Study Hall Digest 6/4/2018

This digest is written by a candidate for Study Hall’s Staff Writer Position.

Play Your Part: There’s a standout sentence in this excerpt from Michael Pollan’s new psychedelics-for-squares book that has been ricocheting off the blue walls of my mind since I read it last weekend: “Like many people in late middle age, I had developed a set of fairly dependable mental algorithms for navigating whatever life threw at me, and while these are undeniably useful tools for coping with everyday life and getting things done, they leave little space for surprise or wonder or change.”

The Media and its discontents, a collection of humans who I suspect are not all that different from Pollan here, often engage in a similar kind of procedural inertia. Each week, the actions of a celebrity, politician, or some haplessly viral rando are thrust into the center of the Discourse, and everyone gets in formation. Most of us know our roles and the roles others will play, leaving little space for surprise or wonder—or most importantly, for substantive change.

Roseanne.exe: This week’s input for the algorithm was an egregiously (though unsurprisingly) racist tweet from rebooted sitcom star and Trumpista Roseanne Barr, in which she compared former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, who is black, to an ape. As the outrage cycle kicked into gear, ABC swiftly dropped Roseanne’s show from the air, and Roseanne’s talent agency cut ties with her. Predictable dominoes ensued: the quote-tweets justifiedly disgusted with Roseanne, the narrow ass-covering from associated corporate actors, the defenses from opportunists and racists, the craven headline gaffes, an unconvincing excuse, the Bari Weiss column about liberal hypocrisy…wait, where was the Bari Weiss column????

When the Roseanne news broke, so many people tweeted half-joking predictions of such a column from the Times Op-Ed editor that her name was trending on Twitter and GQ published a parody column under her byline decrying the firing. Never mind that Weiss herself had publicly condemned Roseanne’s tweet—it was enough that Weiss has expressed and amplified various reactionary views in past columns. People thought they knew exactly how this would play out. This is not a defense, or extension of sympathy to Bari Weiss (please, god, it is anything but). But I couldn’t stop thinking about Pollan’s point as I watched the Bari Weiss jokes outweigh any more substantive discussion of ABC, the corporate incentive structures that brought Roseanne back as an explicit Trumpist provocation, and how those structures might be changed. Without more of a focus on that last point, we’re going to repeat this cycle ad-infinitum.

Time Is a Flat, Circular Earth: The biggest risk of our reliance on these Pollan-style “algorithms” is how they can inhibit shifts in discussion that could affect systematic change. But, another problem is: they’re boring! This is why we thirst so badly for events that cause the algorithm to glitch, where our roles aren’t quite so pre-programmed. Thus, the frenzied excitement around the recent news that Elon Musk is dating Grimes, or last year’s covfefe tweet, which (initially) bucked the formula just slightly.

Many people, both within and without media, are wearying of our predictability—and the world’s. Case in point: One of the best features of the week, Alan Burdick’s dispatches from a Flat Earther conference, finds that most believers—in addition to being radicalized by YouTube’s *algorithmic* recommendations—have landed on their ludicrous theory to spice up their lives. “You will come to actually understand why a growing number of people are dead certain that Earth is flat,” Burdick writes. “Because that truth is unnerving.”

The Grift that Keeps on Giving: As Burdick’s piece details, the 19th century founder of modern flat Earth theories was a quack doctor who scammed his followers to fatten his pockets, which places his story squarely in the week’s thematic realm: grifters. After New York mag published Jessica Pressler’s deep dive on the “Soho Grifter,” and then several other thematically-related stories emerged, it became hard to tell whether everyone was now seeing the news through grifter-colored glasses or if the week truly featured an unusually high number of stories about cons, swindles, and fraud. Pressler’s piece tells the tale of Anna Delvey, who blustered her way into some of the most elite circles in Manhattan, posing as a German heiress and supporting her lavish, globetrotting lifestyle through an informal Ponzi scheme of generous socialites—until it all unraveled. The story, like so many grifter narratives, is cathartic in a Robin Hood-schadenfreude kind of way (eat shit, rich people!), and teems with peripheral characters who are varying levels of full of it. Martin Shkreli weighs in from prison.

The story became so popular that The Cut began selling t-shirts referencing it. The American Apparel-esque white tees read “Fake German Heiress,” “My Other Shirt Will Wire You $30,000,” and “Not a Grifter.” Funny, but it remains unclear if Pressler or any of the other people who worked on the story will see any of the money the shirts bring in. Probably best not to look too closely at the revenue-sharing practices of New York Media, or really any for-profit company—we have enough tales of grift this week.

Seriously: There was Tommy Muscatello from upstate NY who sold himself to the media for years as Thomas J. Mace-Archer-Mills, Esq., a British expert on royal weddings and the monarchy. A Colombian guy had been living in Miami pretending to be a member of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family. A Russian journalist apparently faked his own murder with the help of Ukrainian security forces (!). And there was the now-fired Vogue assistant who was charged with stealing more than $50,000 from her boss, Vogue’s former creative director-at-large, Grace Coddington. Maybe the Vogue assistant also stole the $100 million Condé Nast lost last year? Either way, that deficit ate up 8 Vogue jobs this week—surprisingly, none of them Anna Wintour’s.

The Wing of Desire: Is the Vogue assistant news even a grifter story, or just one of thievery? How elaborate need the deception be for it to shift into grifter territory? In our gleeful reception of all these stories as ones of ‘grift,’ are we overextending the term? As the week wore on, the linguistic drift seemed to spiral out of control, and I began to wonder if maybe…every story is a grifter narrative in one way or another. Unfortunately, William Safire didn’t return my email queries about the word, so it looks like we’ll keep seeing grift everywhere until he gets back to me! Speaking of which, a tweet from the week: “I’ve re-read the grifter story and her original art space/soho house pitch seems like an unsuccessful version of The W*ng, which is to say I admire them a lot for succeeding.”

The Wing continues to seek new ways to succeed. The pricey, women-only coworking office/networking space/summer camp is expanding further into a media brand. They’ve announced a “feminist ‘stuff you missed in history class’” podcast coming this fall, and their magazine, No Man’s Land, will be sharing features on The Cut this month. The Wing’s podcast will be produced by Pineapple Street Media, which also produced the campaign PR podcast for lifetime Wing-member Hillary Clinton.

“The Industry”: The Wing wasn’t the only media empire that expanded this week. Vox and NBCUniversal’s digital advertising marketplace, Concert, added New York Media, Rolling Stone, and PopSugar to its ad network. Concert and the publishing industry are fighting an uphill battle against Google and Facebook’s joint domination of digital advertising. Meanwhile, it seems likely that a publication already felled by a nefarious tech giant will be purchased later this month by a marketing firm that wants to turn Gawker into a chumbucket of Upworthy-esque slurry.

A Note on Parodies: As tempting and justified as it is for our algorithms to make fun of Bari Weiss, Times Op-Ed parodies should be attempted with caution, since they’re unlikely ever to top the verisimilitude of Alex Pareene’s excruciatingly dull Bret Stephens impersonation. Instead, parody writers should focus on doing a fake episode of Pusha T on the Longform Podcast.