Ledes, Nutgraphs, Arguments & Process.

"We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house. I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe."

This post isn’t about process.  Last night I held a quick conversation about instant punditry culture, its profitablity, its shallow depth and its inevitable ennuied end.

And it happens so quickly.  And checks are hard to come by.

This George Eliot quote and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ commentary stemming from it articulate the tension better than I did.

Coates adds this (excerpt):

That last section really gets at something I’ve observed in relation to the relatively meager prominence I’ve enjoyed over the past couple of years.

You would be shocked how often I am offered the opportunity to hold forth on subjects of which I have only the scantest knowledge—sometimes with a check at the end. There’s a certain kind of intellectual hustle that really extends from the Ivy Leagues schools on down founded on “thin and eager” chat. 

It isn’t just the matter of cable talk-shows. It’s something about the market, and thus something about us. Perhaps it’s our earnest desire to actual know more, a laudable curiosity oppressed by the very forces Eliot cites. Our summer afternoons are not so spacious and we too are short on that specimen of winter evening. From that angle the writer/historian/intellectual/philosopher who speaks in the language of branding is really just feeling a need. I don’t know. 

(Source: The Atlantic)