increasingly stale buzzphrase du jour, “black bodies” - but not how to break or twist the repetition and pour all that energy you’ve built up into an original, novel thought.

The end result is a plodding drone of a tone, piling words on words on words unto infinity, it’s writing as prog rock. The preacherly cadence is at root an oral form, but you can tell his first medium is text, if he ever tried to speak this stuff in front of an audience he’d at least notice them tuning out halfway through, notice that he was just making himself hoarse without eliciting more of a response.

And really, that’s the telling bit. That’s the part that gives away the game, that the promotion of Ta-Nehisi Coates, all the self-congratulatory media attempts these past few years to put black figures up front in the public eye, it’s not about putting power in black hands but as a maneuver in a status games among whites, that these guys aren’t being looked to as thinkers but as mascots.

(There’s an old joke from when the Republicans were the “black party”, but even then more in thematics than in actual power - “What do you call a black man at the [annual fundraising] Lincoln Day dinner? The keynote speaker.” [related])

Because really, what is whiter - what could possibly be whiter - than trying to distance yourself from your whiteness, trying to show how with-it you are, by latching on to some black celebrity, praising him to the heavens, wielding your fandom as a talisman, and not even noticing that you’ve managed to pick a guy with no goddamn sense of rhythm?

Verbs and flattery, that’s an improvement.

“Proof you can explicitly structure a community around being ethical and rational and someone will still manage to sleep their way to the top.”

That probably comes off more venomous than I actually feel but it’s too good a line to delete, to the extent there’s a moral there it’s not “slut! jezebel!!” but “if the only rule structuring your hierarchy is voluntarism, power will inevitably follow charisma”, perhaps crossed with one of my favorite morals, “awareness of does not equal exemption from”.

As a thinker/writer, entire stance is leveraged out from “though I know I’m crazy I don’t want to be put under control of the sane”, which is sympathetic but still a weak reed.

Generalizing to “though we’re crazy, we shouldn’t be put under control of the sane” shows charity and metaawareness but not particular mercy or wisdom, especially in how the “know” and “want” parts are elided.

Might be more pose than persona, a lot of the positions people put forward most actively are defensive negations of their actual selves, fetish/kinks are the big things where the shirt shows through the slashed doublet and the thing with Jim’s blog hoo boy

Kinda self-aware but not enough about how crafting a successful life has involved arranging submission of will to multiple sane lovers, specifically who being no less an accident of fate.

As such, basically reinventing catamacy. (From catamite. La LA la la la la la la la, catamacy damascene.) Like the thing, recent local maxima the ‘60s-‘70s, where petty charismatic authorities (professors, psychiatrists, priests/youth pastors/cult leaders, coaches) would engage in intense relationships with the vulnerable where they’d give them seriously valuable guidance through personal development AND using them as hot flexible little fucktoys.

You know, the thing the current consensus defines itself against, that the coming generation is learning to define ITSELF against?

You’ll notice I’ve avoided pronouns in this post, that’s how I reconcile politeness with integrity.

Summarized, I guess my complaint about Freddie deBoer is

“He values substance in writing, and believes that too much writing today substitutes style in its place, and that’s true and important. But while he *says* he values style, and thinks it has a place, you sure wouldn’t guess it from reading him.”

(You could say he substitutes substance ABOUT style in its place.)

nostalgebraist:

veronicastraszh:

nostalgebraist:

[…snip, snip, snip…]

I mean.  On the one hand I agree Freddie deBoer has all of these problems.  On the other hand I get this special sort of frustration when people point out these problems, in this kind of blog post, in this writing style, using these sorts of rhetorical techniques, etc. etc. – because it seems to exemplify the thing that I think deBoer is rightfully criticizing?

i think a lot of what deBoer is saying is basically:

The average piece of cultural criticism on the internet is very bad, and otherwise smart people are strangely tolerant of this state of affairs, and the reason probably has something to do with a stock of cached responses that prevent them from realizing some article is bad.  (That “Books All White Men Own” article basically has no good qualities, but by framing it as “all white men” it set up this situation where a bunch of people wanted to circlejerk about how they were sufficiently sophisticated not to make the “not all men!” response.)

And that seems both eminently true and important to me.  When I read deBoer’s posts about this stuff I had this very relieving “my god, exactly” response – this was a problem I’d felt on some level, with all of this progressive clickbait and mediocre blogging I’d seen circled around endlessly on social media, and I’d just assumed no one else saw this problem and so it was probably a non-problem (i.e. a problem with me) but here is a person saying it, in a way that rings very true to me.

And I’d be perfectly open to attacks on deBoer’s position that engage with the actual position – attacks that explain why this kind of material is not as bad as he says, or why it’s bad but that doesn’t matter, or whatever.

But focusing on how deBoer as a person is obnoxious, or humorless, or pretentious, or self-parodically bombastic (I mean, my god, look at this) – all of which is true – is exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to shout “for once, do I get to not care?!”  deBoer is saying: everyone has been celebrating bad, uninsightful writing because it pats them on the back about how they don’t have certain character flaws.  (Ha ha, I own lots of these books and am laughing at myself for it!  I’m one of the self-aware white men!)  And it’d be nice for once to focus on the quality of the content, to say, yeah, this writer is kind of messed-up as a person, maybe, they’re a little bombastic and grating, sure, but do they have insights?

So, to get to the point: the Belle Waring post does not have insights.  it does not say that deBoer is wrong.  What is says is that he is annoying, possibly sexist, that he has character flaws, that he “lectures,” that his “pose” is grating.  And what deBoer is saying, which I think is an insight, is that the progressive blogosphere / clickbait-osphere has been churning out precisely these kinds of critiques well beyond the point of diminishing returns.  Versions of points like “Freddie deBoer has character flaws, owned, Q.E.D. motherfucker” are the sort of thing I feel like I’ve seen 10^9 times in my life and would like to go, I dunno, a week without seeing?  Can I please not care for once?

So, like, if you come in agreeing with deBoer, then Waring’s post is just going to make you say “look, see, this is the kind of shit he’s talking about!“  If you come in disagreeing with deBoer, then, well, I guess Waring’s post probably comes off as like a pretty good series of dunks aimed at an obnoxious prick.  But either way, no one’s mind changes, so … 

(I realize this is not maximally clear, temperate, or sensible.  Sorry.  I’m more worked up about this than I am in possession of clear thoughts about it)

Yeah, I can’t take his critiques so seriously, cuz a lot of this stuff is maybe meant to be a bit shallow. Not everything is high minded all the time, nor do I want someone who expects us to be.

Which, I didn’t really like that one terrible Toast article, but so what?

And on that, from that Kang-DeBoer debate I posted earlier:

DeBoer is arguing with himself. After reading through the list and through the hundreds of comments, I saw scant evidence of the “white male tears” response. What I saw instead, were hundreds of readers who were gleefully trying to add to the joke. It was what The Toast generally has been — a place where the readers can thumb their nose at the establishment, whatever that may be. And while I might agree with deBoer that the joke certainly could have been more subversive and accurate, I also know from years of online content creation that sometimes these sorts of posts are more so that your audience can chum around in the comment section.

And that is what DeBoer doesn’t get.

There are real criticisms to make about how the left has jumped into Twitter rage culture and Internet pile-ons and all of that. So fine. But the left is not alone in that space (she says while #gamergate still lingers on).

Which, this happened. It ain’t just we lefties who cannot handle The Power of Interwebz!

But if a bunch of women get together in a comments section and make jokes about dude-culture –

This is no cultural high point, but it serves a purpose, one that I sense DeBoar is both excluded from and oblivious to – and one wonders if those two facts are causally linked?

Anyway, if you want some better critiques of “outrage culture” and how it hurts the left, I suggest Katherine Cross:

http://quinnae.com/2014/01/03/words-words-words-on-toxicity-and-abuse-in-online-activism/

http://quinnae.com/2014/02/06/the-chapel-perilous-on-the-quiet-narratives-in-the-shadows/

http://feministing.com/2015/04/23/words-for-cutting-why-we-need-to-stop-abusing-the-tone-argument/

In my view, she nails it.

Thanks for the links.

The part of deBoer’s critique that resonates with me isn’t so much the stuff about internet pile-ons per se, it’s about a lack of analysis, particularly analysis of big features of society that go beyond inter-left disputes, particularly analysis drawing on facts the reader might not already know (or “know”).

It seems like the kinds of articles that are getting celebrated (or, at least, talked about) are less and less made up of arguments about that sort of thing, and more and more this sort of hall-of-mirrors stuff where there is no argument, just assertion of stuff the reader probably already agrees with (or is willing to immediately agree with), or sort of … posing in psychological space rather than arguing.

What do I mean by “posing in psychological space”?  Well, consider something like this article.  It’s an all-right article as far as it goes, I guess.  It originally included a link to a tweet which started a long internet argument called “Jacobinghazi.”  Jacobinghazi itself was an argument about the conduct of certain leftist twitter users, started by an offhand remark in an article criticizing a tweet by Aaron Bady in which he referred to Thomas Piketty, among others, as “broconomists.”  In the article itself Amber A'Lee Frost criticizes this sort of use of the “bro” trope.  And, okay, let’s take a step back … 

None of the this has to do with anything concrete.  I mean, you can feel however you wish about how leftists use the word “bro,” but that dispute doesn’t connect in any way to the sorts of things that started all this.  The “bro issue” has nothing to do with the economic issues that Piketty’s book were about.

So what I’m saying is: increasingly, it seems like the things that get passed around, talked about, celebrated, written, flame warred over, etc. are these things that are sufficiently removed from the original political issue that they have no implications whatsoever for that issue.  It may or may not matter for Piketty’s analysis of inequality that is he is or is not a “broconomist” (whatever that is), but it certainly doesn’t matter for Piketty’s analysis of inequality whether it is correct leftist practice or not to criticize people in bro-themed terms; by that point we’ve gone meta enough that the original topic (inequality) is completely unconnected to what we’re talking about.

I want more Piketty, or more “why Piketty is wrong,” and less “should we approve of referring to Piketty as a ‘bro’?”  (Note: this point is about distance, not gender.  If someone were to make an actual feminist critique of Piketty that would fall safely under my “why Piketty is wrong” category.  Instead, what we saw was a single, unexplained tweet about “broconomists” followed by wankery at higher meta-levels.)

It’s not always about this kind of distance; sometimes it’s just a lack of argument, full stop.  Progressive clickbait is full of this.  Everyday Feminism has a worldview, but it won’t explain to you why you should buy that worldview.  It’s hawking a specific, increasingly (!) odd version of feminism (cf.), but it won’t make a case for this, or even admit that it is taking a specific position that not all feminists would agree with.  It just lectures you.

To get around to the point: I think aiming at The Toast was about the worst possible choice deBoer could have made, because yeah, it’s a comedy website, and saying it’s just an excuse for wanky banter invites the response “what did you expect”?  But Jacobin is serious; Everyday Feminism is serious (I think?); and these kinds of things get shared and flame warred over endlessly.  There’s a relevance vacuum and an argument vacuum here.

The problem for me here isn’t tone or anger, it’s the lack of a full connection between the reader, the writer, and the real world.  One gets lectured at with no arguments, or argued at about inside baseball meta-issues that only ~100 people have ever heard of, or whatever.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the guy since before clickbait was even a thing, back when Salon was only as far gone as Slate is now and Slate was still actually trying.

First encountered him through… Dreher? Poulos? Then completely unrelated saw him crossing swords with Sady Doyle back when she was still ENDING SENTENCES IN ALL CAPS.

So if he thought the same writers were worth paying attention to that I did, I thought maybe he was worth keeping an eye on. And his point has been the same, and correct, all this time, that from the irony era to the snark era, no one is actually being earnest about things and it’s a problem.

But, and this is why his style is relevant, the guy’s writing *is the worst goddamn argument* for earnestness I can imagine, implicitly setting up an opposition between taking things seriously and having any sense of playfulness whatsoever. For a guy who studies rhetoric… I’m not saying he has to start imitating *me*, but a little fucking deadpan here and there wouldn’t kill you.

Honestly I think his recent, more hitpiecy stuff is a little better in this regard, maybe venom becomes him. But then you see that post slagging Grantland, all “look at these would-be writers, narcissistically trying to *coin a memorable phrase*” and it’s like dude, COME ON.