Study Hall Digest 3/2/2020

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Should I Watch Another Episode or Optimize My Goddamn Life?

We are living in the backlash to the optimization trend: the imperative to squeeze the most productivity and meaning out of every second of your dumb mortal life. The New York Times last week put out an ironic video showing the futility and joylessness of optimization — read book summaries while cooking your meal-prepped dinner! — and without watching it, some Twitter users assumed it was sincere and furiously derided it. This was also my immediate response before realizing the video was satirical. “Stop telling me to cram every waking moment with meaning and productivity!!!” I wanted to scream. “Let me luxuriate in the pleasure of DOING NOTHING.” (Like everyone else in my profession, I too read Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing last year.)

But is that a “pleasure” I am in fact “luxuriating” in? “Doing nothing” — which can be one of life’s greatest pleasures — means a lot of things. Doing nothing is going for aimless drives and listening to the radio; it is online shopping for shit you don’t need; it is lying on your bed and scrolling through Twitter and Instagram for hours; it is sitting around at home with some people you like and talking about whatever; it is bingeing Netflix content. They all qualify as “doing nothing” because nothing is being produced — time is simply being passed — but some, like hanging out with friends, leads to genuine fulfillment, while others, like reading thousands of words in tweets, leave you feeling hollowed-out and useless.

It’s easy (at least for me, a dirtbag) to binge-watch Netflix all day and convince myself that I am partaking in self-care and resisting a toxic trend born of the tech industry. I do resent the imperative to optimize; I also just love using mediocre TV to turn my brain off. In the past few months, I have devoured Cheer, The Circle, High Fidelity, and Love is Blind. None of these added value to my life in any meaningful way — I believe pure enjoyment is enough of a reason to indulge in something, but I didn’t even enjoy most of those hours of viewing. The unhinged reality phenomenon Love is Blind mostly just made me anxious. But it distracted me from my own life, which makes me even more anxious.

Last week in the New York Times, Dan Brooks wrote a very funny assessment of Quibi, an upcoming streaming service that will churn out ten-minute episodes to be watched exclusively on mobile devices. Ads for the service, Brooks points out, are self-aware about what they are hawking: another superfluous way to waste time while you wait for death. “Here is the umpteenth iteration of a technology many of us have come to wish had never happened,” Brooks writes. “The last thing we need is another reason to look at the phone, and we know it. The good people at Quibi know we know it. But they are also pretty sure that millions will pay for it anyway, so let’s just admit that, have a laugh and get on with choosing passwords. And then we can start counting down our remaining days.”

I love wasting time, but I can’t help but feel there are too many ways to do it, and soon there will be more (HBO Max and NBC’s Peacock are also launching soon). I’m not about to start meal-prepping on an exercise bike while listening to a sped-up podcast, but the existential dread I feel at contemplating the hours (days, weeks, months) I have spent staring at a screen will propel me to, hopefully, find some middle ground while the streaming wars battle for my attention.

Freelancers Beware: Garage Ghosted a Longtime Columnist

Beginning in January of last year, freelance writer Tyler Watamanuk wrote a twice-monthly column for Garage magazine called “Sitting Pretty” about design trends in chairs. Fellow freelancers will recognize this arrangement as an “anchor gig” — an assignment you can rely on, whatever else may be falling through. “It was so nice to not have to be pitching constantly and knowing I’m at least going to be writing this stuff,” Watamanuk told Study Hall. “The pay is pretty decent in terms of internet writing. It felt like such an accomplishment to have this column that I’m passionate about.”

The arrangement continued for about a year — until early January of this year, when a Garage editor who Watamanuk declined to name (and who had not initially commissioned the column) abruptly stopped responding to his emails. He sent about four follow-up emails but never received a response. (Though there wasn’t an ongoing contract for the column, it appeared to be longterm — a mistake freelancers will be familiar with.) He waited about three weeks before beginning to pitch the column elsewhere, hoping the Garage editor might respond. But he now wishes he’d starting shopping it around earlier in the year, before budgets had been filled up. “It is frustrating,” he said. “I would have [pitched it] when people were looking for new columns. I could have gotten a head start.”

Watamanuk has a full-time job outside of media, so he’s okay financially, but that isn’t the case for all freelance writers. Seems like it would be pretty easy to just send an email letting a longtime contributor know their column is no longer wanted! Anyway, if you have any ghosting horror stories you’d like to share, let me know: [email protected].

Longread of the Week: What else? In The Cut, Emily Gould wrote about her time at Gawker, getting sandbagged by Jimmy Kimmel on Larry King Live, and the feelings of shame that have followed her long after. It’s a great meditation on the ways in which shame has been intertwined with living online, especially for young women, and on the way shame can linger, maybe forever, coloring our experiences far past that initial point of humiliation.

Comings and Goings

— The Texas Tribune has hired Stacey-Marie Ishmael as editorial director and Millie Tran as chief product officer.

— Hillary Clinton is starting a podcast with iHeartRadio, known mostly for producing conservative radio shows. Apparently she was inspired by Conan O’Brien, so he has a lot to answer for.

Everything Else

— Vanity Fair has the scoop on the search for a new BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief in the wake of (BuzzFeed) Ben Smith’s departure to the Times. So far, sought-after candidates have included Washington Post media columnist and ex-Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, New York Times national editor Marc Lacey, and NewYorker.com editor Michael Luo. Apparently BuzzFeed is looking for someone with “gravitas” and who can improve the company’s financial outlook for news.

— Speaking of BuzzFeed Ben, he really came out swinging on his Times debut. Smith’s premiere media column for the paper took on his new employer, arguing that the Times’ phenomenal success over the last few years is perhaps making it a monopoly and snuffing out competition. While local newspapers fold and fire staff en masse and digital publications struggle to stay afloat, “Times stock has rebounded to nearly triple what it was in 2014 and the newsroom has added 400 employees. The starting salary for most reporters is $104,600.” (Lmao; also unions are good.) The Times apparently might buy the podcast Serial for somewhere in the neighborhood of $75 million, so it could be dominating the auditory space as well.

— Washingtonian made a list of former Bloomberg News staffers who have gone to work for Bloomberg’s presidential campaign. About a dozen of them!

— The New Republic is apparently sending out sponsored content for Bloomberg. Money is tight, of course, but it’s a bad look, especially for a magazine so critical of the candidate.

— Crooked Media, best known for producing milquetoast centrist political podcast Pod Save America, is ordering up a new slate of non-political podcasts tackling race, religion, sports, and a journalist Jason Rezaian’s detention in Iran.

— In The Guardian, Lynn Steger Strong spills the “dirty secret” that you need some form of financial privilege (familial safety net, no student loans) to make it as a full-time writer. I’m not sure this is a secret anymore, but I do agree writers should generally be transparent about their financial situations so as not to create the illusion that it’s totally doable to just live in New York and work on a book for a year.