Doom at 1.5 Speed

To start clearly and obviously: I love podcasts.

Love might not be a strong enough word. I’ve listened to podcasts for, literally, half of my life. In college, I used an RSS reader to follow blogs that posted shows as MP3s, which I downloaded, loaded into iTunes, then put onto my iPod. My first podcasts were bootlegs of NPR broadcasts, pirate radio shows that played music, and low-fidelity conversations on esoterica I was highly interested in.

Now that I list the steps of finding and listening to these early podcasts, I realize how durable the format is. Every step in that old process is obsolete. So is the equipment. Even the act of manually downloading a file and moving it to an application is impractical, if not next to impossible on a smartphone, the most widely used modern computer.

To be even clearer, and to elevate the sense of betrayal at the heart of this: I love spoken-word audio. It’s my livelihood. Since adulthood, I’ve never not had a job that didn’t involve producing audio—either radio, podcasts, or both.

The medium has been good to me. But after two decades of subscribing to shows, building parasocial bonds with hosts, cultivating bonds with listeners, and watching as podcasting grew from an inconvenient and nerdy novelty to a cliche of modern media dominated by celebrities, I realize the medium hasn’t been good for me.

I listen to too many podcasts. This is bad for my mental health, my social life, and my understanding of the world. And I’m not alone. Over the last decade, conversations with friends turned into exchanges of facts and takes we first heard on podcasts. We might talk about news, politics, film, music, or history, but we’re really rehashing episodes to each other. We are the Reader’s Digest version of our favorite shows.

I mentioned music as something we talk about. We rarely discuss actual songs. Instead, we talk about a band’s place in culture, the buzz around a tour, or some other abstraction. My generation is at the point where we would normally age out of the target audience for the newest of the new and settle into comfortable adult contemporary while cycling through our dusty collections of old favorites. Instead, we’re filling our ears with talk radio.

This is the problem.

I’m not here to deliver the crank’s case that there are Too Many Podcasts. There aren’t. I have friends making great shows you should listen to. I make shows you should listen to, too (it’s still my job). The beauty of the format is that it can cater to niche interests and amplify unheard voices. I’m also not worried about the end of the monoculture. Society’s ills don’t stem from a lack of shared interests (interests that were the result of uniform consumption, which was itself the result of a lack of abundant options).

The issue is what people aren’t listening to: Music, or silence.

There is a justified concern that generative AI drives people to outsource their thinking and to overlook the value of humanity in the creative process. The gradual but nearly all-encompassing embrace of spoken word audio (specifically loosely structured chat shows) instead of the aural alternatives is a similar mass abandonment of art and interiority.

I can hear the objections already (through my noise cancelling headphones and over the improv comedy podcast playing through them).

1. Is this happening or am I just a millennial projecting my own (or my peers’) habits onto the world at large?

It’s real. A 2020 report from Spotify claimed that as users listened to more podcasts on the platform, their overall listening to all types of audio grew, suggesting podcasts were indeed replacing silence (or perhaps replacing conversations). Further analysis from MIDiA1 Research concluded that about a quarter of listeners were turning away from music to focus on podcasts.

Now consider the kind of music listening that’s being either augmented or replaced: Streaming music is a passive activity. The algorithm chooses the songs, which then play in the background of some other activity. This kind of listening—through the ease and infinite options for streaming—already replaced silence in many contexts. In other contexts, it turned active music listening into something closer to nothing. If podcasts are replacing music, then to some degree, they’re replacing music that just recently replaced silence.

Even more worrying, Spotify now wants users to use AI to generate individualized podcasts. One benefit of podcasts is they might offer something to talk about with friends. This, however, is private Content for private, passive consumption, made to fill every quiet moment.

2. Wasn’t this always the case? Talk radio was huge.

Yes there was always talk radio, but if you’re old enough to remember when radio was the only source of spoken-word audio, did you know anyone who listened to it nonstop? People might like Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, or their local sports hosts, and they might even make those shows appointment listening, but these listeners weren’t carrying a portable radio everywhere they went, tuning in on their workouts, their short waits, and their walks to get coffee.

Portable audio players were about music—tapes, CDs, MP3s of music, FM stations full of tunes. Listening to music all day—always having headphones in—might be a little anti-social, but listening to talk radio all day was for weirdos. Yes, it’s good to get information. And yes, spoken-word audio is a great medium for delivering news, but the amount of real journalism available via podcast is miniscule. To seem doubly disloyal to my field, I’m not sure there’s more than a couple hours worth of news a person can—or should— process in a day.

3. So what? Podcasts are art, and I’m both enlightened and entertained.

No. This is where I’m going to seem either the most pretentious or the most woo-woo (or maybe I can do both). First, most podcasts are not art and they are not journalism. They are rambling conversations that might occasionally veer into insights, but they don’t consistently offer the quality of scripted entertainment or the information of actual interviews. Most podcast “interviews” are friendly chats that, when they’re conducted with newsmakers, don’t serve the audience the way that a journalistic interview would.

A scripted show or a well-planned interview takes time and it usually takes a team—people thinking and working together to bring you something that’s worth your time.

Some podcasts are beautiful. These are the narrative podcasts that are deeply reported, creatively produced, and cut with care. When I’ve worked on shows like this, a single episode can take months to put together. These shows are excellent examples of the crafts of journalism and audio production. They are also rare. On the podcast charts, they often fall below celebrities shouting at each other.

Even if you would consider any of these examples art (and I could see a case for it with certain shows), they are not comparable to music in terms of the rewards they offer. Compared to music, talk needs firmer grounding. The sentences have to make sense, the conversation needs to flow, and a show in a series needs to fit the expectations that series has established. Most podcasts are about conveying information, or, if they’re entertainment shows, they’re built around improvised riffing, typically on real-world events. Music, meanwhile, needs none of this. Music can sound like anything, or like nothing else. This is why music’s effect on your emotions and mood is so strong and mysterious. I can tell you why a quip is funny or why a fact is upsetting to hear. I can’t explain why a great song makes you cry or why certain sounds push you to go harder in your workout. Stories can do this, but such stories are rare and take time to craft.

To turn away from music, especially now, when it’s more accessible than ever, is to give up on the feeling part of your body—that link between the heart and brain that we might otherwise label a soul.

Now that I’ve brought the soul into it, I may as well go all-in. The soul. It’s that thing we search when we’re in silence. Our modern lives are so full of dinging distractions that it’s tempting to view silence as the reprieve. It may be a reprieve sometimes. But silence is a reward, too. At least it should be.

Eliminate diversions for a moment and notice what your mind does. Mine is like a dog that’s been in the house all day when the owner comes home—it zooms and jumps and burns energy as if it had an endless supply. Then it tries to go places it shouldn’t—grim thoughts, anxiety, catastrophe. To stop it, I could either put it back in the crate or give it some exercise. (This metaphor is more tortured than I like, but talk is the crate, imagination is the exercise.) Silence gives our mind space to run free. Walls of talk close us in.

The more insatiable for talk we are, the more of it we’ll get and the worse it’ll be. Again, look at streaming music. The fake artists and impending AI slop of the streaming services are ways to cut costs, but they wouldn’t exist if they weren’t also symptoms of an endless appetite for the passive destruction of silence. Talk is cheaper for streaming services, with no royalties to pay and no costs (to the service) to license or produce. The AI podcasts that already exist are the natural successors to the three-hour ramblefests millions of people have convinced themselves are better than anything made through more deliberate—and deliberative—processes. Our willingness to engage with this, and to feed ourselves with whatever is on offer, is core to streaming services’ businesses. This doesn’t make for better music or talk. It doesn’t make for a better life.

We are thinking and feeling beings. When we fill every free moment with talk, we’re already ignoring the feeling part of ourselves. And when we accept dashed-off talk that’s the spoken equivalent to muzak, then we outsource the thinking part of ourselves, too.

1. The Mega Man theory of personality

In the video game Mega Man, when you beat a boss, you gain their power. Beat the fire boss and you can shoot fire in the next level. That sort of thing.

When I was a senior in high school, I was cast as Mark Twain in a school play. To play the part, I read Twain, I read about Twain, and when I drove places, I read the signs and billboards out loud in my attempt at his accent. The next semester, my English teacher pointed out that I was writing with more humor, and taking more jabs at the school administration in my papers than I had before. “I think this Twain thing really rubbed off on you,” she said.

To some degree, this is influence. The experiences you have shape you in ways you can’t always clock. If you go into a creative field, then whatever you make is shaped by the ideas and styles you take in. With journalism, there’s the additional need to research a topic you write about until you can comfortably talk to experts and participants in the field and explain their activities to non-experts.

I’m a neurotic researcher and avid collector who has spent most of my professional life as a generalist—that is, not having a specific beat, but picking up whatever seems interesting or needs coverage. Factor these together, and you get a pretty good explanation of my mental landscape and my physical surroundings.

My head is a collection of facts learned in the course of duty and my apartment is a collage of artifacts that feed my obsessions. Ask about the shelf full of Polaroid cameras and I can tell you about the company’s history, which I studied while working on a story about how discontinued technology can be repaired, decades after the parts are no longer manufactured. Point out the Harry Partch/John Cage split album in my record collection, and I’ll tell you about the letters between the two that I found while researching a performance of a John Cage piece.

This goes beyond items and into ideas. I spend so much time with the research, I keep thinking about it after the story is done. Sometimes this gives me a new perspective on a story that I wish I would’ve come to while I was on assignment. Other times, it leads me to a fun new hobby. And occasionally, it changes how I live. The ability I gain isn’t just an influence or a piece of knowledge—it’s a way of seeing the world.

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2. Abandoning Expectations

Look, this isn’t going to be a navel-gazing section about my own writing. But I need to mention it to get to the main idea.

For the last two years, most of my professional life has been focused on my book, which I’ll surely soon encourage you to pre-order. There’s a part of the book that deals with convenience and information—particularly how the media and the audience reacted to new ways to get news easily, and what that did to our understanding of the world. One challenge I faced writing this section was moving beyond chronicling the missteps.

But one of those missteps has stuck with me—the way so many news publishers have tried to stay relevant by jamming their way into as many conversations on as many platforms as possible. It’s a quantity strategy.

I’m thinking of it now because, as you’ve noticed, my writing here has been sporadic as I’ve had my head down working on the book. Bursts of regular posts happen between deadlines and edits.

I made an assumption in that last paragraph. I wrote “as you’ve noticed.” Have you noticed? Did you even think about it until I mentioned it? When you got this newsletter, did you think, “I haven’t heard from Gabe in a while” or did you assume that you just missed my last dispatch? Did you think of it at all?

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Probably the safest assumption is the last one. That’s the one I hope for. Because, as I’ve been thinking about the expectations of convenient technology, I’ve been realizing how unhelpful and artificial they are.

This isn’t a newsy newsletter. If it doesn’t arrive, it’s nowhere near the disruption to your habits that it would be if, thirty years ago, you didn’t get the morning paper or your favorite drive-time radio station was off the air. It’s not even like tuning in to see a sitcom you casually follow and finding out it’s a rerun or is pre-empted. You don’t go to your inbox and search for this. It comes when it comes.

The problem is that I think of this as a problem, and you probably don’t think of it much at all.

If you have expectations for me, it’s probably for the substance of the newsletter, and not how many you get. When it comes to the downsides of easy information, I’ve come to think that maybe one solution is for writers like me to not give in to the pressures to constantly publish and for readers to not expect a cadence for anything that doesn’t need to have a cadence.

If I want to go a bit further and project a portion of my post-book personality, then I might say this strategy makes receiving an individual newsletter slightly more pleasant.

Here’s what I mean: I subscribe to a lot of magazines. In the U.S., I knew when weekly magazines would arrive because they always arrived on the same day of the week. Monthly magazines were a pleasant surprise because I didn’t know when they would show up. I might have figured this out if I thought about it, but I didn’t think about it. Biweekly, quarterly, trimesterly, and other oddly intervaled periodicals were more of a treat. I still don’t know when The New York Review of Books publishes. Now that I live abroad, I have no idea when a magazine will get to me. They come from printers in neighboring countries and they get here when they get here. I look at the tables of contents and then decide what priority to give a particular article or issue in my general stack of reading.

In the end, I read more of what arrives because it all arrives like letters.

Do I still have media I expect? Yes. I expect my news apps will be updated when I look at them in the morning. There are three or four podcasts that I’ve timed to particular regular activities that I rely on. But for the most part, with magazines or newsletters, I’m just happy whenever one shows up. That’s who I am. Or at least, it’s who I am now. For now.

In late summer last year, young people across the German-speaking world met by the dozens in parks and public squares. At a designated time, they took out small cups of pudding and plastic forks, then used the latter to eat the former. They did it because someone posted to TikTok that it would be a fun thing to do.

Pudding mit Gabel Essen was silly fun, and from the participants I’ve spoken to, no one there thought much of it beyond that. Observers, however, weren’t as restrained. In the press coverage I read, analysts described the gatherings as symptoms of the international loneliness epidemic, rebellion against the collapse of the old order, and a way to forget the troubles of the world for a moment. It wasn’t enough that there were Pudding mit Gabel get-togethers or that the participants had fun, the entire concept needed to be an Event—packed with meaning. The people describing it as an event, as far as I could tell, did not attend. They watched online.

Concurrent with Putting mit Gabel was “six-seven.” Young people said it, older people were confused by it, and hundreds of commentators raced to explain what it meant. I saw analyses calling it a secret language, a triumph of postmodernism, and a failure of postmodernism. No one could agree on what it meant because it didn’t mean anything. Still, lots of people wanted it to mean something. None of these people were the ones who said “six-seven,” though. They were older.

In December, the musician Cameron Winter played Carnegie Hall. I’m sure the people in attendance liked the music, but I didn’t hear anything about it from them. The critics, writers, and podcasters I follow who went to the show mostly described it as a momentous occasion. They mentioned that Paul Thomas Anderson was filming it, that aftermarket tickets cost four-figures, and a few said they felt guilty for posting photos from the show instead of enjoying it. Pretty much everyone compared the show to a young Bob Dylan’s performance at the same venue decades earlier. This comparison wasn’t based on music, but on the attendees’ assurance that this would be a world-historic event. At least one person called it “generation defining.” Which generation? It wasn’t clear.

Critics tend to look for connections, patterns, or meaning, but it seems that everyone with a column, handful of followers, subscriber list, or a USB microphone is looking through a critic’s lens with a hopeful eye. There’s a desire, mostly among people over thirty and especially among people over thirty five and under fifty, to understand every new occurrence in the timeline of history. Armies of online millennials are hoping to prove cause and effect through brute force hot take posting, even when there is no cause and the effect is hardly worth noticing.

A few posts from disappointed fans are labeled a “backlash” (to a new Taylor Swift album or a new season of Stranger Things). A reasonable point of disagreement is seen as a souring of consensus (to a new Paul Thomas Anderson movie). This is beyond the usual overhyped trend-spotting of the early 2000s, when three people wearing a certain cut of jeans could inspire a few articles. This is a search for meaning that leads to applying a label to anything and everything that exists. Overzealous cultural taxonomy combined with armchair sociology.

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The result of this isn’t a deeper understanding—it’s the exhaustion that comes from confusion. We’re panning for gold miles from the seam. Meanwhile, culture is being crushed under the weight of expectations.

I have a few theories for why this is happening…

One: Commentary Travels Faster and Farther than Art

I said it a couple paragraphs ago. There are a lot of people posting online. They post to platforms that are thirsty for Content. These platforms amplify whatever gets a reaction. Creating new culture or art is difficult and risky. Sounding off is fast and fun.

Plus, all of this Content is ephemeral. How often have you seen a Reel or a TikTok video and then, when you try to find it later, it’s gone…lost in a sea of Content that’s made unnavigable by its size and by poor search capabilities? Why bother making anything deep enough to warrant watching again?

Commentary and criticism are both valuable, but this value comes from consideration and conviction, neither of which the platforms reward. Saying any old nonsense to get a little bit of attention paid forward to your next bit of nonsense is the winning strategy.

Two: Nothing Means Anything

We’re in a crisis of meaning. Meaning—as in the importance embedded in an object or an occurrence—often comes from effort. Effort, in the form of time or energy, is worth something. This is pretty much the basis of our economy, but you can apply it to the intangible value of cultural goods. If you work hard to make money to afford a CD, you’ll have a different relationship to the music than if you stream it for (almost) free. If you have to carve out time and make a trip to go the store to try on a shirt before you buy it, it’ll mean more to you than next-day delivery of a one-click purchase. Going to the movies isn’t like watching TV. Streaming isn’t like going out to rent a video.

It also doesn’t help that the streaming business model thrives on passive consumption of background noise or that ecommerce is so often built on race-to-the-bottom sacrifices of quality for quantity. It’s easy to find stuff, harder to find the good stuff.

Automation and ease have pulled the need for effort out of so many parts of life, the biggest struggle is affording all the costs of living. The rewards of this work are diminished, the comforts are cold. Of course there’s a desire to give everything meaning.

This didn’t happen overnight. Meaning drained away slowly. We gave up on effort naturally. The emptiness of the new experiences, the isolation of the easier technology, snuck up on us.

Three: We Label By Default

Of course we’re more likely to see everything as an event. Anyone under a certain age grew up with the idea that they needed to have a Personal Brand—a label for themselves that could travel easily online. For years, we put all our activities—from work meetings to casual hangouts—into Google Calendar with a start and end time. We sent e-vites for dinner parties and made Facebook pages for college movie nights. When we pay bills or clean our apartments, we call it “adulting.” We gleefully attach the suffix “maxxing” to any show of effort. Even laying around needed a brand—“bedrotting.”

When activities have so little meaning and seemingly no consequence, then labels are a way of showing they exist, of trying to impart some kind of importance because there’s a word for it.

The rush to make everything an event leaden with meaning coincided with the rise of “performative” as a descriptor of just about every activity. A guy reading in public was a “performative male.” Any action—or any political stance—that didn’t seem to align with a previous lifetime’s worth of leadup was performative. Pointing out that there’s an element of performance inherent in public existence was performative. Everything has a label, and nothing seems authentic.

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Each of these theories is connected; they’re part of the same tech-driven Way We Live Now.

My concern is that this cycle is only going to get worse and push us further away from enjoyment of events or art or culture. In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag argued that the search for a true meaning focuses on what a work of art says, while simply experiencing that work of art focuses on what it does. When art, culture, or even silly teenage hangouts become first and foremost things to be analyzed and defined—when we expect them to say something in particular—they stop being whatever it is they were in the first place, and they can no longer do whatever it is they need to do. We approach them with the expectation that they will make us feel a certain way.

This is bound to cause disappointment.

Over the holiday break, I had a piece published in the New York Times Magazine about my snail obsession and how it helped me adjust to life in Switzerland. You can read it here.

This post is kind of a cousin or sibling to that one. Let me know if you like this kind of writing, or if you’d rather have the typical hand-wringing analysis of minor records or trends or whatever else it is I do here.

For a short period of time in my late 20s, I was, according to a handful of friends, “Louisville famous.” This meant that within the Louisville, Kentucky, Metropolitan Area, people who listened to a lot of public radio or who attended live storytelling events (this is probably a redundant list) knew who I was.

“Famous” is a stretch. Fame for local journalists went to hosts of radio shows, newspaper columnists whose photos ran next to their bylines, and anyone who was on TV. I was less notable than most of my on-air colleagues. Still, I would occasionally be recognized. In a restaurant, someone might say “aren’t you on the radio?” The question left me flattered but made me worry that I was talking too loudly. Once when I was playing tennis in the park, a man stood outside the chain link fence watching me. During a break in play, he said, “You’re Gabe. ” I said yes. “I liked your article about pens,” he said, and walked away. On a Saturday afternoon, a stranger outside a cigar store yelled out “Moth man!” a reference to my co-hosting the live Moth events in the city. The rewards of this fame were having a local food truck name a hamburger after me for a night (it was good) and forming a lasting friendship with the guy who called me Moth man.

Still, even this limited recognition made me nervous. It wasn’t because I might be spotted doing something embarrassing. I didn’t worry about reputational damage. I wasn’t comfortable having a reputation at all.

I’m shy. I liked the anonymity of being on the radio or existing only as a byline in print. Once, the station ran a photo of me to promote the news blog I wrote. I was thrilled when a local lawmaker said “hey who is that in the ad for your blog?” unaware it was a photo taken a year prior.

After Louisville, we moved to Boston, then to D.C. I worked behind-the-scenes in newsrooms, only occasionally writing or putting my voice on-air. I wasn’t a little fish, I was a plankton. Unknown except to those who I wanted to know me (friends, mostly, as well as the staff at the restaurants and coffee shops I frequented).

Now I’m in Switzerland and I think I’m getting a reputation again, but not for work.

Every morning, I jog along a set path, usually at the same time each day. This means I see the same people. The custom here is to greet someone with a Grüezi as you pass, which I do, even when I’m out of breath pushing for a better mile kilometer time. They return the greeting, even if they’re speeding by on a bike or tying up a dog waste bag. With some of these strangers, the greeting has expanded into a miniature conversation in passing. They’ll comment on the weather, maybe, or say something about how I’m still at it. One group of dog walkers who I often pass always throws me for a loop, shouting phrases in German that force me to match my physical exertion with mental. I worry about being rude, so I usually smile, nod, and agree to whatever it is they’ve said with the word for “yes” or “exactly” or “one more day.”

The other day, a guy who lives at the top of our hill was on the sidewalk talking to a man from a tree-cutting service. He said something beyond my comprehension, so I sped up to give myself plausible deniability for a snub. Before I got out of earshot, I heard something I could translate: Er ist jeden Tag hier. “He’s here every day.”

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Self-consciousness over my pace and appearance aside, I don’t mind this kind of recognition. It’s neighborly. In Boston and Washington, there were people who lived in our apartment building who didn’t say hello. In Louisville, people were friendly but sometimes the encounters carried some kind of expectation; people asked for my take on a big local news story, for gossip about NPR personalities, or for a recommendation letter for a young relative who was applying for jobs “and would just be thrilled if you could do something.”

I like having the neighbors as part of my day, and I like thinking that I’m part of theirs. If I don’t see someone for a while, I ask myself if they’re on vacation or maybe feeling sick. I hope their dog is still healthy enough for a morning walk. I wonder if they do the same for me. When I’m out of town, do they ask “what happened to that bald guy with the funny accent?”

In a way, I feel less like a person people interact with and more like part of the scenery here—the jogger in the green cap who never goes any faster, never gets any thinner, and appears along the road to Schönenbuch on weekday mornings. Really, I suppose I’ve become part of a routine. Walk the dog, see that guy, go home. I like it. The only expectation is a friendly word or two and the unspoken promise of being back at it tomorrow.

It’s Christmas again. I like this time of year just fine but I feel the weight of that “again.” It’s been on my mind a lot, especially as the years keep running together. It feels like this is the fifth Christmas of 2020.

Again.

I should look at it differently. After all, repetition is part of tradition—an important part. Something that happens once can’t be called a tradition. Neither can something that happens every day. A tradition is a routine with celebration. It’s a habit with meaning—a set of rules we look forward to following. Ceremony separates it. Repetition grounds it.

This is fertile ground for the insouciant human desire to shake things up. There’s always someone who wants to do it a little differently—try a new cookie recipe, put a techno remix on the playlist, give experiences instead of gifts. And no seed takes root more easily than one that expands the tradition. This is the likely unconscious aim of every uncle who ever got a little bored around the Christmas television and dropped a chestnut like “Die Hard is really a Christmas movie.”

But even older than any factoid that might get a Nakatomi Plaza ornament on the tree is the insight that follows a gentle nudge while “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” plays in the background.

“You know,” someone says in the tone that accompanies the imparting of forbidden knowledge. “This is really a sad song.”

Then it clicks. It clicks before they can tell you the history, how it’s about a last Christmas in a beloved hometown⁠1, how the lyrics are actually “Someday soon, we all will be together, if the fates allow. Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.”

The song is sad on the surface, too. It’s slow and plaintive. It makes the day diminutive, a “little Christmas.” And the singer won’t be celebrating with you, because you need to make it for yourself. Have yourself a merry little Christmas. I’ll be crying in the egg nog.

A few minutes of thought and so many Christmas songs become sad. There’s the air of nostalgia for lost days in “White Christmas.” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is a soldier’s letter home. “O Tannenbaum” is usually played a little slowly considering it’s a song that celebrates a beautifully appointed tree.

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The wistful threads in all these run back to the oldest and most traditional Christmas songs. “Silent Night,” “The First Noel,” and “Away in a Manger”—to name a few—are downtempo and sad. But the tempo is a symptom of a more profound melancholy. As someone who didn’t up with religion, I can’t speak to the spiritual weight of these songs, but the lyrics have the mix of hope and worry that permeates throughout the season. These are songs about people searching for something. They search regardless of their status. They could be kings or kids with nothing but a drum. They travel across the desert in their search All of their hope is tied up in a rumor. There’s a straining and striving, a desire to give everything for something whose certainty is made by fervent belief.

These themes—longing, emptiness, desire for change—resonate with modern songwriters. As holiday celebrations secularized, the dream of peace on earth and goodwill toward man changed from the hope of a faithful few to the humanist dream of the masses. Stevie Wonder’s “Someday at Christmas” and John and Yoko’s “Happy Xmas” are anti-war protest songs.

Other songs are more personal in their heartache over dashed hopes for kindness. “Blue Christmas” is self-explanatory in title alone. John Prine’s “Christmas in Prison” continues the sad longing inherent to the season. It’s framed as a prisoner writing a letter to the outside expressing thankfulness (“the food was real good”), longing (“I dream of her always, even when I don’t dream”), and a recognition of the impossible (“I’ll probably get homesick, I love you, goodnight”).

Even the songs that celebrate the most crass or commercial elements of the yuletide have something darker beneath. “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” might be cute to grownups, but the child narrator is learning that either infidelity is real or Santa isn’t. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” a song that’s cheerful and fun on the surface, is about unattainability and solitude. The narrator of the song is alone on Christmas. She can have everything but just wants another person to be with. She wants that person more than they will ever know.

It’s a holiday of giving where everyone wants something that can’t be bought. The day of gifts reminds us of the limits of our purchasing power. As kids, we so often want things that are real—toys. Things we can touch and own and play with but things that Santa might not be able to make or our parents might not be able to afford. The objects of our desire change, but our knowledge that we’ll never get everything we want only grows. The day is a mix of wanting everything, hoping for something, and knowing anything is a gift. As adults, we understand this, even if we don’t want to admit it every year.

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As a kid, my parents used to put on A Christmas Together by John Denver and the Muppets around the holidays. It’s a tradition I’ve kept into adulthood. The smiling folk singer surrounded by mirthful muppets on the album cover is no preparation for the complexities within, especially the third song: “The Peace Carol.” It starts with the lyrics “The garment of life, be it tattered and torn” and closes with a verse that holds the key to why Christmas songs are sad.

Add all the grief that people may bear

Total the strife, the troubles and care

Put them in columns and leave them right there

The peace of Christmas Day

This is the same spirit as “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” It’s the thesis of every sad Christmas song. There are troubles. There is pain. Let’s try and make the world a little better for others. And let’s put aside the rest of our worries as best we can. Let’s wish for it to be different and pretend that it could really be different, if just for the day.

Christmas is indeed little in the grand scheme of the year. We can stretch the season as far into October as we want but when it comes down to it, it’s one day. This one day is a break in the routine. It’s a time for tradition. Everything is cold and dead outside. That’s routine. But taking a step out of the routine doesn’t make it go away. From that distance, we can see what it is.

On Christmas, we face the reality that the last year wasn’t everything we wanted⁠2 and we greet the prospect that next year will be the same. No matter what changes, it will bring us back here, surrounded by gifts and loved ones and sitting with the knowledge that it’s going to be a long journey around the calendar. So let’s take a little break.

Nothing is truly static. Not even traditions. We repeat actions and words and deeds, but as we age, the places we go and people we see will change. The numbers around the table grow and shrink and we get a little reminder every year that it’s not always going to be like this. Doing something again and again reminds us of how things have been and how they can be. We’re different people each year. Having a holiday tradition reminds us of the parts of life, and of ourselves, that are continuous, and the parts that aren’t.

Accept it. Celebrate it. Again.

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Who taught you what a director does?

This is one of those pieces of knowledge that used to come through cultural osmosis—some assembly required.

Based on conversations with peers (and the discussion on the latest series), I learned about directors the same way a lot of kids who grew up in the ‘90s learned.

First there was Tim Burton. Batman was everywhere, and when I saw Edward Scissorhands on hotel cable during a family trip, I could understand that the same person made both movies. Twin Peaks was on TV, too, and I knew to associate David Lynch with an eeriness and imagery I didn’t understand.1 This is how I learned about the director as an artist.

The only Spike Lee productions I had seen as a kid were Nike ads, but he was about as famous as a director could be, especially during the marketing of Malcom X. Stephen Spielberg was on Animaniacs and he made Jurassic Park and E.T. This is how I learned about how directors existed as artists in the public eye.

When Fargo came out, adults around me sprinkled their conversations with Minnesota nice—“you betcha” and “ohh yah?” especially—and so the Coen Brothers entered my cultural lexicon. My oldest brother had posters for The Doors and Dazed and Confused in his room, and he talked about Boogie Nights and Casino, so I knew the names Stone, Linklater, Anderson, and Scorsese. My mom had previously rented 2001 for me, and I picked up on Kubrick references on The Simpsons. This is how I learned about directors and audience taste.

Around the time TV ads hyped The Big Lebowski as coming from “the guys who brought you Fargo,” I latched on to a director for myself. The TV spots for Rushmore had funny jokes and my favorite song (The Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away”).

My brother said he had seen the director’s first movie, Bottle Rocket, and liked it. I fixated on seeing Rushmore the way a thirteen year old fixates on anything that seems to be part of a slightly more grown-up world. When it finally landed on cable, I studied it, trying to figure out what made the movie the work of that particular director. The music? The visuals? The editing?

A couple years later, my mom came home with the just-released DVD of The Royal Tenenbaums. Now I understood what a director did.

By college, I had seen enough movies, watched enough Siskel & Ebert, and read enough newspaper critics’ columns to understand directors (and to have a loose opinion on auteur theory, which my proximity to film majors soon solidified). Sophomore year, my school got a sneak preview of The Life Aquatic. The screening was packed. The giveaway promotional red stocking caps were prized possessions on campus.

Walking out, I was among the disappointed. The general consensus from my friends was that the movie was too heavy on style and too light on substance. Classmates used terms like real and raw to describe what they liked about the earlier Anderson movies, and they used the word twee to describe The Life Aquatic. The red caps were no longer cool. Like Richie Tenenbaum’s red-white-and-blue headband, they were the mark of a style-over-substance hipster instead of a true aesthete.

A few months later, I watched The Life Aquatic again on DVD with friends and saw all the realness and rawness of the movie’s broken heart. I understood how Anderson’s style might appear to hold certain ideas and emotions at a distance, when in fact the emotion is right there in front of us.

I’m a solid Anderson defender now. The accusations of twee are constant, though. And I see the point. His movies have become so stylish and singular, it’s overwhelming to follow what’s on the screen. At the same time, the movies have taken on deeper, heavier, more existential topics.

(I wrote about the shallow accusations of “quirk” at Together Alone.)

Together, Alone

In Defense of Artifice

Two things happen when a new Wes Anderson movie arrives in theaters, as The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson’s twelfth film, did last month…

Read more

a year ago · 3 likes · Gabe Bullard

On a trip to London last week, Linda and I saw The Wes Anderson Archives at the Design Museum. It was beautiful. (As she wrote, one of our early relationship highlights was seeing shooting locations of Rushmore while visiting her parents in Houston.)

The exhibit opens with handwritten script pages and on-set Polaroids. It moves into the Sundance posters for Bottle Rocket (then a short film) before exploding into color with the Rushmore costumes. Walking through, you see how Anderson used greater and greater budgets to realize the most meticulous details of his visions. You see scouting photos of the Tenenbaum’s house, costume sketches for the Zissou crew, the prop books made for Moonrise Kingdom, and the precisely detailed miniatures for The Fantastic Mr. Fox. The placards describe how Anderson worked with designers, prop specialists, and a seeming army of collaborators to make every frame exactly how he imagined it. I spent a good fifteen minutes studying the editorial board from The French Dispatch, which appears on screen for a few seconds and isn’t even readable then.

While I was studying the wale of Mr. Fox’s corduroy suit, I overheard another visitor. “I appreciate the design, but it’s just too much fluff,” he said. “Give me something real.”

I’ve been turning that over for a while. My main criticism of Anderson’s latest movies is what I mentioned earlier—they’re overwhelming in their detail. This and the brisk plots makes repeat viewings necessary to take it all in, and it can be hard to know what to focus on in the moment. But as a problem to have, that’s pretty minor.

What could be more real than this? We’re in a gallery hall full of ideas made manifest. No production still showed even a hint of green screen. I never saw the letters CGI in their all-caps succession. Yes it’s incredibly fussy, but isn’t this perfect for the age of streaming, when you can pause and study each frame? Isn’t this exactly what’s lacking from so many movies today?

This month, the wrong files for Mad Men were uploaded to HBO’s servers, and special effects shots were missing. A Starbucks cup appeared in Game of Thrones. These are understandable if embarrassing mistakes, but given how often these things happen (there are hundreds of thousands of words dedicated to “bloopers” like this on IMDB), isn’t a carefully constructed screen world something we should celebrate? Or is “good enough” ok, and reality is judged by how little attention an artist can appear to pay?

Look at the examples of directors I mentioned in the opening. Notice how each one is still a notable name today. They were artists who millions of people knew, who a kid growing up in a tiny rural town could aspire to learn about, to sharpen his taste against. They were artists who made mainstream works that became part of popular culture. I’ll take an indelible but obviously constructed world over whatever seems real on streaming today.

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Are we past the age of must-have Christmas gifts?

These were always a mass media creation. Endless ads and fluffy news stories manufactured desire for the latest novelty—Tickle-Me Elmo, the Clapper, and all the other As Seen on TV delights of late December.

In our fragmented, algorithm-customized world of information, breaking through and staying broken through long enough to make it to a wishlist is nearly impossible.

MrBeast is arguably the most famous entertainer in the world, yet he remains almost comically unrecognizable to anyone who isn’t a devoted fan. (As evidence of the odd nature of modern fame, that last sentence would seem specious without the word “arguably” in it, even though hard numbers say MrBeast is the most popular person on the most popular platform on the planet.) What chance does a doll commercial have?

The tech that gave us this fragmentation also gave us the one-tap purchase and buy-now-pay-later. It’s easier to order than it is to make a list. Anyone who wanted a Labubu got one, along with all the accessories and an aftermarket designer bag to clip it to (near-mint, four easy payments).

If anything today is a must-have, it’s the devices themselves. But these are now so expensive (and widely owned) they’re a risky and impractical purchase for most gift-givers. The devices do need a lot of subscriptions, though, and their accessories need constant replacement. So perhaps the hot gift is a virtual purchase—an Apple Store gift card, redeemable for hardware or in-app purchases. It’s never been more naked that we’re just trading cash.

Or maybe I’m getting old. “It’s the thought that counts,” was always as common as the refrain of Jingle Bells from adults around Christmas, and I say it more often myself every year. It’s an old chestnut that I value as much as whatever is roasting on the fire.

My favorite thoughtful gift was obsolete even before the age of the smartphone, though it, too, is a victim of technological advancement. For years, I gave people CDs. This wasn’t just a Christmas thing. All year, I’d trade custom mixes with friends. But as the damp, drizzly November weather came in, I found myself pausing in front of record stores, a long shopping list dancing in my head.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to give someone music, and the same general strategy applies to books and movies, too. The wrong way is to push your preferences on the recipient. I like this and you should too. Here the art is not a gift, it’s homework. Only with a mixtape can you expect someone to listen in order to understand you, and even then it’s a short walk to total narcissism. Split up the soul sharing with a few bangers, at least.

The right way takes thought. What music does this person like? What great record don’t they have? Have they said they wanted anything lately? Sadly, streaming has made the last two questions irrelevant and is working on the first through its devaluation of recorded music. To know these things about a person, you had to truly know that person. You had to know their collection and their taste, and to pay attention to what they’ve said. This process is the same as it is with any other gift, to a degree, but music was not an ordinary gift. The recipient may listen to the record you give them for years—on walks, at home, in the car, and in so many different moods. If they love it, you and this person now share an emotional secret. If they hate it, you have an inside joke (and a better idea of what to give next time).

I’m certain there will be plenty of vinyl records under trees around the world this year. And that’s cool. But in the pre-streaming years, the physical album was necessary to have if you wanted to hear something—even if you only touched the CD once, when you ripped it to mp3s for your iPod. Now, a record is a display object more than something you listen to, unless your intended recipient is a dedicated analog listener (which brings a whole new set of challenges to the purchase). It’s just as likely a gift of vinyl will prompt someone to stream an album more often. That’s nice, but a little of the magic is gone.

Most of the music shared this holiday season will be beamed over Bluetooth—connections awkwardly commandeered by houseguests’ devices and songs chosen as one person looks over the shoulder of another, gazing into the screen’s infinite selection, where every album is meaningful, but means almost nothing to have.

Winning

In the twenty-first century, nostalgia piled on top of itself until it collapsed into a heap of meaningless.

The swing revival ended on January 31, 1999, when Big Bad Voodoo Daddy played the Super Bowl halftime show, along with Stevie Wonder and Gloria Estefan. Twenty years later, critic Rob Sheffield told the Ringer this particular halftime show did to ‘90s culture what Altamont did to ‘60s culture. 

Things were about to get very weird in the new century. But the change wasn’t immediate.

Whatever ideas became outdated after Altamont didn’t vanish entirely. Many elements of the 1960s broke from their larger context and spread across culture (Deadhead stickers on Cadillacs and whatnot). Likewise, as the swing revival faded, elements of the culture that had launched it spread.

In the fall of 2003. Two and a Half Men premiered, with Charlie Sheen starring as a lascivious songwriter who was almost always clad in camp-collar shirts with block patterns. They were his character’s signature.

Sheen’s shirts weren’t found in the back of a parent’s closet or Salvation Army counters. They were new, made of silk and linen. Sheen’s character was a perpetually horny sleazeball, but the upmarket shirts gave him the touch of elegance that money can bestow on even the most inveterate louche. The bowling style made him seem irreverent and casual. The bowling shirt was no longer associated with bowling at all. It wasn’t ironic, subversive, or suburban. It was the uniform of the moneyed, comfortable, Californian, broadcast into the homes of millions of Americans every week. Casual triumphed over formal. Nostalgia inspired the new. 

Types of Guy

Three years after Two and a Half Men debuted, America met a restaurateur from California who had entered a competition to star on Food Network: Guy Fieri.

In promo photos for his first show, Guy’s Big Bite, Fieri is in an upmarket camp collar shirt similar to Sheen’s. With his tattoos, piercings, goatee, penchant for flip-flops, and spiky hair so bright it might be radioactive, Fieri looked like a living cartoon among his Food Network peers. But to millions of viewers, he was a stock character. The same type of guy could be found at car shows or cheering on a classic rock cover band at the state fair. He was the new American man of leisure.

The set on Guy’s Big Bite was pure space-age bachelor pad: chrome lamps, Googie wallpaper, a tall red bar stocked with martini shakers and decorated with trophies—perhaps bowling trophies. It looked like a set from the “Walkin’ on the Sun” video. And indeed, Fieri and Smash Mouth’s singer Steve Harwell were often mistaken for each other.

After a year of Guy’s Big Bite, Fieri took his show on the road. Driving a classic convertible (though not one with fins), he visited the types of businesses that had sprung up across the American suburbs and exurbs with screaming Googie architecture. They were what the show was named for: Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.

Even though he wore bowling shirts on Guy’s Big Bite, Fieri told the Wall Street Journal that their presence on his new show was happenstance. 

I get a call to do “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” and they said, “Bring a short-sleeved collared shirt.” I’m pretty much a T-shirt-and-jeans guy. Shorts. Flip-flops. I’m not a real fashion icon. I had this one Dickies work shirt that was gray on the sides and had a dark gray panel in the center. When the show got picked up, that’s what I had worn in the pilot. They go, “That’s the wardrobe.” 

The essential part of this story is that Fieri had a bowling-style shirt. What’s more, it was ostensibly a shirt made by a workwear company for some type of physical labor. The shirt was double-duty Americana—a bowling pattern on a laborer’s uniform.

It made sense that Fieri had this shirt. It made sense that he would be on TV in a groovy apartment with vinyl and formica and hubcaps on the wall. It made sense that people would mistake him for the singer of Smash Mouth. It made sense because these guys had evolved out of the postwar American experiment. They were Gen Xers who quoted Swingers and loved old cars and diner food. As they got older and made more money, they went for brand new recreations of the clothes their peers had found at thrift stores. Nothing about anything Fieri did seemed anomalous to anyone who was familiar with the malls and middle-class white suburbs of the 1990s. It just made sense. 

Don’t Forget the Food

The food Fieri championed was American, too. It wasn’t always just monster burgers or piles of fried onions. It wasn’t unusual to see Fieri scarf down a dish that infused flavors from Asian or Mexican cuisine. Infused is the key word. Fieri wasn’t a traditionalist. But the new flavors he brought to the televised palate were usually attached to a more domestic dish—a spice rub on pork chops or toppings on a pizza. One of the restaurants Fieri founded is called Tex Wasabi’s. The menu of another one of his restaurants, named Guy’s American Kitchen, includes pastrami egg rolls and cajun chicken alfredo. 

The country Fieri traveled on TV was one where everything blended together into something that was distinctly America-shaped. 

None of This is Real

Ever taken a road trip across the USA? How often did you encounter a genuine diner, drive-in, or dive? The businesses that once dominated the nation’s roadsides gave way to identical outlets of chains at interstate exits. Those that remain are tourist attractions.

In a way, Fieri helps these businesses by giving them attention. The restaurant industry is tough. Publicity can make or break a business.

In another way, Fieri provides a limited view of what these restaurants can be, and pushes them to a familiar set of expectations that work well for his tastes and the TV’s presentation. He celebrates a world that no longer exists and creates a false version of it that endures. He builds the simulation on top of the ruins of the original. He creates a new type of chain, united by a uniformity of offerings rather than corporate ownership.

Irony, Melting like American Cheese 

In 2012, Pete Wells’s New York Times review of the Times Square branch of Guy’s American went viral. The piece was a list of questions aimed at Fieri. 

Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret — a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers — called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?

…

Has anyone ever told you that your high-wattage passion for no-collar American food makes you television’s answer to Calvin Trillin, if Mr. Trillin bleached his hair, drove a Camaro and drank Boozy Creamsicles? When you cruise around the country for your show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” rasping out slangy odes to the unfancy places where Americans like to get down and greasy, do you really mean it?

Or is it all an act? Is that why the kind of cooking you celebrate on television is treated with so little respect at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar?

Nearing his conclusion, Wells asks: “Is the entire restaurant a very expensive piece of conceptual art?”

I’ve thought about this line a lot. Fieri is not joking. He’s a business man. He’s a brand. The way he packages his product and presents his brand is simultaneously authentic (he’s a type of guy that exists in the world) and completely contrived (the type of guy that he is evolved through so many layers of irony and adoption, through cynicism and sincerity, that there is no way it could be natural).

Fieri reminds me of Jesse Thorn’s description of Evel Knievel in his manifesto on the New Sincerity, a post-ironic aesthetic/way-of-life that’s always had a slippery definition. 

Let’s be frank. There’s no way to appreciate Evel Knievel literally. Evel is the kind of man who defies even fiction, because the reality is too over the top. Here is a man in a red-white-and-blue leather jumpsuit, driving some kind of rocket car. A man who achieved fame and fortune jumping over things. Here is a real man who feels at home as Spidey on the cover of a comic book. Simply put, Evel Knievel boggles the mind.

But by the same token, he isn’t to be taken ironically, either. The fact of the matter is that Evel is, in a word, awesome. His jumpsuit looks great. His stunts were amazing. As he once said of his own life: “I’ve had every airplane, every ship, every yacht, every racehorse, every diamond, and probably, with the exception of two or three, every woman I wanted in my lifetime. I’ve lived a better life than any king or prince or president.” And as patently ridiculous as those words are, they’re pretty much true.

The New Sincerity, as Thorn describes it, is “more Hedwig than Rocky Horror.” It’s an earnest way of approaching something that someone might otherwise approach ironically. In his book Say Hello to Metamodernism, Greg Dember calls this kind of idea “Ironesty.”

Ironesty is irony/sarcasm/sardonicness/snark employed in the service of making an earnest point or expressing a heart-felt emotion. It’s kind of a way of saying, “Hey I get that what I’m about to say is kind of corny, but…” and then truly caring about the thing that comes after the “but.” Or it’s a way of delivering a humorous, clever ironic message, but softening it with a “Don’t worry … we’re not too cool for you, we have sincere feelings just like you.”

I quoted Thorn in a review of dueling Evel Knievel documentaries I wrote for Salon a few years ago. One of the docs featured Guy Fieri as a talking head. Which, like everything he does, made perfect sense and no sense. 

Fieri’s presence is particularly surprising, but also oddly perfect. Here is a man who also glorifies an America that isn’t really sustainable and perhaps never really existed—a showman draped in a form of realness that is both unreal and unreachable by the audience. When Fieri says of Knievel “the man knew how to hype the game,” it’s clear it’s coming from a man who also knows.

Asking whether Fieri is engaged in an art project is asking a question that’s out of date. There is no project, except for the fact that it’s all a project. No one with hair like that is unaware that they are constructing an identity. No one who has spent two decades on television is unaware that their personality is a marketing tool. He is effectively performing an identity that is sincerely held. And the bowling shirt is central to it. His own closet inspired the wardrobe for the show. He’s like Colonel Sanders for the postmodern age.

No Time for Lovers

Irony didn’t die or get replaced by something new. Like nostalgia, it piled so high that it collapsed into an all-encompassing meaninglessness. 

After Wells’s review, it became cool to like Fieri. I had friends who took trips to Guy’s American Kitchen that they hyped so heavily on social media, I briefly wondered if they were paid junkets (they weren’t). This spirit culminated in a four-minute comedy routine by Shane Torres on Conan that asked why everyone hated Fieri so much, when “all he ever did was follow his dreams.”

The routine reminded me of Carl Wilson’s book Let’s Talk About Love, in which he tries to set his own self-conscious sense of cool aside and find out why so many people love Celine Dion. In a section on how popular taste changes over time, he briefly mentions exotica music. What was once “a pathetic seduction soundtrack on the hi-fi of a smarmy insurance salesman” was, to a new generation, “charmingly strange, governed by a lost and thus beguiling musical rulebook.” 

Something similar is happening with Fieri. The people I knew who were rediscovering him weren’t watching him on Food Network. They knew him through references and reputation. To a Millennial in 2015 or so, the idea of someone driving a convertible to retro diners on cable TV was as distant as bowling leagues were to a Gen Xer in the late ‘80s (though Fieri was still on TV in 2015, just as league bowling was still happening in the ‘80s). It inspires its own nostalgia, and its own embrace of what used to be square. Fieri’s self-conscious performance of a real type of authenticity seems almost refreshing to the modern eye. 

But in the world of New Sincerity/Ironesty/etc, there’s a crucial difference between a Gen Xer wearing someone else’s old bowling shirt and a Millennial posting about how Donkey Sauce tastes good, actually. Fieri is the face of Food Network. Literally; his image appears at least four times on the network’s “Shows” page. (Ina Garten appears in name only.) Celebrating Fieri is rooting for someone who already won. And you’re rooting against…who exactly? People like Wells who build a career by having trusted opinions on whether a restaurant is worth your money? People who don’t like to see American food defined as anything and everything that fits into the deep frier?1

The idea of Poptimism in music criticism began as an attempt to draw serious consideration to music that didn’t meet ideas of authenticity that were based in the standards of rock music (singer-songwriters, analog instruments, etc). The approach has prevailed in ways that go far beyond music, and far beyond professional criticism. In some cases, it justified fans’ treatment of commercial success as not just a criterion of cultural importance, but the most vital criterion. It perpetuates mass appeal. “If a lot of people like it, you should like it, too.” 

It’s good for people to like what they like (with obvious exceptions for things that are actively harmful to other people). It’s also good to like things in different ways. Degrees of authenticity in appreciation can lead to different types of appreciation—a more well-rounded satisfaction that comes from a more nuanced view of culture. Otherwise, it’s just different levels of love with no room for critique, for nuance, or for keeping a distance from something but not shutting the door on it entirely. The world becomes binary—something is good or bad, beloved or hated. The simulation is as real as the original.

Without nuance, culture is just something to consume happily or condemn heartily. Meaning is pointless.  

A High Fashion Moment

Prada sells bowling shirts. So do Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, and Gucci. 

Sort of.

They call them “bowling shirts,” but they’re all variations on the camp collar short-sleeve shirt. The bowling name is a catch-all, a way of appealing to search engine algorithms after a few fashion influencers say the “bowling shirt is back.”

It’s back. But it never went away. 

This is part two of a series of notes on the bowling shirt and the culture around it. Part one is here, but you don’t need to have read it to enjoy this one.

There Is No Twenty-Year Cycle

I bowled on a computer before I bowled in real life. I spent hours on our Macintosh Performa playing “Alley 19,” a bowling simulator with a ‘50s motif—horn rimmed glasses on bowlers, a neon martini sign above the virtual lounge that held high scores, and of course, bowling shirts. Later, when I went to a bowling alley for the first time, it was the Bel-Air Bowl in Belleville, Illinois, an alley that matched the video game’s Googie aesthetic. When I started going to my hometown’s bowling alley, I fell in love with the Brunswick-made ball return, which was as Googie as the fins on a vintage Cadillac. The alleys were the genuine article, while the video game was part of a particular flavor of ‘50s nostalgia that was sweeping the country in the 1990s. 

A typical conversation about nostalgia in the ‘90s focuses on the ‘70s revival that rolled in over the first half of the decade. Even though Dazed and Confused wasn’t meant as a nostalgic movie, it signaled a new appreciation for the era that Gen-X had been children in. The rock music of the ‘90s hearkened more to the punk and hard rock sounds of the ‘70s than the hair-metal glam of the ‘80s. Old TV shows remained popular in reruns, and in music videos from the Beastie Boys and ODB.1 But while the ‘70s were cool again, there was a palpable ‘50s nostalgia at the time as well. 

There’s a pervasive idea that nostalgia moves in regular cycles, particularly cycles of about twenty years. There was a wave of ’50s nostalgia in the ‘70s. Angst over Watergate, disillusionment with ‘60s flower-power idealism, and the rise of Americana that presaged the Bicentennial brought about Grease, American Graffiti, and the song “American Pie.” This would explain any ‘50s nostalgia in the ‘90s as something dredged up when the ‘70s returned. It’s like Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” video—a ‘90s band placed into a ‘70s show that was set in the ‘50s (directed by Spike Jonze, who’d also directed the “Sabotage” video).

But nostalgia doesn’t cycle as much as it stacks up. A generation entering adulthood looks back to childhood. A generation entering middle age longs for a time before they faced the responsibilities of career and family. The generation becoming empty nesters has warm memories of the era when their children were young. This is called the reminiscence bump. 

Each group has a different target of their nostalgia and each group has a different level of accuracy of the memory. Each group also has a different level of influence on popular culture. These overlapping nostalgias lead to a melange of misplaced memories. The popular image of the past becomes increasingly imprecise. 

Nostalgia for the ‘50s didn’t go away after the ‘70s, it just evolved and took on different meanings. It stuck around in the ‘80s, in Back to the Future (which paints the ‘50s as sex-crazed and violent) and the campaigns of Ronald Reagan (which paint the ‘50s as wholesome). There were a few different visions of the ‘50s in the culture of the mid-‘90s. One vision drew on the exotica, bowling alley, martini lounge side of the decade. In the video for Harvey Danger’s 1997 song “Flagpole Sitta,” the first subculture the band uncomfortably passes through is a bunch of martini-drinking neo-beatniks  under Googie light fixtures. It’s an exaggeration, but as someone who was always looking for fashion cues at the time, I can safely say there really were people who looked and acted like this—mixing Kerouac with kitsch. 

In another corner, “Elvis” was a type of guy you’d regularly encounter on TV. Quentin Tarantino, Nic Cage, Rob Schneider, John Stamos—they were all popular men of varying levels of cool who took aesthetic cues from Elvis (all of them played Elvis in some way, too—Tarantino in an episode of Golden Girls, Cage as “Tiny Elvis” on Saturday Night Live, Schneider in musical tributes, Stamos on Full House). The ‘90s were the decade of the Elvis stamp war (written about here). Elvis in a white jumpsuit in Las Vegas stood next to Elvis in an Aloha shirt in Blue Hawaii. 

On top of that, Tarantino’s films brought back various aesthetics from the past, from surf (Dick Dale’s Miserlou in Pulp Fiction) to ‘70s cool (Jackie Brown). It all went into the same cultural stew. 

The camp/bowling/guayabera shirt was part of this mixed-up ‘50s style in the ‘90s, often worn with a wry, ironic distance—again, think of Jon Waters on The Simpsons and Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites. 

Too Many Shirts

The bowling shirt was an easy emblem of the past in large part because there were tons of them around. A league bowler might change uniforms every season. The shirts were built for performance—to be worn hard and washed hot. They lasted. They piled up in Goodwill. “Men and businesses come and go, but the bowling shirt lives on,” a columnist wrote in the Buffalo News in 1982.

The bowling shirt, specifically one meant for bowling, fit the irony of the ‘90s perfectly. A bowling shirt was a uniform for leisure, a mix of official garb and goof-off attire. Often, the shirts had the bowler’s name embroidered on the front and a local business that sponsored a long-ago league team on the back. For a person who loved irony and hated commercialism, what could be cooler than to wear an advertisement for an unknown business with someone else’s name sewn on the front? Plus, the shirts represented an era just before the ‘60s that Baby Boomers were becoming increasingly nostalgic for. Wearing a ‘50s-style bowling shirt was a way of indulging in nostalgia that countered the previous generation’s nostalgia. 

It’s So Money

Nothing cool can stay that way. Anything with both appeal and edge will slowly have the edge sanded down until it appeals to the widest possible audience. As ‘90s hipsterdom went mainstream, the old nostalgic symbols took on a new meaning. 

In TV and movies, the camp collar short-sleeve shirt became a sign that a character was slightly off from the mainstream. To me, the exemplar of this style is David Anthony Higgins’ character Joe on the Ellen sitcom. He’s a nerd who works at a coffee shop/bookstore well into his ‘30s. Joe had ‘50s throwback glasses and often wore loudly patterned camp shirts. It fit his character—a slacker with more wit than ambition and a deep knowledge of popular culture (I wonder why he inspired me so). 

The movie Swingers brought the cocktail-sipping, Vegas-hopping lounge lizard to a wider audience (Las Vegas being a hub of the postmodernist Googie-style architecture). But the movie’s version of ‘50s nostalgia was blurry. This is clearest in the music. Swingers was essential to one of the strangest eras in modern popular culture, and the peak of the decade’s muddled nostalgia: the swing revival. 

Swingers helped break the band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, an act that played music from the ‘40s, dressed like they were from the ‘20s, and had a name that evoked the exotica era of the ‘50s. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy had roots in the ‘80s Southern California punk scene, and punk had long had an aesthetic connection to various ‘50s and ‘60s subcultures. The Ramones nodded to girl groups and bubblegum. The Clash veered into rockabilly. The Stray Cats camped out in it. In the ‘90s, Stray Cats leader Brian Setzer started a Louis Prima-inspired group and became central to swing revivalism. It’s Setzer whose song was in the Gap’s “Khakis Swing” ad.

The Gap used nostalgia freely in ads in the ‘90s. The brand ran an ad in 1993 saying “Kerouac wore khakis.” The year after “Khakis Swing,” Gap ads featured music from Donovan (“Mellow Yellow”) and Queen (“Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” as performed by Dwight Yoakam). 

 Meanwhile, punk acts inspired by the Clash (among others) brought in horn sections and joined the third wave of ska. None of this music sounded like anything from the ‘50s or the ‘30s. None of it was particularly good. But it was played and enjoyed by guys who wanted to have a retro look. Anything retro would do. It wasn’t uncommon in these years to go to the mall and see dudes in bowling shirts, fedoras, and checkerboard Vans.

It was a mess of vibes with no singular historical precedent; nostalgia, separated from its origins and reveling in an evocation of the generalized past. And the fact that it was now mass-market and mainstream meant it was no longer ironically cool, or even authentically cool. It was just popular. It was the post-modern aesthetics of the Las Vegas strip manifested in white suburban teenagers’ closets. 

It All Happens at Once

I’m all over the place with the timeline. Swingers was 1996. “Flagpole Sitta” was 1997. Ellen debuted in 1994. It’s easy to imagine that Ethan Hawke’s character in 1995’s Before Sunrise would find Ethan Hawke’s character from 1994’s Reality Bites to be a pretentious jerk. Elvis guys and the bowling shirt crowd co-existed. Today, the path from outré to on trend to cringe takes only minutes to traverse. But people have always moved at their own pace, often slowly, through culture.

Every Nostalgia Thread in One Video

1997. Smash Mouth releases “Walkin’ on the Sun,” their first major single. 

The video features the following:

• All four band members in bowling shirts

• A beach party scene with tiki statues

• A brief homage to Petticoat Junction

• A ‘50s style hot rod race

• A performance scene shot in a vinyl and chrome lounge that wouldn’t seem out of place in a suburban bowling alley.

Smash Mouth’s sound borrowed from ‘60s pop and exotica, like a more mainstream version of Stereolab (the thriving indie scene and counterculture of the ‘90s meant there was always a cooler alternative/antecedent to whatever was popular). “Walkin’ on the Sun” sounds similar to “Swan’s Splashdown,” from J.J. Perrey and Gershon Kingsley’s 1966 album The In Sound from Way 2

A cutting-edge bachelor pad would’ve had this record in rotation (it’s easy to imagine it playing in either version of Rock Hudon’s apartment in 1959’s Pillow Talk—either the cool modern songwriter’s den or the tacky jungle-themed pad Doris Day turns it into as revenge). 

Proving that there was always a cooler alternative to the mainstream in the ‘90s, in 1996, the Beastie Boys released an instrumental homage to the Perrey and Kingsley record, with the same title and a similar cover.

How the Sleaze Seeped In

There was an undercurrent of sex in the ‘90s version of the ‘50s. It was in the exotica strain (they embodied Hugh Hefner’s quote from part one of this essay and embraced the covers of exotica albums). And it was in the rockabilly side (vintage pin-up photos were popular). This was part of the nostalgia for the ‘50s, even among the most irony-obsessed Gen-Xers. It was this generation that revived interest in Bettie Page as a subversive fashion icon.3

When the various subcultures of the old era were merged and mainstreamed in a time with less stringent social mores, the sex rose to the top. This explains bands like Lit and (I really hate typing this name) the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies—acts that foregrounded sleaze and sex over an incomprehensible mix of nostalgic aesthetics. We’ll leave the “Daddies” to the dustbin of also-ran rock history. Lit’s sound was a vaguely punkish pop metal that borrowed most heavily from the Sunset Strip acts of the ‘80s, while their aesthetics were pure ‘90s nostalgia-mining dirtbag—boxy shirts, slicked back hair, pin-up model album covers, gross goatees. 

In 1999, Lit released “My Own Worst Enemy,” their first major single. (I’m not embedding the video, but you can watch it here.) The video for the song has two set pieces. In the first, the band is bowling. In the second, they’re playing the song. The bowling shots are a jumble of time-specific references. There’s Googie architecture in the bowling alley, ‘50s bowling shirts, and a general wardrobe of leisure suits from the ‘70s. In the performance shots, the band is in late-‘90s rock-guy gear—instruments slung low, hair gelled and spiked, the guitar player’s goatee braided into a long point. At the end of the video, the scenes merge. The bowlers follow a group of women to the bowling alley’s bar, where we see the band’s performance. A party ensues. The two aesthetics combine in a haze of sex and booze.

A Moment on Bowling

There’s a reading of the Lit video that places its direct inspiration one year earlier, in the Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski. The movie has several scenes in a ‘50s-style bowling alley. Steve Buscemi’s character Donnie wears an array of bowling shirts, each embroidered with a different name. But it’s John Turturro’s character—The Jesus—who seems to be the most direct parallel to the guys from Lit.

Turturro drapes his character with a layer of comedic sleaze. He licks the ball before he bowls. He thrusts his pelvis in the air. He does a move where he holds the ball in a sling over his crotch and quickly lifts the sides of the sling to polish the ball, which stays just below his waist. While this was surely something bowlers had long thought to do as a goof, the guys from Lit do the same move in their video. Turturro’s character isn’t just a bowling shirt guy, he’s a bowling suit guy—he wears a jumpsuit that extends the bowling shirt to the floor. The character is also, notably, a convicted sex offender in the movie.

In both the Lit video and in The Big Lebowski, bowling is presented as a sport that’s retro in ways that extend beyond the design of the alleys. In Lebowski, it’s the out-of-the-way pastime for a group of losers. In the Lit video, it’s a decidedly vintage game. The twentysomethings in the band are cosplaying as lascivious members of their parents’ generation.

Out of Their League

Both the video and the film presented bowling as something it increasingly wasn’t in the ‘90s: organized. The movie and video are about league bowling, which was in decline at the time. In 1995, Robert Putnam published his essay “Bowling Alone,” which would grow into a bestselling book five years later. It’s about Americans’ waning civic involvement. In the passage that inspired his title, Putnam writes:

Between 1980 and 1993 the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent. (Lest this be thought a wholly trivial example, I should note that nearly 80 million Americans went bowling at least once during 1993, nearly a third more than voted in the 1994 congressional elections and roughly the same number as claim to attend church regularly. Even after the 1980s’ plunge in league bowling, nearly 3 percent of American adults regularly bowl in leagues.)

So bowling was still something people did with friends, but organized competition was becoming the stuff of fiction. Leagues, the source of the branded bowling shirt, were fading away. The ‘90s had seen the bowling shirt move from ironic cool to mainstream to vaguely off-putting. The shirt had many meanings. The actual reality was unmoored from its origins.

Next time: Irony dies on the lanes

This is going to get weird

Let me explain. 

When I was sorting through my clothes before moving two years ago, I found an old bowling shirt I used to wear in high school. It was a gift from a friend who got it from her dad. At the time, it was cool—ironic, vintage, unique. I wore it until sometime in college when I saw someone wearing a bowling shirt and one of those visors with fake hair on it. 

Squeezing myself back into the shirt, I wondered where the design came from, and why it stopped being cool. So I started researching. The research led to this short article for Smithsonian magazine. 

But this wasn’t the end of my interest. Reporting the piece left me with dozens of documents and pages of notes that center around ideas I write about here—nostalgia, history, popular culture. What follows is essentially a version of my notes. I’m going to spread this out over three installments. Don’t worry—each piece works on its own as something to read, so don’t feel like you’re committing to every installment by reading this one. 

The Uniform of Space-Age Bachelor Pad Exotica

Guy Fieri doesn’t own a bowling shirt.

Interviewing the TV chef for The Wall Street Journal in 2024, Lane Florsheim asked Fieri outright how many of the garments he has. “I don’t think I even own one,” Fieri said. Fieri has also distanced himself from the flame-patterned bowling-style shirt that he’s been long-associated with, saying it was the uniform at one of his restaurants, not a personal fashion choice. When you look at the picture of Fieri in the shirt, there’s a clear insignia for his restaurant Johnny Garlic’s on the right breast.

In terms of gossip tonnage for interview bombshells, Fieri’s comment on the bowling shirt barely ranks. But it’s interesting that the Wall Street Journal asked him about this particular item. And this was the second mention of bowling shirts in the piece. The lede describes Fieri as an "Emmy-nominated host and restaurateur [who] has established himself as a greasy-spoon connoisseur with a wardrobe full of bowling shirts and a crown of frosted tips.”

The bowling shirt’s image is so firmly associated with hot-rod dad culture that when high-end designers put bowling-inspired garments in their lineups a few years ago, Vogue suggested careful styling to avoid “looking like someone’s creepy uncle.”

Thirty years ago, a bowling shirt was a signifier of an obsession with kitsch or an addiction to irony. The vintage-shop owner played by John Waters in a 1997 Simpsons episode wears multiple bowling shirts. Ethan Hawke’s character wears one in Reality Bites. In less than a decade, the bowling shirt changed from the uniform of alt hipsterdom to the button-up equivalent of a bleached-blond soul patch. A Flair Hair visor for the torso. Now its image is something like Fieri—derided in some corners for absurdity and tastelessness and appreciated in others for earnestness. It’s simultaneously steeped in irony but too sincere to dismiss as frivolous. Fieri’s influence on the shirt’s image is notable, but it’s just one part of a decades-long nostalgia cycle that has left the shirt a little more faded with each turn.

Three Precursors to the Bowling Shirt

There’s a long history of clothes with origins in athletics becoming everyday wear: polo shirts; sport coats; tennis shoes; baseball caps; and most recently joggers (pants with elastic waists and cuffs—basically a way to wear sweatpants in public, heaven help us). While that’s certainly the case with the name of the bowling shirt, it’s not so clear that the shirt itself was designed for the sport.

Generally defined, a bowling shirt fits a few criteria:

• Short sleeves

• Button-front

• Open collar

• Full, boxy cut

• Squared hem

These criteria weren’t unique to the bowling shirt. In the middle of the twentieth century, before anything was called a “bowling shirt,” there were three other garments with a similar design in men’s wardrobes.

First was the camp shirt. These took off in the ‘30s as casual warm-weather shirts intended for camping or other outdoor activities in a time when wearing just a t-shirt would be like going out in underwear. In its cut and khaki color, the camp shirt is similar to military uniforms (the armed services, like sports, are a major influence on clothing design). 

Next is the Guayabera shirt, a lightweight camp-collar design notable for having four pockets in the front (two at the breast, two at the hip) and pleats. The shirt is most closely associated with Cuba, though there’s some debate over whether it might have originated in the Philippines and spread between Spanish colonies. Short-sleeved versions of this shirt became common under various names in the U.S. As a kid shopping in thrift stores, I knew them as “barber shirts,” presumably because the pockets were handy for holding combs or scissors. And indeed, here’s a photo of barbers in the ‘40s in Wisconsin wearing what look like variations on the basic design. 

The other type of shirt with these features that grew in popularity in the ‘30s was the Aloha shirt—likely first made in Hawai’i using colorful cloth imported from Asia. This shirt spread to the U.S. in droves as servicemen returned from duty in the South Pacific and as Hawai’i became a tourist destination for Americans who were getting rich in the post-war boom years. 

The Bowling Boom

Tropical travel was just one way to spend the excess time and money many Americans had in the postwar years. Bowling was another. The sport grew in popularity in the late ‘40s, and exploded in the 1950s with the invention of automatic pinsetters, which made the game faster and more convenient. Bowling was popular on early television, which only drove more Americans to the lanes themselves. Bowling alleys were staple amenities in the growing American suburbs. The American Planning Association estimated that 20,000 new lanes opened across the U.S. in the first twelve years after the end of the war. Some alleys offered child care so stay-at-home moms could compete in leagues during the day. By 1960, the New York Times was reporting that bowling rivaled baseball in popularity. 

In the same article, the Times reported on the launch of a new line of clothing from the bowling company Brunswick that was “a far cry from the utilitarian shirt-and-pants-look so long associated with bowling.” As bowling spread, it wasn’t always clear what one would wear to participate in the nation’s new pastime. Pre-war illustrations show men and women in the traditional garments of the time—shirts and ties, dresses or skirts with blouses. 

As dress codes relaxed after the war, bowlers went to the alley in the shirts they wore for leisure, and clothing manufacturers tried to cash in on the trend. They made boxier shirts in long and short sleeves, some with collars that would hold a man’s necktie. Over time, as dress codes kept relaxing and as the AC kept blasting in bowling alleys, these designs evolved into the bowling shirt we know today—close cousin to the camp, Aloha, and Guayabera.

But that’s just the shape of the shirt. The bowling shirt has other features that set it off from a standard camp shirt—color-block stripes, contrast piping…some even had epaulets. These were practical adjustments. Bowling shirts were athletic uniforms. Most bowling was done in leagues, where teams needed to match each other. They also needed to match their surroundings. With robotic machines setting pins and a mass culture obsessed with splitting atom and the space race, many new bowling alleys took on what we now think of as a classic ‘50s architectural style—usually called Googie, after a diner that demonstrated this style. 

It’s a distinctly American look. It’s the kitschy, futuristic contemporary to the more European-inspired midcentury modern. But while Googie aspires to space and jets, it’s modeled on trains and built for cars. The chrome and tile diners that embody Googie evolved from train cafe cars. And the neon lights and swooping boomerang awnings were meant to draw in passing motorists.

Bowling alleys were social hubs. The American Planning Association called them “the poor man’s country club,” and implied this nickname was commonly used at the time. Alleys not only had lanes, they had lounges and restaurants. A driver passing by didn’t need to be in a league to stop in and have some fun. For those who did compete, the new bowling shirts were loose enough to wear during competition, but styled to be chic during a post-game cocktail at the alley bar. 

Briefly: Short Sleeves for Everyone

Throughout the ‘50s, many men had taken to wearing what were called sport shirts. These were slightly more casual versions of dress shirts, usually distinguished by their louder patterns or softer details and fabrics (some traditional menswear stores list Oxford shirts among the sports shirts). The growing counterculture in the ‘50s and ‘60s loosened fashion rules for everyone. In 1966, in an effort to promote the Aloha shirt, an industry group celebrated “Aloha Friday.” Soon, offices across the U.S. let their workers leave the ties at home under the day’s new name, Causal Friday.  

The Aesthetic of an Ethos

If you’re imagining a soundtrack to the late ‘50s bowling bonanza, you might be thinking of rock and roll. It’s the music associated with the Googie diners and drive-ins. But adults in the ‘50s were too old for Elvis. They went for jazz. And among the newly moneyed leisure class, there was a new type of jazz to enjoy—exotica. 

Exotica is hard to describe, but you know it when you hear it, or when you see it. It’s a little like the bowling shirt—a blend of cultural influences shaped for the comfort of white middle class Americans. It evokes the South Pacific and the Caribbean while borrowing heavily from Latin Jazz. The records in this genre sometimes included animal sounds among the beats. The covers featured sexy women dressed to look “exotic”—that is, foreign. It’s music for young people who just got back from the war, who have disposable income, and are living in America at a time of empirical expansion. The music went well with the Tiki craze of the ‘50s. 

The scholar Phil Ford describes exotica as not just music, but an entire aesthetic designed for “The technologized suburbanite who is permitted to spy on native rites.” Ford goes on to describe this listener by quoting Hugh Hefner’s writing in the first issue of Playboy. “We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

Exotica was often lumped in with lounge music, the type played by Esquivel. At its best, the music is innovative, taking advantage of stereo recordings and new techniques in mixing. It’s truly space-age. At its worst, the music sounds like easy listening in a cheap satin dinner jacket—pretensious but hollow. 

The “technologized suburbanite” might be mixing martinis in silver shakers or going out for a Mai Tai served in a cup shaped like a Pacific Island statue. He bowled in leagues. He drove a car with fins. He lived a new type of lifestyle. The future was his. 

Next time…the last decade of the future.

I was once a professional blogger. 

It was part of my job as a reporter. Between filing spots and features, I posted about three times a day to my radio station’s news blog. 

The posts were short—usually a link and a comment. They were built for an audience who used RSS readers and browser bookmarks. Writing something the length of one of these newsletters for the blog every day would have been way too much. Likewise, sending something like the average blog post in a newsletter today would be too little. This change in the medium pushed a change in the message.

What I’ve noticed now, though, is that a lot of writers (myself included) and podcasters (also myself included) are stuck in the middle, between the old blog-and-social-media need to constantly update and the new post-social media/anti-brain-rot expectation that each update will be substantive.

Every so often, in conversation with a friend, one of us will mention a paid newsletter/podcast/Patreon/etc that we mutually subscribe to. The reference meets a blank stare. “I haven’t kept up,” one or the other of us says. The reason is always the same: There was just too much.

The problem is, in most cases, we’re still paying for whatever it is we gave up on. The subscription was automatic, easy, and aspirational. Canceling felt like a betrayal to the writer and to our own sense of ourselves as the type of people who support and keep up with independent media. 

But supporting just a handful of independents means getting more Content than you can reasonably sort through. Inboxes are flooded. Podcast feeds are full. YouTube channels are constantly updated. And for your money, you don’t get a full picture of the world. Paid subscriptions carry the user from niche to niche. The audience is pulled into deep and narrow crevices of culture then drowned in commentary.

It’s simultaneously too much and not enough.

This is the creator economy. This is the independent, entrepreneurial, tech-powered world we all live in, but in which very few of us make a living. The demand for output is greater, the rewards are smaller, and the quality is all over the place. Things needed to change in the old media world. They still need to change. But as a solution, this isn’t better. 

Instead of a few people in institutions and more people trying to get in, we have hundreds of thousands of people hustling to create their own institutions and to collect their own subscription fees. This inherently means they need to dominate their own corner of a crowded world. And we (I say we, because what is this but my own entrepreneurial venture?) do it on platforms we don’t control—platforms that take a cut of the meager earnings and push us to constantly publish the dregs of our drafts folders just to stay alive.

We’re cranking out bits to line the bottom of big tech’s birdcage. 

The promise of the creator economy is that a small group of supporters can, through small contributions, sustain the writers, podcasters, or artists they like. It’s a nice idea. But by replacing the old system that supported the people who are now called Creators, the platforms of this new economy put pressure on these people to do the work of newspapers, radio stations, art galleries, magazines, et cetera. And it pushed them to do it all themselves. This work includes marketing, finding subscribers, analyzing data, cultivating conversations in the comments, and putting out enough Content to keep subscribers happy. 

These are not jobs that everyone has time for. They’re not jobs everyone is good at. I’d argue that almost no one is good at one of those jobs—data analyst for Content.

It’s not that people don’t know how to read measurements, it’s just that the measurements we have aren’t doing what we think they’re doing. Audience measurement has always been imprecise. Broadcast ratings were determined by statistical sampling (sometimes the samples were gathered by volunteers keeping diaries of the radio stations they remembered listening to). Nobody knew what happened to a newspaper or magazine once it was delivered. It’s technically possible (though unlikely) that a columnist could write a weekly dispatch for their local paper for fifty years and never have a single person read it, beyond an editor. Digital metrics still involve a lot of guesswork. If you’re still reading now, you are statistically the same to me as someone who quit after that first paragraph. Hatereads and devoted followers register as the same. Bots and humans are the same. It’s technically possible (though unlikely) that a post could get hundreds of thousands of clicks without anyone reading a single word of it.

As soon as the numbers start going up, a new mindset takes hold. It says that anyone who sees a little of something must want a lot of that same thing. Look at a news website. Scroll down to the bottom of an article. Chances are you’ll see links to three more articles that are about the same topic. 

This mindset isn’t limited to big publishers. I’ve noticed that a lot of the newsletters I subscribe to have become increasingly narrow in focus and voice. Looking at my list of ideas for upcoming newsletters, I see it happening here. A post is popular, so I want to make more like it. This is especially true if I get new paid subscribers for a post.

This applies to the subject of a post and to the quantity of posts. If one newsletter on a certain topic gets a lot of readers, maybe a dozen newsletters on related topics will get even more readers. The data analyst in my head is now talking directly to the business manager in my head. And they’re bossing around the Content Creator.

The problem is, all of these are the same person. And only one person. There’s simply not enough capacity to keep up the quantity and quality needed to survive. I have a long list of newsletter ideas. I could send out three a week. But I wouldn’t be able to make them as thoughtful as I wanted to. I wouldn’t be able to trim them down and edit them to an appropriate length. They would ramble in an unfocused haze, hovering around whatever was most popular a few months ago. The newsletter would turn into the written equivalent of one of those Instagram accounts where a person does variations on the same joke over and over until you skip too many times and they vanish from your feed entirely. 

The well isn’t deep enough. When I worked as a blogger, keeping up a cadence was easy not just because the posts were short, but because they were built around reporting. I went into the field and worked the phones and had new facts to present and to analyze.

There are a lot of newsletters and podcasts and YouTube channels about current events, but not many of them are journalistic. They don’t involve reporting beyond reading the news and coming up with something to say about it. They’re akin to the worst kind of newspaper column, something editors offered as a reward for a long-serving journalist that meant the paper would “lose a good reporter and gain a bad writer,” in the words of Tom Wolfe. The archetypal columnist, Wolfe wrote, “seemed to do nothing more than ingest the Times every morning, turn it over in his ponderous cud for a few days, and then methodically egest it in the form of a drop of mush on the foreheads of several hundred thousand readers of other newspapers in the days thereafter.”

Wolfe praised Jimmy Breslin, the journalist credited with reviving the column, in large part because Breslin left his desk. One of the themes of a recent documentary on Breslin and fellow columnist Peter Hammil is that the two were unique because they were constantly out and about gathering material.  “They were everywhere,” as one of the talking heads in the movie puts it.

You can learn a lot more today by sitting at your desk than you could in the pre-internet years, but how often do you see this connectivity put to use to gather facts, and how often do you see it put to use to find something to give an opinion about?  

“Holding too many very strong opinions about matters of minor consequence might elsewhere be the virtue of hucksters and demagogues,” Renata Adler wrote. This was in her essay on Pauline Kael, who, Adler argued, had ceased to have anything of value to say, but who kept cranking out the columns, dedicated to deadlines.

The Creator economy encourages hack work. It’s not that everyone is sitting at their desk and cynically thinking they can get by shipping slop to the audience (though I’m certain some people—maybe a lot of people—are doing this). The demands of the platforms can too easily inspire a single-mindedness that limits the Creator’s view of the world, of the audience, and of the audience’s needs. The platforms redefine success on their own terms. Those terms are not usually interested in art, knowledge, and the public good. They’re about profit.

At least with a newspaper or magazine, there were other things to read in the publication you paid for. Some of it was actual news—reported by a person whose job was to find facts.

As a freelance journalist, I work in an old-fashioned way. I come up with ideas for things to report on and I pitch those ideas to publications who pay me to go gather some information. It’s precarious work that’s getting ever-more precarious. But it’s far more rewarding. I get to work with editors who push back on ideas, tell me I’m too long-winded, and otherwise ensure that I’m making something people want to read. Often, the work is fact-checked.

I’ve never been under the illusion this newsletter would bring me riches. I’ve long hoped that any revenue that comes in here would be enough to pay a part-time staff—editors, other writers, designers. I could say this is because I love you, dear reader, so much that I want you to only have finely tuned work. Really, it’s more for me. I don’t want to be embarrassed by publishing too much unpolished work. I also know a lot of good editors who need work. There’s no Creator economy for them. 

Still, I sometimes think about getting more paid subscribers and making this more of a job than a hobby. But honestly, there’s already a lot to give to. If you’re in the U.S., your local public media station or independent nonprofit newsroom needs the cash. And I’d rather have a staff gig than run my own enterprise. I’m not good at being a business person, or a business.  

As a consumer, I’m not withdrawing from the Creator economy. I’m going to keep giving to writers and shows and publications I like. I don’t expect any of them to offer me more. I don’t know that I’d take more. I just went through my Patreon and other subscriptions and realized a lot of my rewards are sitting unclaimed. Videos are unwatched. Podcasts are unheard. Content is unconsumed.

If the slow collapse of the media industry continues, I may need to change my mind on a lot of this. But I also have the silly little hope that a different approach might help stop the worst from coming. 

So tell me. How many newsletters and podcasts do you subscribe to? Do you read them all? Is my every-two-week cadence here too slow? (I’m not sure I’ll do anything about that last question, but I am curious.)

This is the start of an occasional series I’m going to do about craft. I’ll have another installment in a few weeks, after I send a few other newsletters. As with any series I do, you don’t have to read each part. I know that simply subscribing to a newsletter is all the commitment some people can handle. 

I never leave home without two pencils. Why pencils? Because they don’t spill ink if they break, go dry from disuse, run in the heat, or freeze in the cold. Why two? One might break or get dull. Why do this at all? Because I learned it in school.

I don’t know where I learned it. Was it in William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, which was assigned in my introduction to journalism class?1 Was it from the professor of that class, a gruff newspaperman whose mustache was striped with a permanent nicotine stain? Was it from my beloved advisor whose lessons and advice went beyond journalism and into all parts of life? (She taught me how to pick out gifts for people, how to navigate bureaucracy, and how to effectively cut a VOSOT^⁠2 on a tight deadline.) 

These teachers, even the ones like Zinsser who I only knew through prose, took my enthusiasm for writing and gave it form. I came to them with jars of Play-Doh and they showed me the press that squeezes it into different shapes. They taught me how to turn the unruly globs of ideas and information into something another person can recognize and understand. 

This is craft.

I am not an artist. “The least talented talk about Art,” Janet Malcolm wrote of the motivations of journalists.^⁠3 I’m a crafstman. And I love craft. I love thinking about craft. Practicing it. Reading about it. Fine-tuning it. Unlearning it. Relearning it. 

There is no amount of study that makes craft easier. Studying and practicing make the end result better, but they don’t make the work less taxing. There is no best with craft. There is only better. There’s no perfect form.

With journalism, a work is done when it runs. Its quality can be judged in any number of ways—clicks, compliments, complaints, et cetera. What’s consistent is that the work could always be a little better, at least to the person who wrote it. It’s finished, but the craft can be honed. 

I use the word expansively. Craft, for me, covers all the ways of doing the work.

On one side are best practices—the inverted pyramid, five Ws, and ways not to get yourself sued. These rest on immutable facts like the meaning of words, the rules of grammar, and local laws.

On the other side, nestled around the nearly invisible line that separates standards from superstition are the habits of the trade. These are the personal tics that have calcified into codes. They sound sage to outsiders and newcomers, they inspire aspirants and imitators. These are ideas like “Carry two pencils” and “put 30 at the end of your story when you file.” These are passed down by bosses, cool colleagues, professors, and other idols. 

I once saw a reporter in a documentary using a tall, thin reporter’s notebook with the wires pointed down. I realized he was flipping it over with each page. The advantage is that the notebook could later be laid flat on a desk with two pages visible to a writer typing up their notes. The next day, I started flipping my notebooks like this. Seeing former interns do this gives me the same sort of pride I feel when I see them make big career moves or win awards.

 The best legacy of craft is to see it deployed by a new talent—for it to be adapted and spread without your name attached. Craft is not about fame. It’s about making the work better.

Craft shouldn’t be confused with imitation. Over and over in newsrooms, after seeing someone lose their temper at a colleague, trot out an outdated phrase, or otherwise hurt or humiliate, I’ve thought, “I bet an editor of his4 did it that way.” 

Craft isn’t as rigid as it can seem. Craft gives rules to break. It gives limits to test under an editor’s conservative eye. 

One day, the editor won’t be there. The teachers aren’t around. You’re the editor. You’re the supervisor, the role model, the instructor. The title won’t fit. It won’t hang comfortably on your ego. You will feel alone. This is where you need craft. It’s where you assemble the best pieces of inspiration into your own way of doing things. Craft is the cornerstone you build on and around. And you build something better. You will make mistakes, but they will be your own mistakes, not mistakes of the past you carry forward to a new generation. You’ll get better, make the work better, make the craft itself better.

The best craft advice I’ve ever learned is simple. Avoid cliches. Don’t write them. Don’t become one. 

I first noticed the stone on a Monday. I jog on a route along the edge of the woods. I’ve been advised to run in the woods, but I can’t. I tried it once, during a visit years ago. I felt lost. Not physically lost, but spiritually. Or maybe chronologically. My synthetic mesh shorts and space-age rubberized shoe soles seemed like a futuristic intrusion among the trees and moss. It’s not that the woods seem old, though they are. They seem timeless. The plasticized present has no place here. Neither does the commodified, gamified self of running apps. The little voice in my headphones telling me how fast I was going pushed me to go even faster, while the nature around me beckoned to slow down. When we moved here, I chose a path to run that abuts the woods but never goes in. I also turned off the little voice. It never actually made me go faster. 

For a portion of the run, farmers’ fields stand between me and the woods. Every day, I monitor the progress of the crops. The winter wheat grows green then almost blue before drying to amber. The canola grows tall and green then explodes into sun-bright flowers. The sugar beets grow leafy stalks before the tractors rip them up and set them in giant piles, fifteen feet high, waiting to be hauled away and refined to crystals. 

After each rotation, the birds feast on the bugs and worms turned up in the till. Storks, crows, and the occasional heron stalk the fields and peck all morning. Someone looking down from the right distance could see striations of time, man, and nature. To my right is the road with cars and buses. To my left is the freshly-turned field where the birds, people, and plants work to their own goals. Past the fields is the canopy of the trees that no one could see through from above. 

It was while I was watching the birds clean up after a sugar beet harvest that I saw the stone. It was about the size of a sugar beet1, just a shade darker, and it sat at the edge of the field, a few feet from a pile of beets and just inches from my footfall. 

Years ago, in a class on landscape architecture, the professor said Maine was once the leading producer of potatoes in the United States. The horse-pulled digging machines that came along in the late 1800s made the job faster, but raised a new problem. The Maine soil was full of rocks, which the machines dug up just as indiscriminately as they dug up everything else. The time the machines saved in digging went toward sorting potatoes from rocks. The professor then showed a slide with an old photo of a Maine farming family at work. To one side was a large pile of potatoes. To the other was a pile of potato-shaped rocks. In the middle was a pile of potatoes and rocks, waiting to be sorted by the smallest child in the family, who looked directly at the camera, nearly crying. 

I thought about this photo when I ran past the stone. Was the soil here less rocky? Surely someone had invented a way to sort tubers from rocks in the last century. I thought about the farm equipment I grew up around—harvesters that could pick up dozens of corn stalks at a time, pick the ears, and strip off the kernels in seconds. One day, the fields around town were tall with drying stalks. Then a cloud of dust kicked up. When it settled, the horizon went on again for miles, low and flat, strewn with naked cobs. 

The stone had slashes in it, like it had been cut by the blade of the tractor. They were dark red. I assumed this might be rust, a sign of iron in the stone exposed by a thresher blade. I don’t know if this is how rocks or rust really work, but it seems like a nice story.

Over the next two weeks, the stone became a kind of landmark. I knew I was just over halfway done with my run—just a mile and a half left until I’m home. I locked onto it as I approached and stared at it as I passed. Later in the morning, I would take a break from work and look up details on the geology of Switzerland, reading about the Jura Fold and how, even though we’re not near the Alps, their formation shaped the strata beneath us. Anything that big has ripple effects.

Then, one Friday, I decided to pick up the stone. Over the last few days, it had rolled into the path. Cyclists swerved to avoid it. I jumped over it. It was in the way and it needed to go somewhere. I couldn’t put it back into the field. I didn’t want to set it in the median grass, either. Work crews had been out mowing paths where they would dig to place pipes. Clearly the rock could stand up to steel, but I pitied whoever had the misfortune of dragging a weed-eater over a sugar beet-sized hunk of mineral. 

 Not knowing where to drop the rock, I kept on running. I don’t know why. I have no use for a stone, but neither did the farmer or the road crew or the commuters who passed it.

It’s not easy running with a big rock in your hands. It weighs you down. At first I kept it under my right arm like a football, until my hip started to ache. I moved it to the left and my knee flared up. I carried it in front, but this wore out my arms. I briefly ran a short distance holding it over my head, but I stopped because I probably looked like a maniac. Eventually, I settled on holding it like a football but alternating arms whenever I felt the weight in my step. 

I passed about a half-dozen people on the way home. I gave them the traditional greeting of Grüezi and they said it back, nodding. A couple glanced at the stone. Nobody asked about it, for obvious reasons. We don’t usually make conversation with a greeting, I was jogging in the opposite direction, and, really, what would you even ask someone? What’s with the rock? I was glad, because I don’t have enough German to explain. I don’t have enough English, either.

I set the stone next to a pile of other stones outside our apartment. I looked at it every so often. It’s easy to identify from the scratches. After a few big rains and shortly after I turned forty, I carried it upstairs and put it in my office. I needed something to look at that was older than me. 

It’s not really doing anything here, just sitting in a corner needing the occasional dusting or sometimes being employed as a doorstop. When I look at it, I think about the potato farmers in Maine, about wearing high-tech fiber shorts in the woods, and the way my body ached carrying a rock from a field to a spot just underneath a wi-fi connected laser printer. Those red lines almost glow sometimes. A reminder that no matter how sharp a new technology gets, there’s always going to be a rock in the dirt. 

I spent part of yesterday watching videos from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The live keynotes have been replaced by pre-produced videos that are painful to watch. They’re stilted and awkward and have the same kind of lighting as the product videos, which is eerie and fake-seeming.

So, in honor of that, I’m sending out this piece on design and video from last spring. There’s one dated political reference—see if you can spot it!

1. Life Before Portrait Mode

A few years after college, I noticed a trend in the photos my friends posted to social media. Every snapshot, vacation, and artisan cocktail was captured crisply in the foreground, with the focus falling off at the edges into a blurred background. When I saw my friends in person, I learned this was the result of their purchase of digital SLR cameras with lenses that had manual focus.

Seemingly overnight, the shallow depth-of-field look overtook the fake film filters of Hipstamatic and early Instagram as the signature aesthetic of our generation and class. We were young professionals finding our footing in life and we had just enough disposable income to buy a nice camera to document whatever might come next. Families have invested in cameras since the Kodak Brownie, but in the smartphone age, having a separate camera said something more. New homes, exotic trips, first children—these are moments that deserve real documentation, not a one-off tap from the same device we use to play Flappy Bird. Just like the events they captured, the shallow-depth-of-field SLR pictures signified a certain level of success and an elevated sense of taste to go along with it.

The effect looked good sometimes, but it was overused and often misapplied. No amount of driving the idea into the ground could keep it buried. Smartphone cameras improved. Portrait mode became standard. And soon, wonky terms like “bokeh” were common enough to be jokes in iPhone commercials.

2.  Ecru’s Clues

The point of the Apple ad is to show off a feature on a device with a roughly six-inch screen. To do this, the ad needs a gigantic house. The three adults sit in a well-appointed sunroom, surrounded by nice plants, wearing shoes on a tan carpet that’s placed over stone. The children play next to a large tree outside. The wide shots are shot from another room, also well-furnished. There are two walls of glass between the camera and nature, one wall between the closest people. Everything is a pale tan or light green. This is the home of people who make a lot of money, and the size of the tree outside says this isn’t some new-build McMansion; it’s established.

The people who populate this kind of space don’t need to buy a high-end camera because their phone is now a high-end camera, one they replace every year. Their attachment isn’t to a device they’ve learned to use, but to a system that quickly and easily produces images that fit with the aesthetics of their class and generation.

3. The Golden Hour at Fifteen Seconds to Midnight

What time of day is it in the “bokeh” ad? What time of year?

When the first promo videos for the Apple Vision Pro dropped, they seemed off, like they weren’t shot in the real world. Photo director Emily Keegin posted about the look of the videos on Instagram. “Apple chose a lighting direction & palette that is everywhereeeeeee at the moment. But especially prominent in interior-photography,” Keegin posted.

The elements of this aesthetic are (from Keegin’s post):

• An extremely muted sunlight

• The sun is out but has no real direction

• Everything is mud. No sharp edges or bright lights

• There’s a haze

Keegin calls this “Wildfire Logic.” It’s the look a room inside when the sky outside is full of smoke and haze. “The old ways of the sun are done. We have a new sun now,” Keegin writes. In real life, this kind of light is unsettling. When wildfire smoke covered D.C. for a few days last year, to even look out the window was to confront impending doom, to be reminded of the consequences of our wasteful lifestyles. Fortunately, we now have a device we can look through instead. A new Vision Pro ad even features someone looking at a virtual presentation of a hazy skyline. In here, it’s always paradise. Version 2.0 will be even better

4. “Life Stuff”

Apple has set a lot of their recent commercials in what look like idealized upper-class Californian homes. These aren’t places where tech bros live in creepy minimalism. They aren’t real family homes, either, with clutter, furniture that’s a little too thin, and space that’s a little too tight. These homes have some of the old hippie vibe to them, but nothing dangerous or truly countercultural. There’s probably a half pack of marijuana edibles hidden behind a Whole Foods seaweed salad in the fridge. The houses look like they could be near a beach. They’re homes at the end of the world.

These ads aren’t memorable and even the inclusion of Apple products in every shot isn’t enough to make them stand out as ads for Apple. The company’s most memorable campaign (the “Get a Mac” ads) were famously shot in an infinity white room with no distinguishing features. Often, they didn’t even show the product.

When they did show the products, Apple ads didn’t show what those products actually did. The screens are off in this famous iMac ad:

There’s nothing in these ads that tells the viewer what they should do with the technology. In the “Get a Mac” ad above, Justin Long says Macs are better at “life stuff like music, pictures, movies.” There’s no suggestion of what a home movie or photo album should look like. The aesthetic idea, as much as there is one, is that a Mac user has slightly hipper clothes and would be into a computer that isn’t beige. Beyond that, the decisions are yours. You decide what your life looks like.

5. Aspirational Beige

The homes in these ads remind me of Paul Ford’s great essay The American Room. Ford noticed that so many videos online were set against the same tan backdrop. “The walls are decorated, although we can’t see the art. The same color on the walls, the same white doors,” Ford writes. “It’s a standardized room. Like Diet Coke or iPhones, American rooms are a kind of product, built as quickly and cheaply as possible to a standardized specification.”

The American room is the room where we use these devices.

I noticed these rooms a lot a few years ago when water bottle flipping went viral. On Vine and YouTube, people in beige rooms tossed half-full plastic water bottles in ways that always resulted in the bottle landing on either its bottom or its cap.

More than the rooms, I noticed the sound. It was the sound of thin plastic echoing in mostly empty spaces. I noticed the bottles, too. Why did everyone have so much bottled water? Were water crises that much more common than reported?

These rooms aren’t as common online now. Instead, posters use the automatic (and buggy) background removal tool to hide the beige walls. That, or the videos are set entirely in virtual spaces like Minecraft.

6. Of Course I’m Quoting Susan Sontag Here

Photography, generally, captures an image of the world through technology—a chemical reaction or a sensor. Yes, a person frames the shot, adjusts the camera, and takes the picture, but the role of a person in making a photo is very different from the role of a person in making a painting. In On Photography, Susan Sontag argued that by using “mechanical techniques which anyone can learn,” photography blurs "the distinction between authentic and fake, between original and copy, between good taste and bad taste.”

The quality of how something is made matters less than the fact that it is made at all, as long as it’s made to be consumed.

“All art aspires to the condition of photography,” Sontag wrote.

7. The Most Famous Room in America

The most famous room in America right now (or, as of early 2024 when I first wrote this piece) is probably a kitchen in Alabama.

Senator Katie Britt’s response to the State of the Union Address has been widely criticized for a variety of reasons. And some scrutiny has landed on the backdrop—a kitchen that seems over-planned yet under-thought. Does anyone actually cook and eat in this room? Does anyone enjoy being in this room? Does anyone have a room that looks like this?

Maybe they do, but they certainly don’t have one with light like that.

8. Uncanny Plateau

OpenAI has a new machine called Sora that makes videos out of text prompts. The company has been showing off the results.

These videos look strange. It’s not just the errors—the appendages appearing out of nowhere, the impossible construction of buildings, the way they’re oddly lumpy in some places but freakishly smooth in others—it’s the way they’re just one step too many removed from reality. They look like an imitation of an imitation. As if someone thought Wildfire Logic were how the world really looked, then sought to replicate it, but couldn’t get it right. In motion, the slightly less-than-real gravity adds to the effect. It’s as if the machine is describing something real that it has never actually seen.

The videos aren’t passable as real, but they are plausible as Internet Content. Sora is a machine that puts out images that fit the expectations of the viewer.

In spirit, the Sora videos remind me of the bizarre visual effects in modern movies and TV shows. Productions are rushed to the audience (and visual effects artists are mistreated in the process) with effects that look half-finished.

The vibe is less “look what we can do” and more “you get the idea.” It’s lazy on the part of studios putting this out. They assume we want quantity over quality. Often, the assumption is right. It doesn’t matter if something is good or if it connects to our real life, it just matters that it exists. We don’t expect quality, we just expect something. It doesn’t matter if it lasts. It doesn’t ask that we remember it; we’ll get more of the same next year.

The plan works as long as we accept that it’s close enough.

The big message at the end of this essay is that the newsletter will be back to its every-two-weeks schedule with an audio edition, starting in July. Now that I’v…

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Think of the last time you went out. Were most people you passed wearing headphones, earbuds, or something similar?

This might seem like an unsurprising realization. The price and availability of smartphones has dropped steadily. The same is true for headphones. For years, the two were even packaged together. But as obvious as the fact is, the speed at which this has happened is remarkable1⁠. It's happened so fast, I wonder if we've started to absorb what it means for so many people to suddenly change the way they use one of their senses.

For the first half of the 20th century, headphones were a technical tool. They were for switchboard operators and anyone monitoring ship-to-shore signals. Some hi-fi obsessives might have had a pair at home, but anyone out and about with headphones on probably also had a metal detector. The first portable transistor radios changed this. They came along in 1954. A search through newspaper, book, and magazine archives shows that mentions of the term "earphones" exploded in the late '50s. In the newspaper archives, a lot of these mentions are in advertisements⁠2.

This changed again in the 1980s. The path of mobile sound changed, too…Because of the Walkman.

The Walkman popularized the term "headphones." There's a spike in the use of the term in print beginning in 1980. And what it meant to wear headphones changed, too. Wearing them didn't make you look like a United Nations interpreter or submarine radar technician. In the U.S., headphones became a symbol of youth, particularly slacker youth. In Back to the Future, Marty McFly keeps them on his neck like jewelry.

This cultural shorthand was so ubiquitous, it's now a signifier of the decade. The backstory of one character in Guardians of the Galaxy is represented by a Walkman with headphones.

Headphones became a status symbol. They said you had a strong enough love of music to own a Walkman, and enough money to buy one. As the number of portable audio players grew, so did the potential for headphones as signifiers or advertisements.

In the early 2000s, white earbuds were the mark of an iPod. And having an iPod in those years said a lot about you⁠. It was a marker of a mainstream idea of cool. Apple used it as the basis of their ads for four years. TV commercials and billboards showed people dancing with their iPods. The dancers were framed as silhouettes against a bright background, making the white earbud cable the center of attention⁠. The images were so iconic, Apple has brought the campaign back, this time focusing on wireless AirPods3.

The revolution of wireless earbuds, beyond the convenience, is the need to almost never remove them—in part because we’re wearing them all the time, and in part because there’s no headband or cable that allows us to easily remove and wear them. The other day, while we did separate chores, Linda and I each listened to our own devices. When we stopped to talk, we didn't remove our earbuds. We just paused whatever we were listening to. If you set up a digital avatar on an Apple device, you can give the caricature of yourself a pair of AirPods, just like you would give it earrings or a jaunty cap⁠4.

All headphone wearers have one thing in common—they have a secret. The secret is what is (or isn’t) coming through the headphones. This idea is laid out in The Walkman Effect, a fascinating paper by Shuhei Hosokawa published in 1984. “The walkman holder…neither refuses communication nor is isolated from reality, but continues enunciating the existence of his secret in this simple way,” Hosokawa writes.

The Walkman didn’t create this world of private listening, it just expanded it. Before the Walkman, the car was a private space where you could listen to whatever you wanted, provided it was on the radio or a cassette⁠5. The Walkman and its attached headphones made this possible anywhere, no car or road required. The Walkman Effect is the sense of control headphone wearers have over their environment. The sounds of the city are random. They can become musical in their way. But to have music at one's command is to control the soundtrack of life, rather than let strangers or nature control it.

This was the final step in creating what Hosokawa calls “the mobility of the self.” What we choose to listen to is part of who we are. And headphones let us take that part of ourselves wherever we go. Our soundtracks our selves.

The Walkman Effect begins with a dismissal of the expected hand-wringing associated with headphones. The author describes an average person who is asked whether Walkman users "are human or not; whether they are losing contact with reality." The respondent laughs off these questions as old-fashioned, then looks forward to the day when "you will have every kind of film on video at home, every kind of classical music on only one tape." This is the new era of autonomy.

We have this now, and then some. Our listening options are no longer limited to the radio shows that are on at the time, the tapes we have, or the MP3s we can move to our iPods through a Firewire cable. We can listen to anything—a politics podcast, a favorite song, a new release (or the audio edition of this newsletter). But our choices of what to listen to seem less important now than our choice of what to do while we listen.

The mobile self is always moving. That is, it’s always doing something else. Hosokawa points out that listening on the go is really listening and walking or listening and driving. We were always free to do other things while playing records or the radio at home. And this is great. Music makes so many things better. Being able to listen in more places, during more tasks, is wonderful. But there are downsides. Hosokawa writes that being mobile "enables our musical listening to be more occasional, more incidental, more contingent.”

Open your streaming app and you’ll find music is now largely organized by incidents and contingencies. There are playlists for relaxing, studying, cooking, working out. These are put together by professionals or assembled by algorithms. We choose what to listen to based on the activity we do while listening, and we leave the specifics of that listening up to a curator or a computer. We’ve attained the autonomy the Walkman promised, and we readily give it up.

There’s a fine line between soundtrack and background music. It’s so fine, it’s hard to know when we’ve crossed it.

After work a few weeks ago, I decided to take a walk and grab a beer. Approaching a restaurant, I switched my sunglasses for my regular glasses, put my earbuds in their case (as comfortable as I am having conversations in headphones on the street or at home, I still try to keep them off for transactions like this), and put on my facemask. Walking out to sit on the patio, I set down my drink and changed my face again. I swapped my glasses, removed my mask, and popped my earbuds back in. I hit play on my music. I felt like myself.

I’m back from a vacation, working on a new essay for the newsletter, and I have a question:

Do I exist?

From my early twenties until my mid-thirties, I rarely felt like a stranger. I’d meet someone I hadn’t seen in a while, and they’d know what I’d been up to—books I read, places I visited, changes at work, that sort of thing. I usually knew the same abou…

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