Weekend reads: Lotus Land edition

A dispatch from my spectacularly scenic (and prohibitively expensive) hometown

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Greetings from the Left Coast, reader. By the time you get this newsletter, I’ll be in my hometown of Vancouver, walking the seawall, dodging spaced out yogis, appreciating the majestic mountains, feasting on my favourite food group dim sum, and drinking deliciously strong JJ Bean cappuccinos.

We timed our brief getaway with the annual explosion of cherry blossoms, so if the rain manages to hold off, we’ll be biking around taking in the blooms and generally celebrating the arrival of spring. (Plus, the completion of the 2024 Massey Essay on the State of the Media, a 10,000-word project that I’m excited to share with you all in mid-April when it’s published in the Literary Review of Canada.)

In the meantime, I have some updates for you from the Lean Out community.

• Lean Out guest host Aaron Pete just kicked off his career as an opinion writer, with a powerhouse piece for The Hub. Aaron is a council member for the Chawathil First Nation in British Columbia, and in his debut opinion essay, he calls for more media scrutiny of First Nations leaders. He writes:

The role of the media is vital in our communities. Investigative journalism must celebrate our wins, but also scrutinize our governance and constructively critique our failures. It is a catalyst for discussion and accountability. I’ve experienced the benefits of such scrutiny and understand its power to spark progress.

We all know the critical role journalism plays in local government. In one well-known Brookings study, researchers found newspaper closures had a direct causal impact on local government public finance. A loss of local newspapers meant a loss of accountability. The study showed that when newspapers folded, it led to an increase in government waste, corruption, and less informed voters. With 630 First Nation communities in Canada and journalism on the decline, one wonders how many investigative stories are simply being missed.

He continues:

I extend an invitation to journalists, community members, and my fellow leaders to join in this newfound commitment to transparency and progress. It is crucial to remember that chief and council meetings are public forums. Despite some exceptions, there is ample opportunity for increased journalistic presence to shed light on decision-making and accountability.

This is such an important topic. During the identitarian moment, media organizations have often treated minority groups with deference. But, as Aaron draws attention to here, deference can do more harm than good. It is the media’s responsibility to scrutinize all local leaders. The groups that identitarians are most concerned about stand to benefit most from such scrutiny.

• Lean Out guest Kat Rosenfield has an essay out for UnHerd on the tepid response to Christine Blasey Ford’s new memoir — and the cultural turn away from #MeToo. She writes:

By late 2020, the anti-Kavanaugh craze was replaced with a fresh furore over the Supreme Court candidacy of the religious conservative Amy Coney Barrett. The MeToo movement then flagged and fizzled out, amid a pandemic-era cultural reckoning that brought race, not sex, to the forefront.

• Two-time Lean Out guest Freddie deBoer contemplates this ongoing “vibe shift,” as well, in his latest Substack essay, which touches on this week’s New York magazine hit piece on Stanford professor and podcaster Andrew Huberman. A “faux-MeToo essay,” as deBoer puts it — and one, he writes, that suggests sexual misconduct or domestic violence but fails to produce anything more concrete than the “bombshell” that “a suddenly-famous and wealthy man was repetitively unfaithful to one woman and then to multiple woman.” The whole essay, deBoer argues, has “that sweaty quality of an exposé in search of something to expose.” Significantly, it rests on the assumption that “the purpose of a big-time magazine is to identify targets who are seen as violating contemporary liberal cultural mores and finding some identity-based charge for prosecution-by-media.” But politics has moved away from this trend, deBoer notes. How will Big Media grapple with that shift?

  New York is in the same fundamental bind of media is as a whole: it’s hard to imagine them listening to anyone who’s not The Right Kind of Person, someone who holds the conventional lukewarm social justicey opinions and fealty to media kaffeeklatsch culture that has dominated everywhere but explicitly conservative publications since I got into the business in 2008. This is a very deep problem and I’m not sure that there’s a single person in media who cares to confront it. How do you ever notice that times have changed when your personal and professional incentives point directly towards not noticing it? How can you evolve in a way that makes your publication more healthy and more true if you have assumed away the possibility that anyone truly challenging a decaying political orthodoxy could be a good person?

deBoer asks Big Media a critical question: “How confident are you that you can move into the future, financially, by serving only those people who share the politics of The Cut?” Indeed.

• Two-time Lean Out guest Meghan Daum, meanwhile, has an essay out on the recent controversy at Guernica, a literary magazine that published a hugely moving and nuanced essay on war by a British-born Israeli translator, and then retracted it in the wake of a staff revolt. (You can read Joanna Chen’s essay “From the Edges of a Broken World” here, since The Washington Monthly has reprinted it. And you can read a Q&A with its author in The New Republic.) I also recommend checking out Meghan’s recent podcast interview with the acclaimed American writer Sherman Alexie, who will be teaching a course at Meghan’s new Unspeakeasy School of Thought. You can listen to that conversation here, which meditates on the implications of Guernica-gate.

  Has Literature Canceled Itself?

Finally, two-time Lean Out guest Sohrab Ahmari, a founder of Compact Magazine, has an essay at The New Statesmen about the new Trump panic. “Talk of ‘defending democracy’ in the abstract doesn’t excite anyone outside affluent postcodes and Atlanticist think tanks,” he writes — and Democrats are repeating the mistakes that got Trump elected in 2016. (For more on that theme, check out my recent interview with Where Have All the Democrats Gone? authors Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis.)

And if you missed it this week, Compact Magazine columnist Ryan Zickgraf was on the Lean Out podcast to discuss his latest essay, “Journalism’s Slow Death Threatens Democracy.”

With that, I’m off to see the cherry blossoms. See you all next week!