Study Hall Digest 5/30/2017

The big news of the week is that Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs got body slammed by Greg Gianforte, who at the time was a candidate for Montana’s lone House seat. A few days later, Gianforte won the election. There have been a thousand think pieces on what this means for the future of journalism, most asking how the public can stomach a guy who wants to beat the shit out of journalists. The incident undoubtedly sucks, but I think we can take comfort in a couple of facts: 37 percent of eligible voters in the state cast their ballots before the body slamming incident, meaning a likely majority of voters did not factor the slam into their vote. But there’s a bigger fact we should take solace in: politicians and journalists should hate each other. What others have called a worrying trend—journalists being shut out of White House meetings, House Reps refusing to talk to the press, this body slamming thing—to me is a sign that journalism has become adversarial, and is trying to expose and hold to account those in power. Good! Obviously Gianforte is a dick, but this is a good sign, I think. Politicians are finally scared of us, as they should be.

Ali Gharib is joining The Intercept. It’s a big win for the site, and comes a few weeks after they announced lefty superstar Naomi Klein was coming on to write commentary and make Vox-style videos. So is The Intercept becoming the new Nation or Mother Jones? It feels like there’s a gap to fill there. Also seems clear that the publications with the least pressure to make money—e.g. Intercept, which is funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar, and WaPo, which is owned by Jeff Bezos—are doing the most interesting work and making the most interesting hires. Good for them…but hopefully a more sustainable way to do interesting things reveals itself soon.

Final Thoughts

WTF IS PRODUCTIVITY? I finally got around to reading this great Guardian article on the history of time management. It posits that time management is a scheme to make our meaningless work feel more meaningful, but that it doesn’t actually save any time. Creative work requires a lot of doing nothing. But the U.S. is uniquely obsessed with time and time management, and as a freelancer it’s impossible, or at least very hard, not to be, Especially considering this, as noted by British historian C Northcote Parkinson in 1955: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” That’s why it takes me the same amount of time to write a 2,000 word article as it does to send a few emails on a day I have nothing to do. If you set a work day, you fill it, no matter what. On those email days, I feel as if I’m actually accomplishing something, even though I’m really not. And it wears me out in the same way writing 2,000 words does. I’d be better served going to a park and ruminating on my writing or journalism or life. So how do you change this? How do you make progress with work, without falling into this trap of managing everything, leaving no space to do anything besides work?