Digest 8/24/2020

Allegra Hobbs leaves New York; SB Nation bloggers win settlement from Vox; the Democratic National Convention is basically a telethon; and more

This week, we have a special Allegra Hobbs Leaving New York edition of the Study Hall digest. Read Allegra’s goodbye-to-some-of-that essay, with her editors’ comments, in the Google doc here.

DISPATCH FROM A REMOTE MEDIA WORKER

“Why don’t you just find inspiration everywhere, you dumb bitch,” I tell myself from my new home in Marfa, Texas, pop. fewer than 2,000. I had just gone for a long, aimless drive in the desert because I was having trouble writing. I had moved to the desert in the first place because I felt like New York was grinding me into dust, but I hoped that it would be easier there. But once I was actually in the desert, it felt stupid to wander around waiting for the landscape to make me feel a certain way.

Still, it is a relief to be here. The novelty of open space still hasn’t worn off. I lived in New York City for seven years and my being a sensitive baby wasn’t conducive to thriving there. (You can read the full story, plus my editors’ comments, in my actual Leaving New York essay — a legal requirement for every writer who leaves New York.) 

On the drive from Dallas to Marfa, I stopped in Abilene, Texas, home to Abilene Christian University and a museum called “Frontier Texas!”, which features a statue of a buffalo out front surrounded by Texas flags. I stood in the shade near the buffalo and scrolled through my Twitter feed, which still puts me virtually back in New York. Everyone was reacting to Kaitlin Phillips’ new column in Spike Magazine, which contains some really enviably fantastic lines, like: “It seems obvious that the majority of twitter scolds are just people who revere their parents.” It’s a piece of writing so deeply positioned in New York City that it is rendered nearly unreadable outside of the Frontier Texas! building. While I scrolled, a man exiting the museum smiled at me and asked how I was doing — I’ve now been in Texas long enough to receive this warmly and not with a knee-jerk suspicion.

Phillips’s column had both an extremely New York sensibility — it projected a very specific iteration of cool that feels native to NYC, an insouciance captured in grainy nighttime shots of beautiful people actively not giving a shit — and concerned itself with New York media types, both the prominent scolds with prestigious magazine staff jobs and the freelancers who drink in Tompkins Square Park and view that echelon with a kind of detached amusement. New York media is a language I still speak, obviously, but it suddenly felt bizarre and alien, dissonant with my surroundings. I was intensely aware that the column, and Media Twitter generally, concerned a very small subset of people. I also realized it was alien to me even when I lived in New York; I never was and never will be cool (nor “prominent,” by Philips’ definition), which is its own kind of relief.

Media communities have existed forever outside of New York, of course, with plenty of vibrant publications and clusters of freelance writers. As staff jobs decline, there will be more remote workers, whose income is unlikely to comfortably afford a sustainable life in Brooklyn or Los Angeles and whose office-less labor can theoretically be done from anywhere. Media is becoming more decentralized, a trend the pandemic is accelerating.

But media culture, at least from where I’m sitting — on the side of a desert highway, staring at Twitter dispatches from far away — still feels very much grounded in New York (even as rumors of the city’s impending death are the subject of national discourse). Now I am one of those remote workers who have become, arguably, even more remote. I don’t know yet how it will change my relationship to the industry. I make coffee in the morning and drink it on my front porch — a thing I have now — and it’s silent except for insect sounds. I go for drives and feel pleasantly overwhelmed by the open sky.

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The Virtual DNC Was a Weird, Eight-Hour-Long Episode of The West Wing

Somewhere, a single tear rolled down Aaron Sorkin’s cheek as he watched the Democratic National Convention last week. In lieu of having everyone in Milwaukee for this year’s convention, the “virtual” DNC made all of America the stage for a four-night, eight-hour telethon that answered the question nobody asked: What would happen if The West Wing was sponsored by Zoom and directed remotely by a barefoot man in his living room? The made-for-TV infomercial was the last big chance to convince America to buy into a Biden presidency and a perfect encapsulation of what the Democratic Party has become. 

In an attempt to appease everyone who dislikes Trump (even anti-abortion assholes like John Kasich and war criminals like Colin Powell), the DNC paraded out anti-Trump Republicans, including Kasich standing at a literal crossroads, in case you’ve lost the capacity to understand subtler metaphors. There were also appearances by aging former stars of the Democratic Party like the Clintons and John Kerry and off-brand Mortal Kombat characters like the Rhode Island Calamari Man. The convention still featured more people of color and women than previous conventions, while this week’s Republican National Convention will feature that white couple who waved guns at Black Lives Matter protesters from the porch of their ugly mansion.

The centrists and Republicans promised that Joe Biden wouldn’t go left on policy; the left-leaning Democrats vowed he would; and everyone decided that picking a 77-year-old white guy from the most diverse presidential field in history was fine. By the end of the Bidenathon, as media pundits like Van Jones exhaled and praised Biden’s speech for being coherent, just being fine was more than enough. — Chris Erik Thomas

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LONGREAD OF THE WEEK Carina del Valle Schorske wrote a beautiful piece for The Believer about the bond between Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin and her memories of a relationship after a breakup. “I’m ashamed of how much I wish to remember — doubly ashamed because I know it’s impossible to remember everything. Life is too much for the mind to carry. But to me it’s always seemed wrong — a betrayal, even — not to try.”

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Vox co-founder Yuri Victor has left the New York Times, where he worked in research and development, and joined the experimental storytelling team at The Atlantic.

— Vanity Fair announced a handful of promotions and hirings, including snatching up New York Magazine’s star feature reporter Jessica Pressler. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who guest edited the magazine’s September issue, has come on board as a contributing editor. 

— New York Magazine is doubling its podcast coverage, expanding into listening recommendations, reviews, and features, and is adding a weekly newsletter by Study Hall pal and Hot Pod founder Nick Quah.

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— Huge news for labor rights in media: Vox Media will pay out millions of dollars to more than 450 former SB Nation workers who had filed collective action lawsuits against the company. The suits alleged that Vox misclassified the workers as independent contractors and violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by failing to pay them fair wages. 

— Vanity Fair has published its September issue, titled The Great Fire, guest edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates, centering the Black Lives Matter movement and featuring a beautiful painting of Breonna Taylor on its cover. It is a welcome change from memories of Graydon Carter’s editorship, when VF would have been unlikely to call the American carceral system “the most sprawling gulag known to man.”

— Radio listening is down, but as we know, podcasts are way up! For the first time, NPR has made more money on underwriting podcasts than from its radio shows. 

— Netflix’s The Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj’s talk show, has come to an end. The show was well known for its journalism and provoking the wrath of Saudi Arabia. 

— Here’s a deep dive from Eater on Peter Meehan, recently-ousted editor of the LA Times food section, who fostered a toxic culture characterized by angry outbursts, sexually inappropriate comments, and intimidation.

— Is The Sopranos just Harry Potter for leftists? As a Sopranos fan and scholar of Harry Potter Brain Disease, I say no. Call me when there’s a Sopranos-themed activist group or a Sopranos equivalent to Pottermore!! (No really, call me.)