And all the box checking required of the liberal institutions paradoxically leads to such incredible mediocrity. Case in point is David Remnick, someone who seems to have no idea where his talent begins or ends and frequently assigns himself plum articles in The New Yorker, which would invariably be better written by someone else.
Lol. One thing I'm discovering in my anti-New Yorker phase is how much vitriol there is for David Remnick. I'd thought of him as a pretty good steward but happy to add to the shit list!
So too in the law school / lawyer / judge / clerkship world. For any law student who wants it bad enough, the conservative pipeline is just so much easier (just ask JD Vance and his wife)
Yes for sure. My sense is that the MFA is largely about passing through a kind of ideological litmus test and charm school. The big prize at the end is a recommendation from a connected teacher and to get that it's important that you be squeaky-clean.
Seems spot-on in many ways, at least from my anonymous perch on the dim edge of the known universe. It’s a familiar story, actually. See ‘O’Rourke, PJ’.
Excellent article and an insightful breakdown. It's good to see these things called out. So many of those "open submission policies" are performative and meaningless. And crazy-making.
The opposite, actually, to the extent that I've critiqued Substack at all. At this point, Substack is an unusually valuable tool. The combo open forum that is the newsletter/blog and notes/blog, with multi media (and messaging and chat), is a powerful vehicle for both individual and group expression, connection, and action.
I'm critiquing its form here, not its content. Much of the content is establishment blather. But crucially plenty of content is much more liberatory, insightful, and useful because it's not gatekept by anyone, especially not by the establishment. To some great extent at least.
Journals are not open forums, necessarily. They are gatekept. If you had to get rid of one or the other, all the individual newsletters or all of the journals, of course you would get rid of all of the journals. Not that there aren't some good ones, even great ones, including ones that do things individual newsletters cannot do, or cannot do as well, but all journals are (and probably must be) intensely restrictive in ways that individual newsletters are not.
Like so many things these days "substack" can be a noun that represents lots of things (and I'm guilty) .. everything from a pipeline to blooming greatness to the best example of the desperate, narcissistic, never-ending, like-chasing enshittification of media culture. It’s one think to chase clicks if you derive revenue from ads, but most of substack does it for the Likes.
I like some ideological bleed-over in publications. Heterodoxy is more fun than homodoxy (if that's a word). The Wall Street Journal used to publish liberals (and a Marxist, Alex Cockburn). The Atlantic used to publish conservatives. Don't know if that's still the case, since I rarely read them nowadays.
Definitely not a word lol! There are always in-house contrarians with the different magazines. The Times has gotten a lot better in the Joe Kahn era and is publishing a lot more conservative op-eds. I might be wrong, but I think The New York and Atlantic are pretty uniformly consistent.
I grew up a conservative in rural Montana, became socialized as a liberal in graduate school, and often now find myself a writer and thinker without a country for many of the reasons outlined here.
My whole career started when I wrote an article and snail mailed it to the editor in chief of DETAILS magazine. They published it because DETAILS was new, it was still in a formative stage, and it wasn't prestigious. Also they needed good stuff. Now I write occasionally for TheBLAZE which is 1) new 2) still in a formative stage 3) is not prestigious and 4) they need good stuff.
Totally. I think that's the only way to do it really. When publications get too big, it's a problem for everyone. It's why we need lots of publications.
All of this sounds exhausting. I just want to write beautiful things for the sake of it. Trying to make a living as an author was always hard but seems downright impossible and masochistic to me nowadays.
Many years ago, I read an interesting essay in Quillette and made a note to pitch them one day, and eventually I did. I was used to getting ignored or rejected, so I was more than a little amazed when something like 12 hours later I got not just an email accepting my essay but the fully edited essay and a pretty decent offer of payment. I went on to write many more things for them even if politically I did not agree with much of what they wrote.
I try not to think too much about the politics of these journals. Hell, it's actually good if a right-of-centre publication accepts something from a lefty because it shows a willingness to engage that you don't generally see on the left. It does feel weird though when I submit something to a big left-wing publication and realise that I've mentioned Quillette and others. I feel pretty sure that alone will cause an editor to pass without reading.
Yeah, it's a nice experience writing for Quillette! Most of these magazines also have no ideological litmus tests. They're just kind of interested in pushing the edge.
Quillette gets attacked by people on the right for being too liberal and by people on the left for being too conservative. That's usually a sign you're not adhering to an ideology and are open enough to question convention, which is a big positive for me.
I'm not sure how much they push the edge. Just start out with reasonable priors and assist them as the world turns. (You know, they've noticed that Trump is a nightmare!)
Yes, the Submittable experience description is spot on. How much do all the people on the other side of these forms hate to read, if they need to put up so many filters before doing it?
To some extent. There's another topic I didn't get into that a lot of publications - and the more prestigious the more they do this - will really eviscerate your writing to keep it fit to a house style. Where I am right now I could probably court The Atlantic or NYT and get something in but it would be months of my life for not that much pay and in the end the article would barely be my own work. I'm really pretty happy with smaller and quirkier publications that let you write as yourself. In any case, this piece isn't really about my own submissions - it's just more something I noticed and then wanted to extrapolate into a more reflective piece.
Hm, I wonder how much of this is simply because there are far more intellectuals on the left than right, so publishers on the left have the luxury of having higher and more arbitrary standards. Having followed politics for a long time, I get the sense that right of center intellectual institutions are always desperate for talent in a way left of center ones aren’t.
Yeah, there's definitely something to that. But being overcrowded is not necessarily a good thing - it creates its own kinds of problems. If you kind of feel like all of your people are excellent in an indistinguishable way, the tendency is to push for a shared voice as opposed to rewarding individual idiosyncracy. The New Yorker writers, for instance, all sound exactly like each other, which wasn't always the case.
I have a copy of the 1995 New Yorker Fiction Edition. 188 pages. Inside are pieces by Philip Roth, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux, Martin Amis, James Atlas, Willaim Styron, T.C. Boyle, Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates, E. L. Doctorow, John Updike, Sharon Olds, Ian Farzier, and more.
That plus the enormous private subsidies for right wing media plus the death rattle of traditional publishing means the demand for thinkpieces from the right is artificially inflated, it's not just the gap in supply.
Thanks Neural! Submittable is really crazy-making - and almost all lit mags, etc, direct you there ASAP.
And all the box checking required of the liberal institutions paradoxically leads to such incredible mediocrity. Case in point is David Remnick, someone who seems to have no idea where his talent begins or ends and frequently assigns himself plum articles in The New Yorker, which would invariably be better written by someone else.
Lol. One thing I'm discovering in my anti-New Yorker phase is how much vitriol there is for David Remnick. I'd thought of him as a pretty good steward but happy to add to the shit list!
Remnick ruined it through hyperpoliticization. And here I thought you'd drop in a Yale vs Princeton barb, which would work.
So too in the law school / lawyer / judge / clerkship world. For any law student who wants it bad enough, the conservative pipeline is just so much easier (just ask JD Vance and his wife)
Interesting, thanks.
Yeah, especially big publishing today. The MFA can be a connector track. But it's definitely an insider track.
Yes for sure. My sense is that the MFA is largely about passing through a kind of ideological litmus test and charm school. The big prize at the end is a recommendation from a connected teacher and to get that it's important that you be squeaky-clean.
The MFA pipeline is Maoist. My PhD wife makes new MFA's.
Seems spot-on in many ways, at least from my anonymous perch on the dim edge of the known universe. It’s a familiar story, actually. See ‘O’Rourke, PJ’.
Lol thanks.
Excellent article and an insightful breakdown. It's good to see these things called out. So many of those "open submission policies" are performative and meaningless. And crazy-making.
Thanks Terrance!
Curiously, Substack's individuals' newsletters have them all beat. By miles. They are quicker, keener, more cutting, and more cohesive.
I thought you were tougher on Substack lol!
The opposite, actually, to the extent that I've critiqued Substack at all. At this point, Substack is an unusually valuable tool. The combo open forum that is the newsletter/blog and notes/blog, with multi media (and messaging and chat), is a powerful vehicle for both individual and group expression, connection, and action.
I'm critiquing its form here, not its content. Much of the content is establishment blather. But crucially plenty of content is much more liberatory, insightful, and useful because it's not gatekept by anyone, especially not by the establishment. To some great extent at least.
Journals are not open forums, necessarily. They are gatekept. If you had to get rid of one or the other, all the individual newsletters or all of the journals, of course you would get rid of all of the journals. Not that there aren't some good ones, even great ones, including ones that do things individual newsletters cannot do, or cannot do as well, but all journals are (and probably must be) intensely restrictive in ways that individual newsletters are not.
Like so many things these days "substack" can be a noun that represents lots of things (and I'm guilty) .. everything from a pipeline to blooming greatness to the best example of the desperate, narcissistic, never-ending, like-chasing enshittification of media culture. It’s one think to chase clicks if you derive revenue from ads, but most of substack does it for the Likes.
"And the result has been that the right-of-center media ecosystem has had to start again from scratch. " This seems right, well observed. Nicely done.
Thank you David!
I like some ideological bleed-over in publications. Heterodoxy is more fun than homodoxy (if that's a word). The Wall Street Journal used to publish liberals (and a Marxist, Alex Cockburn). The Atlantic used to publish conservatives. Don't know if that's still the case, since I rarely read them nowadays.
Definitely not a word lol! There are always in-house contrarians with the different magazines. The Times has gotten a lot better in the Joe Kahn era and is publishing a lot more conservative op-eds. I might be wrong, but I think The New York and Atlantic are pretty uniformly consistent.
orthodoxy is the word you are searching for
I grew up a conservative in rural Montana, became socialized as a liberal in graduate school, and often now find myself a writer and thinker without a country for many of the reasons outlined here.
Yep, political homelessness is a thing.
My whole career started when I wrote an article and snail mailed it to the editor in chief of DETAILS magazine. They published it because DETAILS was new, it was still in a formative stage, and it wasn't prestigious. Also they needed good stuff. Now I write occasionally for TheBLAZE which is 1) new 2) still in a formative stage 3) is not prestigious and 4) they need good stuff.
Totally. I think that's the only way to do it really. When publications get too big, it's a problem for everyone. It's why we need lots of publications.
All of this sounds exhausting. I just want to write beautiful things for the sake of it. Trying to make a living as an author was always hard but seems downright impossible and masochistic to me nowadays.
Cheers!
Many years ago, I read an interesting essay in Quillette and made a note to pitch them one day, and eventually I did. I was used to getting ignored or rejected, so I was more than a little amazed when something like 12 hours later I got not just an email accepting my essay but the fully edited essay and a pretty decent offer of payment. I went on to write many more things for them even if politically I did not agree with much of what they wrote.
I try not to think too much about the politics of these journals. Hell, it's actually good if a right-of-centre publication accepts something from a lefty because it shows a willingness to engage that you don't generally see on the left. It does feel weird though when I submit something to a big left-wing publication and realise that I've mentioned Quillette and others. I feel pretty sure that alone will cause an editor to pass without reading.
Yeah, it's a nice experience writing for Quillette! Most of these magazines also have no ideological litmus tests. They're just kind of interested in pushing the edge.
Quillette gets attacked by people on the right for being too liberal and by people on the left for being too conservative. That's usually a sign you're not adhering to an ideology and are open enough to question convention, which is a big positive for me.
I'm not sure how much they push the edge. Just start out with reasonable priors and assist them as the world turns. (You know, they've noticed that Trump is a nightmare!)
Yes, the Submittable experience description is spot on. How much do all the people on the other side of these forms hate to read, if they need to put up so many filters before doing it?
People hate to read. That's the deep secret.
Have you tried pitching specific editors at the liberal media institutions you're mentioning? That's how you get published in there.
To some extent. There's another topic I didn't get into that a lot of publications - and the more prestigious the more they do this - will really eviscerate your writing to keep it fit to a house style. Where I am right now I could probably court The Atlantic or NYT and get something in but it would be months of my life for not that much pay and in the end the article would barely be my own work. I'm really pretty happy with smaller and quirkier publications that let you write as yourself. In any case, this piece isn't really about my own submissions - it's just more something I noticed and then wanted to extrapolate into a more reflective piece.
Hm, I wonder how much of this is simply because there are far more intellectuals on the left than right, so publishers on the left have the luxury of having higher and more arbitrary standards. Having followed politics for a long time, I get the sense that right of center intellectual institutions are always desperate for talent in a way left of center ones aren’t.
Yeah, there's definitely something to that. But being overcrowded is not necessarily a good thing - it creates its own kinds of problems. If you kind of feel like all of your people are excellent in an indistinguishable way, the tendency is to push for a shared voice as opposed to rewarding individual idiosyncracy. The New Yorker writers, for instance, all sound exactly like each other, which wasn't always the case.
I have a copy of the 1995 New Yorker Fiction Edition. 188 pages. Inside are pieces by Philip Roth, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux, Martin Amis, James Atlas, Willaim Styron, T.C. Boyle, Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates, E. L. Doctorow, John Updike, Sharon Olds, Ian Farzier, and more.
That plus the enormous private subsidies for right wing media plus the death rattle of traditional publishing means the demand for thinkpieces from the right is artificially inflated, it's not just the gap in supply.
Less and less true.