The Honest Broker Podcast

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.
Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Lowry Pressly.
Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).
Lowry Pressly is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and a JD from Yale Law School. He is the author of The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life, which was named by The New Yorker as one of the best new books of 2024.
I invited Lowry to join me in Austin, and we sat down to have a conversation about data, surveillance, and the role of privacy in a flourishing human life.
Below are highlights from our conversation. For the full dialogue, check out the video at the top of the page.
A CONVERSATION WITH LOWRY PRESSLY
Jared: When most people think about privacy, it’s purely in terms of apps and websites and tech companies. We even have this nomenclature of privacy settings—how private a person you are is almost measurable by how many of those features you turn on. Is that too narrow an understanding?
Lowry: Without a doubt. The idea of privacy as something important to human beings as such doesn’t emerge in the public consciousness until the middle of the nineteenth century, as a reaction primarily to the photograph camera and the first mass media. The danger today is thinking of privacy through the lens of privacy settings. One, it gives us the wrong idea of what privacy is—deciding the audiences for your information is better described as confidentiality or secrecy. Two, and this is the dangerous one: the camera and the newspaper weren’t part of an economic system whose profit motive was tied to the diminution of privacy.
When we use the technologies of the data economy to think about privacy, we take for granted that what Mark Zuckerberg calls privacy settings track the reality of what privacy is—and not the reality of his business model.
“Not long ago, within my lifetime, it would have been an unbelievable dystopia to portray a world in which video surveillance is more or less everywhere and each person voluntarily carries an individual tracking device.”
Jared: So let’s go back to the camera. Did we invent privacy as a right in response to it, or did it just make salient something we’d ignored?
Lowry: A bit of yes and a bit of no. The word goes back to the 1500s—the privy council, private correspondence. But it isn’t used to describe an interest human beings have just by virtue of being human until the mid-nineteenth century. The big moral panic has to do with cameras: 1888 was George Eastman’s Kodak, which made candid shots possible for the first time. And note the language of candid—it normally means freely expressing oneself, and now we naturally use it for photographs.
One of the first legal cases to try to vindicate a right to privacy was a woman whose picture was taken on stage by a paying member of the audience. The judge said this was a moral violation of privacy—sadly, we have no law to cover it. That’s later taken up in the famous 1890 Warren and Brandeis article. What worried people weren’t illicit exposures but candid ones—taking a moment out of the flux and flow of life as it’s lived and fixing it in a permanent form. There’s a continuum—being looked at, the person taking notes about you, the photograph. The question is, what moves us along it?
Jared: Here’s a case I don’t have strong feelings about. Imagine I’m eating lunch in a park and discover someone at the next bench has been making a charcoal drawing of me. I don’t have as strong an aversion to that. The person sketching is providing an interpretation of your presence rather than just grabbing the moment. Whereas the more factual it becomes—12:01, took a bite; 12:02, picked his nose—the worse it feels.
Lowry: The charcoal drawing says at least as much about the artist as about you. The list isn’t interpretive. And that goes to what really bothered people about the camera. It creates an image that seems to bypass human interpretation—people called it the mirror of nature, nature’s pencil. It makes a claim to objectivity. And there was a belief, which we still have, that a person’s image—particularly the face—expresses what this person is really like. What the camera seemed to do was to speak from your heart for you. The thing that’s harmed, in the Warren and Brandeis article, is inviolate personality—and inviolate doesn’t mean inviolable. It means sacred. This is a line past which people shouldn’t cross.
Jared: Now you should pretty much always assume you’re being recorded. And it goes well past images. There are settings in Google where you can find out what Google thinks all of your interests are. The first time I saw that, a lot of it was so wrong—Google thinks I like snowboarding, and I’ve maybe looked it up once in my life. But I had this sense of disturbance.
Lowry: There’s an error in their dossier.
Jared: But why is there a dossier? My interests change. Who I am changes. But this is a perfect record of everything I’ve ever been briefly interested in. I felt like a line in a bookkeeper’s balance sheet. I feel like I’m being compressed—and compression almost inevitably loses resolution. You know all this about me, but you don’t know me.
Some people would say privacy is an outdated right, that we should embrace the post-privacy world. Are you fighting a losing battle?
Lowry: You do hear people say privacy is dead, but it’s almost always someone who stands to profit from the death of privacy—famously, Mark Zuckerberg. This is a hopeful pitch. I teach a class of first-year Stanford students on privacy, and if any students are going to be post-privacy, it’s these. Invariably, they all value privacy. But the world has changed so radically.
Not long ago, within my lifetime, it would have been an unbelievable dystopia to portray a world in which video surveillance is more or less everywhere and each person voluntarily carries an individual tracking device. Within living memory, people pointed to the GDR—or today, China’s surveillance state—as one of the most dehumanizing violations of human dignity imaginable. We’ve gone so quickly from seeing this as anathema to a free society to just the normal way of doing business. But these kids aren’t as credulous as we were. The problem is structural—you can opt out as an individual, but that leads to a feeling of impotence.
Jared: And even if you opt out, other people keep documenting you. I don’t put my kids’ pictures on the internet, and it’s like a part-time job—a relative posts their picture and says, oh, it’s just for my Facebook friends. No, it’s on the internet now. Delete it. A good historical analogy is East Germany: it was the willingness of people to surveil each other that made the surveillance state possible. So opting out always feels a little futile.
Lowry: This comes from Bentham’s Panopticon, later taken up by Foucault and the GDR authorities: the best way to control people is constant surveillance. That’s impossible. The close second best is having people never be able to be certain that they’re not under surveillance. You will discipline yourself to fit your imagined idea of what the authority wants. One way to do that is an authoritarian state with informants. Another is just to have recording devices—not just video, but metadata—integrated into the fabric of social life.
Jared: There are these new Meta glasses with a red light that’s supposed to show when they’re recording. I saw just this week that for sixty dollars a company will disable the red light but keep the recording on. So you could always be recorded and have no way of knowing.
I bought one of those AI friend pendants as an experiment, to write about why they’re bad. I couldn’t last a day with it. I didn’t realize it always listens. I went to the farmer’s market with my son—we go every weekend, he likes to get a popsicle from one of the stands—and I got this message on my phone: “Oh, popsicle time?” I smashed it with a hammer when I got home. I had invited this presence into my life, and it was observing this intimate moment with my son. I felt almost soiled by the experience.
Lowry: We’ve been talking about being objects of surveillance, but we have just as much to lose when we become the surveillers. Overnight, without realizing it, we all became private detectives.
Jared: We even say stalking as if it’s a joke.
Lowry: In five or ten years it’s gone from one of the creepiest things you can do to a completely normal activity. Here’s an example from having little kids: baby monitors. At first we had the old-style audio monitor. If she woke up crying, we’d go in. Fine. Then we got a video monitor, and I started checking it in idle moments, the way we check our phones. My wife’s cousin had the next step up—an anklet that monitors vitals—and that one you check constantly, and when it falls off, you think maybe your baby’s dying.
Each step that gives me more information about the child, the more information I think I need, and the more anxious I am. One thing we get from privacy, from limits to knowing more, is that those limits are part of the way we produce trust.
Jared: My wife and I don’t share our locations with each other, and I’ve met people who are horrified by this—they think we have something to hide. By enabling the possibility of dishonesty, it gives us an opportunity to be honest with each other. If we were always disclosing our location, there’s no dishonesty—but there’s no honesty either, because there’s no chance to voluntarily reveal.
Lowry: And therefore no trust. Trust isn’t a thing we have or don’t have. It’s something we do. As a kid, you have the experience of being trusted by being able to close your door. That seems very important for the development of a self who thinks of herself as worthy of trust—and therefore as worthy of leading her life in her own way.
In the most forthcoming relationship imaginable—cohabitating spouses, co-parents—there are lots of privacies. The bathroom door, what she’s thinking in a pensive moment, what she’s texting. Imagine seeing those things as secret or hidden instead of private. Trust turns to suspicion, and what had been a sustaining thing falls apart.
Jared: My wife and I never sat down and made these rules, but if I saw a letter from someone I didn’t recognize in the mail, I wouldn’t open it. I might ask about it later, and she’d tell me basically everything in it. And yet I would never ask, can I read it? I see that as a way of showing respect for her.
In a long-term relationship the boundaries between the two persons get blurrier—you start doing life together. But you don’t want to obliterate the distinction and act like I have the right to know everything, because that reduces her as a person. I want to be in a long-term marriage with a fully realized human being, and her privacy is part of her full realization of her life.
Lowry: Say the letter turns out to be totally innocuous, and you’d insisted: show it to me. If I were her, I would feel disrespected, but also invaded. Because you didn’t respect the boundary—that there was a part of my life beyond what you can get at.
Jared: The problem isn’t that it was revealed. It’s that it was hers to reveal. To be human is in part to live together and strive for some kind of unity, but we’re also individuals. Privacy sits at one of those core tensions between social reality and individual reality. And I don’t think all tensions have to be resolved. Sometimes living with them is part of what it means to be human.
Lowry: Tension can be good. Tension is what makes narrative exciting, what makes music move us. We shouldn’t want to get rid of all friction in human life, or we’d end up with a dull, flat, inhuman world.
And the people outside the home get something from privacy too. There’s a door here—I don’t know what’s behind it. I’m surrounded by privacies all day, every day. It’s a human realm of the beyond in my life. That’s a public good that privacy radiates: a sense of depth, of possibility, a sense that the human world will always exceed what is known and quantifiable about it.
Jared: You carried a backpack when you got in my car, and I didn’t even think to ask what’s in it. There could be a weapon in there. There could be a present. There could just be your notes.
Lowry: Great example. Our default about limits to our knowledge is not a set feature of human biology—it’s a cultural product. Our default in the backpack case is privacy. It doesn’t call attention to itself. But it’s not hard to imagine a society in which we treat concealment as hiding: your eyes go to my backpack, and suddenly your mind is thinking, what’s in there? That’s a very different way of going through the world.
Jared: It’s a much more paranoid world. It’s a small act of trust, and we get to do these little acts of trust.
Lowry: And these small acts are productive. I have the experience of being trusted—it habituates me to a sense that I’m trustworthy, I belong in this society. Privacy—understood as privacy, not hiding—is a linchpin of that trust.
Jared: Explain the title of your book: The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life. What is this right to oblivion?
Lowry: I wanted a word for the kind of unknowing that privacy produces. Compare secrecy: the thing behind secrecy is secrets, and a secret is a piece of information. It can be shared—I come to know the information you were keeping. That, not coincidentally, is how we think of privacy in the age of privacy settings. By oblivion I mean a kind of unknowing that is fundamentally opposed to the existence of information—a limit that describes what is knowable, not just what’s known. A secret has to be information to exist. Oblivion cannot be.
And privacy isn’t the only thing that produces this kind of unknowing. The two well-known kinds have both been described historically in terms of oblivion: death and forgetting. Something that’s actually forgotten is beyond your power to recall. The oblivion of death is a barrier beyond which knowledge and perception can’t pass. Because there’s a barrier, we know that there’s a beyond—but we can’t say anything about that realm.
The corresponding kind of unknowing is obliviousness. We use it pejoratively, but think of the backpack—you’re oblivious to what’s in there. We don’t want people staring at our drapes, wondering what’s going on inside. We want them to walk by in blithe ignorance. That’s what we want from privacy: for people to be oblivious to our lives.
One last thing. Oblivion comes from the Latin for forgetting—ob, toward or against, and livio, which the philologists aren’t completely sure about, but the general consensus is it means something smooth. Against or toward a smoothness. I like that because oblivion is an absence of knowledge, a kind of void—but a void we can integrate into our daily lives in myriad unnoticeable ways. And by doing so, we add depth and a sense of potentiality to the human person, and to the social, material world that we build.
Jared: I was thinking about my own children as they get older. The phrase I wanted to use was, they’re going to start hiding things from me. But before they hide things because they’re ashamed, there are just going to be times where they start doing things in private. My impulse as a parent is to not let them do that. And I’m now thinking about what it would be like to rob my kids of their privacy. My son’s two and a half, and already he wants to do things for himself—and it’s a very small step from wanting to do things for yourself to wanting to do things in private.
Lowry: I feel the same anxiety. And that anxiety isn’t a steady-state constant of human psychology—ironically, it’s directly correlated with how empowered we are to know more about them. These magical little rectangles are like cursed gifts from a fairy tale. They give us unbelievable powers, and yet they end up limiting us. In the same way that it would be damaging to a child to never have any sense of privacy—infantilizing — it’s infantilizing of adults to be surveilled that way. It’s a moral insult to treat an adult as if they were a child.
Jared: That’s a great place for us to end. But before we go, we always ask for a book recommendation—something nobody’s reading, but you think everybody should.
Lowry: Other than mine, obviously: Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose. This is the most dark-horse book I’ve ever read. The cover is schmaltzy, and it says it’s the story of five Victorian marriages—Carlyle, Mill, Dickens. And her analysis of how these couples led parallel lives, entwined, but living different versions of the same marriage, is one of the most beautifully written, insightful, and profound books on what it means to be a human being with others that I’ve ever read. I think it’s a masterpiece, and it deserves to be much more widely read.
Jared: Well, that sounds great. Lowry Pressly, thanks for joining us.
Lowry: Thank you so much for having me, Jared. It’s been fun.


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Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.
Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Zena Hitz.
Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).
Zena Hitz is a tutor at St. John’s College, a Great Books school. She is also the founder of the Catherine Project, a free program allowing participants from around to world to participate in reading groups of the great books. She is also the author of the wonderful book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.
Zena sat down with me while visiting Austin to discuss the joys of the intellectual life, the state of the modern university, and how she is bringing humanities education to thousand of people through the Catherine Project.
Below are highlights from our conversation. For the entire dialogue, check out the video at the top of the page.
A CONVERSATION WITH ZENA HITZ
JARED: Zena Hitz, thank you for joining me.
ZENA: Thanks so much, Jared. It’s great to be here.
JARED: I wanted to talk to you because I was first exposed to your work through Lost in Thought, and then after I read Lost in Thought, I found out about the Catherine Project, and I’ve now participated in one Catherine Project group.
ZENA: Very good, very good.
JARED: You started this thing, the Catherine Project. Could you start by telling us what it is, and also how you got started?
ZENA: I had a kind of longing back from when I was straight out of grad school and started teaching undergrads intro to philosophy and stuff like that. A lot of the job of teaching philosophy at a public university is teaching people who don’t want to learn. So I developed this preoccupation with: what would it be like if you tried to find the people who only want to learn? Suppose you could just filter for the desire to learn.
My first idea was to have an open ancient Greek study group in Baltimore, which is where I was living at the time. We were going to read the Iliad, and this wonderful librarian helped us out, and a couple people turned up. They were grad students at Hopkins or whatever. So it turned out to be my friends. It was very small, and I realized I didn’t know how to reach people in an ordinary city who would want to do something like this. So there was a contact problem. How do I find these people?
But I was still haunted by the dream, and it sat in the back of my mind for, I don’t know, probably 20 years, 15 years. And then, as I talked about in Lost in Thought, I went through all kinds of transitions and tried to figure out what to do with my life, and finally settled on going back to St. John’s to teach. So I went back in 2015, and then in 2020, of course, we had emergency online COVID classes, which anyone who was teaching at the time knows was absolutely miserable. Just the worst kind of teaching you can imagine. Because it was unexpected, and these people were in their parents’ basement, and I was teaching a class called junior math, which was Newton’s Principia, one of the hardest books I know, and we just couldn’t do it.
JARED: That was a very St. John’s sentence.
ZENA: I have a lot of St. John’s sentences. I’m a Johnny born and bred, so that’s the way it is. But we couldn’t do it, because reading something that difficult requires having an in-person community to talk to people and get help and stuff like that. So we kept trying. We put in a college try, but it was really painful. Anyway, that’s a little bit beside the point.
The point is, I was really upset about being online. I wanted to just send everyone home and give them a chance, maybe, to fix their grade, but we had to do it. And I was very frightened. I thought, once universities figure out that they can have classes online, they’re never going to go back, because it’s so cheap. Administrators are just like that. They just want stuff that’s cheap. They don’t care about educational quality. So I was very angry, and that sometimes can be very productive.
I thought, if I were stuck on this forever, what would be the best way to learn? What would be the best way to teach? I thought, maybe it’s a bit like an Oxford tutorial situation, where people went away and read off screen and then had face-to-face conversations in person — or by Zoom, in this case. Small groups on Zoom are better than medium-sized groups, and medium-sized groups are better than large groups. The larger the group, the worse it is; the smaller it is, the closer it is to real human interaction.
So that was one thing I was doing back there. And then the book came out at the same time. Lost in Thought came out, and Lost in Thought made this argument that the life of the mind is for everybody. And I say this a lot, and it’s true: that was really a sentimental idea I had. Like, maybe if I have a Greek reading group in Baltimore, old Greek guys will show up and want to read Greek with me. I didn’t really know it was true, but I wanted it to be true. And then I started getting all of these emails from people who wanted to lead a life of the mind, who wanted to read the great books, and they would ask me what they should do. And I didn’t have a good answer for that question, and that haunted me.
So somehow these two things percolated, and eventually I thought, well, look, let’s just have open online Zoom classes on great books, and it’ll be totally open. Anyone can go. We’ll make it free. We’ll run on volunteer labor. I’ll tap into my academic network, get some professors, and I’ll get some former students to lead informal reading groups. And so that was the Catherine Project. It began — it was sort of born and bred on Twitter. So it was through Twitter that I got to know people who might be interested in something like that, and this was the golden age of Twitter, when everyone was on it because it was COVID, and the algorithms exposed you to all kinds of people.
So anyway, we started out with about 45 students. We had these things called tutorials—small groups, like three. We started with groups of three students and one professor. We had five of those, and they read—well, we had an early divide between people who wanted to read fast and people who wanted to read slow. So some of them just read the Iliad and the Odyssey, some read the Iliad, the Odyssey, some Greek tragedy, and some Plato. And we had two reading groups meant just for people in those tutorials—one was on Aristophanes and one was on Kafka, The Trial.
So we had these 45 people, and November 2020 comes around, and the Kafka group wanted a few more people because they wanted to read Kierkegaard, Either/Or. And it’s November, I was teaching full time, and I was just like, put something on Twitter: who’s up for reading Either/Or on Saturday nights? Like 100, 120, 130 replies. So I was like, uh oh, I have to do something about this. I can’t reject 125 people—they wanted like three people for their group. So at that point we pulled in a bunch of reading group leaders, and then for a long time the Catherine Project became mainly these peer-led reading groups. Some people had PhDs, some had master’s degrees, some were just really good people who had gone through great books programs as undergraduates, facilitating these open conversations about great books in small groups.
So at the end of spring 2021, I was totally out of steam. I was dead. And I applied to Emergent Ventures, which is Tyler Cowen’s group, for a grant. I had no expectation of getting it, because I’d spoken to Tyler a year earlier when I was just getting started, and he had put me through the ringer — the hardest set of questions anyone had ever asked me about the business plan, and how big was it going to grow, and how are we going to fund it, what was going to be the source of revenue. And I couldn’t answer any of those questions. I just had this romantic idea that if you opened up the doors, people would come. Anyway, Tyler, after a year, gave me the grant based on what we had done, without a budget.
We’re now enrolling 1,600 human beings per semester. One of the things that helped with that last spurt of growth is that we had started with these tutorials, with the reading groups that were supplemental, but we were worried that the list of reading groups was actually really intimidating for anyone who wanted to come into the reading for the first time. This is a huge list of books, many of which I had never heard of. We always wanted to be a way for people without much experience with us to find their way into reading and thinking and having conversations. So we instituted—this is the end of the second year—we’re now teaching the fourth unit of what’s called our core program.
It’s basically just a set of readings that we think are basic, that are a good introduction to the life of the mind, that we think will serve people well in the future. So that’s become a big component of what we do. We still run a trillion reading groups. Anyway, that’s the story of the Catherine Project.
JARED: I loved the experience with the Catherine Project, because the facilitator was a graduate student in Germany, and then we had a few other people in various parts of Europe, a couple of undergrads, and then just a few people who I had no idea what their academic background was, but they were joining from their lunch break, essentially, at their desk job. I loved how open the conversations were. I never felt the sense that anyone there didn’t feel like they could participate. And there was just this idea of taking what everyone said really seriously. I found it to be this really amazing experience.
ZENA: It’s a collaborative conversation. Experts don’t teach our courses. And although in the core program they tend to be people who are experts in something, they’re not necessarily experts in what they’re teaching. But they have more experience.
JARED: Let’s talk about that idea you said was a romantic or sentimental idea—that the life of the mind is for everyone. I’m actually writing a book about this too; we’ll talk about that later, off camera. I firmly believe this. One of the things my experience in the Catherine Project showed me is that people from very different walks of life, people studying very different things—I’m pretty sure some of the undergrads were not even humanities majors—and yet they were able to just sit with this text. The Catherine Project also doesn’t require an educational background to apply, right?
ZENA: The only rule is that you’re 16. And there is an application—a statement of interest, we call it. But we’re really just trying to make sure people know exactly what they’re doing.
JARED: Most people who participate—do you think they have graduate degrees?
ZENA: I think we are still drawing a pretty broad range. Some pretty young people, people in high school or college, people just out of college, retired people. There’s a big chunk of people who are in their 30s and 40s who work in, say, tech, or have worked in tech, or in STEM, engineering. And they’ve realized, having been on a really intense career path, that they’re missing something. So we get a lot of people like that.
JARED: What are those things that you don’t do but wish you could, in some perfect world where the Catherine Project has infinite money and infinite resources?
ZENA: One of the things I’m thinking about now is the collapse of specialized research training in the humanities. Lots and lots of graduate programs at the moment are shuttered. They’re not admitting new students, and it may just be a freeze for a time, but it’s hard to see that it’s not the beginning of a shift. I think it was going on for a while anyway, but then the cuts in the science funding that the Trump administration put in last year shook up the administrators, and one gets the sense that they were funding graduate humanities programs with some of the excess money from the sciences that’s been cut.
Part of what I try to do when I’m thinking about things like this is to think not about what would be good for one person or another, but what’s the whole ecology of humanistic learning. What are all the things that need to be in place for humanistic learning to be part of what we do as a culture or as a community? And it seems to me we do need people who are working at a deep and serious level on the books, or on basic humanistic topics. So I’ve been trying to think about ways in which—and I think it’s very compatible with the Catherine Project, it just needs some kind of residential or brick-and-mortar context—but I wonder whether there’s a real appetite among many of our members, and especially our staff, Jordan and Ashley, to do in-depth work.
It’s incredibly refreshing to read a great book, and to be reading them all the time, when you’ve had to leave grad school, you’ve left academia—or even as a supplement to what you’re doing in your highly specialized academia. But it all seems to be supported by people who’ve sat with books for a long time and have really chewed through them and thought things through and have a sense of what’s knowable and what’s not knowable. So the idea would be to have something like a residential library where people could come and study and have visiting faculty who could mentor people. That’s the dream.
JARED: In a way, the core of the Catherine Project—what you’re doing now—is this foundational work. We’re going to give you this foundation in the great books, and also teach you the joys and pleasures of reading widely, but then if you want to, you narrow. Which is kind of the dream of humanistic education too: we all get this broad foundation, we all feel immersed in this tradition, and then you don’t write a dissertation on why the great books are great—you write a dissertation on some subset of some small problem about Homer’s Odyssey, and you’re going into archival research, or doing work on histories of languages, or reception history, all this stuff you’re not going to get in your life-of-the-mind seminar.
ZENA: There’s a lot of thinking that can be done about the books that is just a matter of reading it carefully, learning the original language, reading around it so you know what it’s responding to and what responded to it, reading the commentaries. That already gets you a lot of really interesting angles on a book that you don’t get when you just read it for class, which means two hours a week.
So yeah, I’d like to foster that. Like the Catherine Project, I’ve always tried to be open about what, if it’s successful, it will contribute. So one thought is, when all the institutions die—in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, when we’re all eating out of trash cans and warming ourselves by fires in the open and there’s broken TV sets everywhere. I don’t know where these images come from; they’re probably from Mad Max. So when all of that is there, there will be a Catherine Project. We’ll still be reading books and talking about them in this post-apocalyptic landscape.
But that’s just preserving something that might die. In a way, it would be better if, instead of that, it provoked some reform on the part of the institutions. One of the things it has shown—and programs like it do show, and this I know is something Jennifer Frey has also been arguing—is that there’s been a kind of myth that people don’t want to study this stuff anymore, and I think it’s really obviously not true. People really, really want to study it, and they choose not to major in it in part because the administrators, and often the faculty, are telling them that it’s a waste of time. And if you’re trying to make your way in the world, and the people who hold the power and the keys to the future are telling you it’s a waste of time, then you better listen to them, because they’re going to be able to help you into the next stage, whatever it is.
So this Catherine grad program, or whatever it is, has a similar structure. Maybe it will take the place of these graduate programs that are likely to close, especially for people who aren’t necessarily going to become academics but who wanted to get to the next level. Or maybe it will become the university of the future.
JARED: One of the things I like to think about a lot—but I’m curious to hear what you think—is just the concept of an autodidact. What is an autodidact for you?
ZENA: An autodidact is obviously someone who teaches themselves, who’s self-taught. I tend to think about it in terms of examples. Probably my favorite example is Malcolm X. Obviously, a highly intelligent person, growing up in a society where it was extremely difficult for a black man to have a job that suited his abilities. And he ends up in prison for theft when he’s pretty young, and at that time they have prison libraries—which I think they don’t anymore, of that kind. So they don’t have prison libraries stuffed with classics; they have prison libraries with a few out-of-date copies of, like, Business 101, or self-help stuff like that. So anyway, he read the entire prison library—vast swathes of the prison library—and just became a different person. I think of that as being an autodidact.
I think you don’t need to be alone to be an autodidact. So another example: there’s this wonderful book I’ve promoted for years called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose. He describes these groups of workers would get together and educate themselves. They’d pick an evening, they’d pick something to read—Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Descartes—they’d study astronomy or math or science or literature, Shakespeare, classics. And they would teach themselves.
JARED: There’s some way that everyone’s actually an autodidact. I call myself one—I have a PhD, but I call myself an autodidact, because after I left my PhD, I realized there were all these gaps in my education, and I was never going to be able to take a seminar on them, so I just read it. I understand I’m stretching the term a little bit here.
ZENA: I think everyone is an autodidact, because you don’t really learn seriously unless you’re teaching yourself. An expert can tell you something, but you still have to decide whether it’s true, even though you don’t actually have the basis, the expertise, to judge it. There’s no learning without the participation of the learner. That’s why calling attention to autodidacticism, or nurturing it as the Catherine Project does, is really important—as a reminder of what actually is core to any kind of education. A human being is not just a passive sponge for content that’s somehow been verified somewhere else. In order for us to learn well and live well, we have to find within ourselves the questions and the desires to learn, and we have to find ways to inquire and think about things. We can help one another, and experts can help us too, but in the end, it’s really what you do. That’s the nature of learning. There is no substitute for the act of thinking.
JARED: I was reading Aristotle’s Politics, which I hadn’t read before. I love the Nicomachean Ethics, and at some point it became shameful that I hadn’t read the Politics. And I tried to distill down the propositions you could definitely attribute to Aristotle from that book, and there aren’t that many.
ZENA: No, it’s a very hard book.
JARED: And then you wonder, why would you read it? Because Aristotle’s actually giving you the opportunity to think through these principles he’s floated for you, and then see how it worked out, and how it played out in history. And then you have to actually decide if any of those propositions or principles are true, if you agree with them. I think Aristotle is a great model for this. He really makes you think for yourself while reading him.
ZENA: Yes. And you wouldn’t get that if you just attended a lecture and then said, this was Aristotle’s political theory, and the professor handed you a list of propositions.
I think it’s true that even if you were totally persuaded of every Aristotelian principle, you would still have to figure out how to see all those cases, and to see what’s going on around you in light of those cases. And that is really not a simple task. That’s a serious kind of training.
And there’s no substitute for it. And why would you expect there to be? Why would you expect there to be an algorithm for how to make elections in the United States work better? That just doesn’t make any sense. You have to look at the way things are, you have to look at the kinds of problems we’ve had in the past, you have to look at the constraints there are on what’s possible. And then you have to try some things out. And maybe there is no right answer for something on that largest scale, and you can only fix the voting procedures in, you know, Texas or something. But we’ve really—I’ve gotten pretty deep into a view of human thinking and agency that’s really dangerously false. And that’s definitely part of what I feel like I’ve been working against.
JARED: And also, when you’re coming to a book like the Politics, Aristotle gives you all these cases from Greek history, and you need to think through them. But you shouldn’t limit yourself to only those cases.
ZENA: Yes.
JARED: We have thousands of years of political history post-Aristotle to draw on as well.
ZENA: Yes.
JARED: And I think if you could talk to Aristotle while reading the book, he would say, ‘Why aren’t you writing about the US in the 1960s as well, when you’re talking about the Politics?’ I was reading it on my Substack—I run a sort of informal book club on my newsletter—and some people are like, why would I care about those examples so much? And it’s like, well, okay, we’ll talk through all those examples if you want, and we probably should, but we have a thousand other examples we could talk about. If we think we can learn something through the act of reading Aristotle, it requires this very active process.
ZENA: Yes. It’s something that was in the air in the culture even relatively recently. There’s a beautiful piece by George Kennan, who is one of the great 20th-century diplomats and a beautiful writer—Kennan’s diaries are fabulous stuff to read. But he has a little essay on education for statesmanship. He was thinking about things like working for the State Department, or being a political person, and he’s like, look, there’s not a technique—you have to learn everything there is to know about history, literature, human nature. That’s what you’re dealing with; you’re working with real life. And so as much as you can learn about how things work, have worked in the past, work in this particular place—that’s all going to be material for you to make judgments. But there’s not going to be any substitute for making that judgment. So, yeah, we used to know this, and we’ve forgotten.
JARED: I had this experience when I left academia. I finished my PhD, and I just felt like I was leaving academia behind, so I kind of felt like they’d rejected me, too. And then I started thinking, what’s the point of philosophy? I had been initiated into this guild structure, where you study with a master, you produce your work, and I had been given the stamp, and then I hadn’t gone and gotten a job, so I was no longer part of it. And so now thinking is for those people, philosophy is for those people. And I now see the trajectory of the last five years of my life as reminding myself, and then wanting to remind other people, that I was completely wrong—that philosophy was just as much mine when I left academia, and in fact it was mine before I got the PhD too, and that it’s true for all of you as well.
ZENA: Yes. And that’s also a case of mistaking university constraints, which are totally contingent, for the real thing. There’s no reason for us to think this way, and there’s no reason to think that there’s only one way of using a degree, or that an institution has to be closed to people who aren’t in this special guild.
JARED: But there were material circumstances that made it harder for me to see that at first. As soon as you lose your university email, you lose access to journals—or it becomes a lot harder to access journals. You’re emailing friends, can you send me these articles, and sometimes they do it, sometimes it takes a few days. It can feel, from the outside, like knowledge is very heavily gatekept. Because things like journals, or books that cost two hundred dollars to buy your own copy, you can get at any university library—you just feel like you’re kept out from that.
ZENA: This has really gotten dramatically worse since all those library materials went online. In a way, of course, the online research library is an incredible resource—you can find stuff much more easily, there’s all kinds of databases and indexes that are much easier to use than the old big paper ones I was trained on, because I’m just old enough to have done that. But they have really locked up all of the specialized research, to the point where I don’t have regular access.
It’s a scandal that science is gatekept like that. You ought to be able to learn about a scientific topic by reading the original papers. They should not be kept behind these incredibly expensive subscription services. It’s only making the whole process less accountable, less transparent, and it undermines people’s trust. And it reinforces this idea that somehow an ordinary person can’t understand this stuff.
But I would like to see different kinds of platforms for the presentation of this kind of research that are open access, or minimal access. I don’t know what would have to happen for that to take place, but I wish people who had the resources and the abilities and the understanding would start doing that. That’s for sure.
JARED: All right. I want to be mindful of your time. So I have a question I always end on, which is, if you have a book recommendation for our listeners.
ZENA: Yes, I was wondering about that. I think what I’d like to recommend is the book—or the books—I was most excited about most recently, which was, last summer I read these Robert Caro books about Lyndon Johnson. These are very popular books, lots of people know they’re good, because there’s so many of them and they’re so long—they’re daunting in some way—but they are incredibly well written. They tell the whole story of 20th-century America through Texas, where we are right now. And it’s a particularly interesting view of Texas, and kinds of characters that we think of as being what makes Texas Texas, and not just Lyndon Johnson, who has his own sordid, very complex mixture of very, very bad qualities and very, very good qualities. And you’re never let off the hook, because the writing is so good. And there it is.
I was talking about this last night to a friend of mine, who I was recommending them to—because that’s basically what I do whenever I see someone, I’m like, you should read Lyndon Johnson. And then every now and then, once every three months, I meet someone who’s actually read them, and we just talk about them for hours. What is it that holds a human being together? What’s the nature of political power, political ambition? How does a person maintain any kind of integrity in that kind of context? How do these very beautifully noble motivations coexist with this really venal self-absorption?
So I think Lyndon Johnson is a fascinating figure, and a lot of the people in there are fascinating, and they’re absolutely masterpieces of books. I think there’s reason to think they are the great books of today. So I recommend them really highly—and yeah, it’s a bit like a continuation of Aristotle’s Politics. You’re reading through the casework, the cases, all of the things that happened in the 20th century in the Senate and the presidency, trying to think about what worked and what didn’t.
JARED: Awesome. Zena Hitz, thanks for joining us.
ZENA: Thanks so much, Jared. It’s a pleasure talking to you.


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Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.
Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Ted Gioia.
Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).
Ted needs no introduction here—The Honest Broker is his newsletter, after all. But I want to tell you a little bit about how Ted and I started this project.
I received a message on Substack last year, and when I saw it was from Ted, I assumed it was fake. But it turns out it was real, and Ted asked me if I wanted to get lunch. After talking for a few hours about books, Substack, and new media, Ted asked if I wanted to launch a podcast on The Honest Broker. His only rule: I needed to find the most interesting people as guests. Well, this meant that eventually I had to interview Ted. We sat down to talk about media consolidation, building alternative institutions, and human creativity.
Below is a transcript of part of our conversation. For the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.I know you’ll enjoy this.
A CONVERSATION WITH TED GIOIA
JARED: Ted Gioia, thank you for joining me.
TED: Well, thank you for having me. This is something we’ve long awaited.
JARED: I want to start off with a big question. I think it’s fair to say that we’re living in a time of it institutional collapse. We had these prestige institutions that we used to rely on: The New York Times, The New Yorker, academia. And people could rely on them to vet new writers, vet ideas, and movements, and they just did a lot of credibility building for us. It took a lot of the work out of our hands. I think we just don’t have that same trust in those institutions anymore, and people don’t rely on them in the same way anymore. And things are increasingly more decentralized.
Now, part of me finds this really exciting because it means for people who operate outside of those systems—I think you and I would be two examples—it means there’s more opportunity. But it also raises the question of whether or not we need to start building new institutions.
TED: Well, there’s been a great promise that the internet would open up everything to us. All of a sudden, if I’m a writer, a musician, a visual artist, a videographer, all of a sudden, I could reach my audience directly with the internet. And we thought this was going to lead to an enormous blossoming of culture where everyone had this freedom and a thousand flowers blossomed.
But that hasn’t happened, really. And in fact, what you see is that the institutions have become more consolidated and stagnant over time. Let me give you a few figures. Right now, most of the movies made come out of four Hollywood studios. They control it. Most of the movie distribution into the home comes from just four streaming platforms. In fact, in many instances, it’s the same company doing the movie-making as the streaming.
That was illegal until very recently. In 1948, the Supreme Court said that a movie studio could not own distribution. And that allowed a lot of freedom. After that, there was a real flourishing of indie movies in the United States and overseas. But now we’ve stagnated to the point where there are just four streaming platforms, four movie studios.
In music, it’s even worse. There are just three companies that control most of the hit songs. If you look at publishing, five companies control 80% of the books out there. It’s just ridiculous.
As these industries become more consolidated, they become more bureaucratic, they move more slowly, they’re more cautious. Yet we’re more dependent on them than ever before.
Now, we’re lucky that we still have an opportunity with a counterculture—and I’ll talk about that later. But I think the first thing you see is that the institutions have killed themselves by this consolidation, swallowing up their competitors, and creating this monolithic culture that’s not good for anybody.
JARED: And I think it creates a winner-takes-all mentality, where before you could have movies that did well, but they kind of fall within the middle of a normal distribution. And then you’d have some outliers that did really well, and then you’d have some that bombed. And I think that as things have become more decentralized, you have many more flops. They never get off the ground, or they can’t even get funding to begin with. And then you have these big winners that take everything and maybe that that group has grown a little bit, and then it’s the middle of the culture that seems like it’s been hurt the most by this.I mean the band that sells well but isn’t going to go platinum. The writer who is a solid mid-lister but may never make the Times list. Someone who could make a living writing for magazines but couldn’t necessarily get 100,000 readers on their own newsletter. And that just seems like a less interesting culture because it doesn’t give that kind of room for experimentation or just that kind of pluralistic flourishing that would allow people to just have interesting ideas.
TED: I lived through much of the transition. I started out life writing books, and I was what they would call a midlist writer. That meant I wasn’t going to sell a million copies. I wasn’t going to be at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, but I would sell enough copies to be profitable. And so my first two books, you know, the expectation was I would sell 5,000 to 10,000 copies, and that would be fine.
My third book really broke out and then it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. But today I wouldn’t even get a chance to get to that third book because from the get-go now they don’t want to publish a book that doesn’t have the potential to do 50,000 to 100,000 right off the bat. This presents a tremendous obstacle to young writers and they don’t have a solution
It’s even worse in movies where the studios don’t want a movie that would be profitable but not have that blockbuster aspect to it—they want a movie that could have a billion dollars in revenue. If you go look at the best movies in the history of Hollywood, very few of them had those blockbuster numbers. But where would we be without the Citizen Kanes of this world and the smart indie films that are being squeezed out?
JARED: There used to be this saying in publishing that the best advertising for your first book was your second book. So it was thought, okay, your first book didn’t sell that well, but you get a second book. Maybe it’ll pick up eventually. If your third or fourth book sells fabulously well, people will say, " What else has this guy written?”
I bet your first book, after it sold a few thousand copies, sold a lot more after your third book sold 100,000 copies.
TED: You’re exactly right. The first book I wrote is called The Imperfect Art. I started writing that the day I got out of the philosophy program at Oxford. Eventually, it was very successful, but at first, no one wanted to touch this.
I had a prominent agent say, "This is not a real jazz book.” You should be a real music writer, not one of these phony music writers. But I did get it published. It sold a few thousand copies. But now, let’s fast-forward to 40 years later. I’ve gotten two translation deals for that book in the last 12 months. And the only reason that happens is that I used that as a stepping stone. It’s one of the reasons I like Manfred Eicher at the ECM label. He has artists on that roster that he’s recorded for 30 or 40 years and have never had a hit record. But he believes in them. This is part of why his audience trusts the label, because they see his personal loyalty to what he believes in. We need more of that. But in fact, we get less of it.
The loyalty factor is gone. It’s very hard now to find a publisher or a record label that will be loyal to you for more than one project.
JARED: And it seems like consumers have changed their mindset in response to this. There were times in high school that if a new band came out from a label that I liked, I bought the CD. And even if I hadn’t heard it, because I’d say, I trust this label. I like what they do. I’ll keep buying it.
And people used to think about publishers like this too. Knopf used to run ads for Knopf, not just for their books. They would say, if you have the borzoi on the book, it’s a book worth buying. But Consumers don’t think about it like that anymore. Maybe they do in some parts of music, but do they do that with any of the big five in publishing?
TED: Well, they do it in the indie world, and we need to talk about that because in the indie world, you do have loyalty to a specific person, a specific name, a specific creative umbrella. But for example, in music, how can you? Is there anybody at Universal Music or Spotify who we might say is a person whose judgment I trust? No—and if you look at the interviews with them, once again, they just talk about financial metrics.
The whole corruption of aesthetic language is the application of financial jargon to artistic creativity. This is why instead of calling a work of art by its real name, we call it content. This is why we call a movie a brand franchise. This is why the head of the big AI music company talks about the productivity of being able to release 100 tracks in a week. These are all words—this jargon, this terminology—that come from the business world. It has no place in the creative world. But it’s become so pervasive that even artists begin to talk about their own work as content.
This is something that is only happening because we have replaced a tradition where you have a person who has values and applies those values. We’ve replaced that with a business/finance optimization mindset across the creative economy.
“You’re going to start having private equity roll-ups on Substack…..People have no idea what’s coming down the pike.”
JARED: But there are the indies. There is a Texas-based publisher that I like a lot called Deep Vellum. They publish a lot of very experimental literary work. They have a sub-imprint called Dalkey Archive that reprints classic works, a lot of modernist stuff that’s fallen out of print. They just reprinted Gass’s The Tunnel. which was out of print for God knows how long. I actually I donate money to them every month, and they send me a book, and I would only do that because I trust their taste.
TED: And it does exist, but you have to seek it out. Where does the counterculture exist now? It’s indie presses like you mentioned. I think the indie culture operates on Substack. The indie culture operates on YouTube—which is curious because YouTube is owned by Alphabet. But still it’s become a platform where indie people can speak their mind. You find this on Bandcamp, where bands come out with their own album and work directly with their fans.
There is a counterculture out there, but it’s struggling now because it is starved of cash. The media often operates on advertising, but two companies control 60% of the ad money online. It’s Alphabet and Meta. So basically, two companies control that. The other way is to get your name out through social media. But two billionaires control social media. It’s the same consolidation on the institutional side that we saw on the creative side. I really think there are about 50 people who control the culture now, which is frightening.
Go back a generation. Tom Wolfe made an amazing claim. He said the art world is controlled by 3,000 people. Now what did he mean by that? Well, he’s talking about painters, sculptors, and he says that these 3,000 people decide who’s hot and who’s not. Now 3,000 people, that didn’t seem like much, but that would be great compared to what we have now.
JARED: And we see this even on places like YouTube, where big channels are getting bought by private equity. And I think, inevitably, they kind of get turned into content farms.
I actually received an email a few days ago asking if I would audition to be the host of a spinoff channel of one of these channels, which had been bought by a private equity firm. I’m not going to do this. These channels became their own content engines, but you have to industrialize the production process. These creators made a formula that worked for them, but I know some of the channels that have been bought, and they’ve become worse because they get standardized There’s no authenticity to it anymore.
I wouldn’t be shocked if eventually you saw people buying newsletters on Substack.
TED: I fully expect that. Two years ago, I said you’re going to start having private equity roll-ups on Substack. That will inevitably come to all these channels, to YouTube channels, Substack—that’s going to really take off. People have no idea what’s coming down the pike.
Now, what does that mean for us? Well, for culture, that’s bad news.
JARED: What’s the response to this? Clearly, there are real problems. Do we just sort of remain fiercely independent and say we can’t be bought, or do we try to build competing institutions?
I think tastemaking is a real role in the culture, without those independent tastemakers, you just are kind of ceding all the ground to corporate control. What’s the positive vision that kind of comes with all the doom and gloom?
TED: Well, if you go back in the late 1950s, there was a debate in England. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. It was called the Two Cultures Debate, and the two protagonists were C.P. Snow, who was a novelist who had become like a civil servant and a quasi-technocrat and F.R. Leavis, the literary critic. And they debated the two cultures—in which one culture was scientific culture and the other one was humanities. Which one was more important? Did you need both?
I would say we need a similar debate now, but the two cultures are different now. There’s the institutional culture, and then there is the alternative culture. Unless you find some way of mobilizing an audience for them, we’re going to be in deep trouble. So, a lot of what I do on Substack is serving as an advocate for the counterculture. I serve as an advocate for the indie creator. I am always promoting others’ work.
I think the way it has to work is we need to create parallel institutions. I think we’re going to need to support these parallel institutions, and there’s going to be a parallel culture.
“We have monopolies and cartels, and what we need to be is trust-busters….We’ve got to create alternative platforms so that creative people can reach their audience.”
So there are some things we still need to do. For example, look at all the awards and prizes given out in culture—all of them go to the institutional people. This is one of the things I said when I first met the people running Substack. I said you’ve got great writers here, you’ve got great creativity, but you need to get the kind of credibility that comes with awards, and you should do awards every year for indie writers and indie music—because we need to have that institutional support for what we do. I saw a figure the other day, it was horrifying. It said that if you look at all the big books that have won prizes in this century, they were represented by just 25 literary agents. That’s what you call a cartel! We have monopolies and cartels, and what we need to be is trust-busters. We’ve got to break up the monopolies. We’ve got to create alternative platforms so that creative people can reach their audience. Because the audience is hungry for this.
JARED: There are two paths that come to mind. They’re very different, but maybe they’re mutually supportive. One is just to give people money. You know, there’s a writer who can’t quit his day job so he can’t finish his novel, but you know he’s great. Give him money. There’s a painter who needs more time to paint. Give her money.
The other option is to start building things like more publishers. I mean, I have a fairly simplistic view of the economy, maybe, but my thought is that competition is good. I’ve talked to you about this before, but I have a pipe dream of starting a publishing company one day, and the idea is to find writers I really care about. That’s harder than giving grants, because it requires logistics and overhead and salaries, but I think you need that too. You need those smaller institutions that can serve as disruptors.
TED: Let me make a prediction. I think you are going to find influencers becoming their own institutions. The last time I saw Rick Beato I said, “Hey Rick, we are very disappointed in what the record labels are doing. That means you’ve got to be the next record label.” It sounds like a strange concept, but it really isn’t, because Rick Beato has millions of followers. Why? Because people trust Rick Beato. They trust him more than they trust Universal Music or Sony.
This is the opportunity. The influencer is who people trust. And then the next stage will be the influencers turn into institutions of their own.
JARED: I would want it to be that when I retired or died, someone else was running it, and it was its own institution that could continue right. Knopf was a great publisher even after Alfred Knopf died. You you want institutions that can continue, that can survive any one person. That’s my hope.
TED: And that will happen. I think we are still five years away from that. But the trend I see is, first of all, the mainstream culture will continue to die and stagnate and lose the trust of the audience. That’s already almost played out. They will not be able to turn around their businesses. They really won’t, because they’re so bureaucratic in a consolidated industry.
So the next stage is you’re going to have an alternative creative economy, and you’ll have alternative platforms. These will start as influencers, as individuals. Then the individuals will spin off businesses, and the businesses will survive. And this will be the breath of fresh air we need. What people like you and I want to do is to accelerate that process.
JARED: We talk about trying to build things outside of the clutches of the billionaires and all the conglomerates. But I’m a YouTuber, and I write on Substack. You’ve got a new sort of phase in your career when you started writing on Substack. So we, to some extent, operate within these systems. I’m just curious how you think about that relationship.
TED: Well, Substack, like any platform, is owned by investors, and that always poses a risk because the investors may have completely different goals than you and I have as creative people. And so this is something we need to take seriously, but at least with Substack, we have protections. The first and foremost one is I control all my intellectual property.
But probably our best safeguard is that Substack staked itself out from its early days onward as a supporter of writers and creative people like us. If it starts jerking us around, we leave. So we don’t have any complete and full protection with Substack. But to my mind, this is a gamble I’m willing to take. What I try to do is operate within the Substack system and be a positive influence inside it.
And so far, Substack has allayed my concerns, and they have rewarded my trust. But this is an issue. And whenever you’re involved in any sort of institutional setting, you always have to ask yourself, "Am I aligned with their values? Are their values aligned with mine?”
One of the good things about any indie culture is that in a thriving indie culture, there are thousands of voices. There are thousands of alternative newspapers. There are indie radio stations. In a thriving indie culture, no one has so much power that they can corrupt things. And that’s one of the reasons why we need a widespread counterculture. And even Substack, Bandcamp, Patreon, they aren’t enough. We need more indie institutions.
JARED: And when you started growing on Substack, it seemed like you broke a big rule. When I talk to publishers, they want to place you in a really narrow niche. You write about X and Y, the intersection, something like that. They want to be able to label you really clearly. And if you sell them one book, and then maybe you want to talk about writing another book, they want to know if it is the same sort of book. And I think you see this a lot with people who have successful debuts, especially in nonfiction, and their second book should just have the same title with a 2 at the end. They never sell as well, but publishers seem to push them in that direction. But when I look at your Substack, I see that you write about everything.
TED: For a long time, editors only wanted me to write about jazz. But in fact, what I found after I launched on Substack is that my articles on other subjects actually have reached a larger audience than my jazz articles.
I think, in general, society pushes everybody into tight pigeonholes. You have the person at the factory that just makes part of a widget every day. You have all sorts of talented people who are told to do the same thing over and over again. But when you give a talented person the opportunity to go outside this narrow pigeonhole, they will pleasantly surprise you. So I’ve taken that to heart myself—and I’ve been rewarded for that.
I decided early on that the most scarce thing in media was trust. And that if I could earn the trust of my reader, I would be rewarded, and they would be rewarded. So that was the turning point for me. And I think other writers minimize the importance of this. If you are not earning the trust of your reader you’re creating a problem for yourself.
But there was a second thing I did, and this almost happened naturally, but it proved to be very important. Throughout my career I’ve changed my prose style for every book, and if you look at my various books you’ll see the way I construct sentences and paragraphs changes over time. When I joined Substack, I decided I needed a new way to write for Substack. And what I decided, I think, proved decisive. I decided I would write the way I talk in conversation.
As you know, when we sit down and talk over a meal, we speak very candidly. We speak very frankly. It sounds a lot like what we’re doing right now, too, because we’re very frank here. But that’s what makes a personal conversation so interesting. So, I decided I would write the way I speak to a trusted friend in conversation. I would do that with my Substack. It’s conversational—and it’s fitting for a counterculture or an alternative culture or indie culture to have that conversational vibe.
JARED: How do you think that’s going to translate to when, say, people who blow up on Substack want to write books?
TED: I’ve asked myself this question because I’m toying with the idea of going back and writing books again. And I ask myself: Do I write the same way for a book as I do on Substack? And my feeling right now is no. My thought is that if I write another book, once again, I will reinvent myself for the nature of the book. My style as a writer must adapt. So if I go back to writing books, I will probably change my style and it’ll be less conversational.
But there’s also an argument you could make that the next phase in writing books will be more conversational books. I take that possibility seriously.
JARED: I saw a phrase that was sort of levied against a few recent books that have come out from writers who have gotten kind of big on Substack, and they called them ‘Substack books.’ This was meant sort of pejoratively to say that Substack is really good for developing an idea across maybe 3,000 words, but it’s not lending itself to sustaining an idea across 50,000 or 60,000 words, and that some people, as they’re making the leap from writing essays on Substack to writing a book, tend to group Substack posts thematically into a book.
TED: I think that’s true, but you know I blame the publishers for that. As you know, I made a decision five years ago to put all my energy into Substack. During that period, I’ve turned down every freelance inquiry unless it allowed me to publish what I wrote on Substack. And so I’ve turned down all sorts of book opportunities. But I continue to hear every few weeks from some editor at some publishing house, and the query I get is almost always the same. What they say is, “Ted, I saw this article you wrote last week. Could you turn that article into a book?”
I tell them that’s not a good idea because there’s going to be a lot of padding. You can’t do a book that way.
What you find in publishing now for these Substack books is the editors are doing exactly what I said. They find some Substack writer and say turn an article into a book, and you get a book out there that doesn’t work very well. The problem there, though, is not that the Substack writer doesn’t have talent; it’s that this is how editors operate in the current day.
They have become so cautious. And also once again it’s the intrusion of financial metrics.JARED: I have a book coming out next year, and it’s a very slow process, but I also had a lot of time to sit with my ideas and that was so helpful. That book is so much better than I thought it was originally going to be, and I hope other people agree. I wrote a proposal, I started working on is, I worked with an editor, and then I thought I’d finished it, but we edited it again for three more months, and it became much better in those three months. There was real value in being able to be slow. And that’s my big worry if we go all in on new media. Sometimes art requires that time. And that’s the one thing I don’t feel when I’m producing stuff for the internet.
TED: Some projects require time, absolutely. But we need to reclaim the publishing industry—the publishing industry and the slow process of making a book. We can’t let that go away, because as you’ve pointed out, sometimes you need to have someone support you for three, four, five years to make it. We need to reclaim publishing with real diversity and a real, broader net. And until we do that, we’re going to be in bad shape.
I would like to see Substack get involved in publishing books, for example. You know, that might be a way to do that. I think with print-on-demand now, you could do publishing without a huge amount of overhead. And so that might be the next step.
JARED: Do you have big projects that you want to take more time with in the future?
TED: I always have more ideas than I can pursue. But yeah, I could see myself once again going back and spending years on a project or even going into fiction. I’ve written a lot of unpublished fiction, and it would be nice to be able to turn to that.
JARED: Let me ask you about something different. I’m noticing a recurring phenomenon that when a new band pops up, they’re marketed as sounding like a band from twenty years go. Do you see this too in music? Is there more of an emphasis for a new act to say, " Oh, we’re recreating this old thing” rather than making something new?
TED: Once again, I blame the institutions, not the artists. The institutions have created very hardened genre definitions. So if I come out with a country song that sounds different from the other country songs, it won’t get on the radio. It won’t get on the playlist. That’s why if I listen to country radio now, the songs sound the same as they did 10, 20 years ago. If I listen to the jazz radio station, I know that they prefer playing jazz that sounds a certain way.
JARED: I think it’s helpful to remember that ‘genre’ is a marketing term. But if you go in thinking, " Oh, I’m going to play this genre,” you’ve already started by putting yourself in a marketing box before you’ve gotten to the creative part. TED: The most creative music now is happening on the margins of the genres. As you know, I listen to new music every day, and I take notes. I write a brief description of what kind of album it is. What I find is that often with the best albums, I can’t come up with the words. This person is doing something that doesn’t fit my narrow categories. Now, for me, that’s a great thing. This is mind-expanding, but for the music industry, it’s terrible.
JARED: Can we talk a little bit about the New Romanticism?
TED: That was a term I started using as a joke. I looked at the Romantic movement that emerged around 1800. It was a reaction to the industrial revolution, to the tech revolution of its time—to this intense rationalism. This was the age of enlightenment, where everything was supposed to be decided by human reason, so you had technology-intense rationalization and urbanization. And all of a sudden a number of artists said “We don’t want this. We want human feeling.”
So, I made a joke saying with technology so dominant and manipulative right now, we might need a New Romanticism. I just said that as a quip, and then over the next few weeks, I started thinking about it. and I said, “You know, this is actually true! This is what we need.” And I know that when I mentioned this, I got a favorable response.But in terms of actually getting momentum behind the New Romanticism, we’re still in the very early days…..I think it is a broader indication of the direction we’re moving in.
JARED: Ted, we always end by asking for a book recommendation for the audience. Do you have anything for us?
TED: I’m going to return to David Foster Wallace, who’s had a very strong impact on me. In fact, it’s surprising because most of my influences that shaped my creative work came when I was very young. It’s very unusual after I reached middle age for me to find an author who would change how I view my vocation. But David Foster Wallace was one of them because of his focus on compassion, kindness, and also showing that you can still be very creative, intensely creative without abandoning those human virtues. So I want to turn to a book of his that’s not very well known, but really is a good starting point for anyone who wants to read him. It’s a short novel called Something to Do With Paying Attention. This was part of the manuscripts he left at his suicide in 2008. And it’s a story that I often recommend to people, especially young people. I’ve given out this book as gifts. And it tells the story of a young man who’s lost. And he’s lost in very typical ways for our contemporary society.
He suffers from screen addiction. He’s struggling to find a purpose in life. He’s got depression. He’s trying to find his place in the job market. He describes himself as a wastoid—he just watches TV all day. And then he finds deliverance from this. He finds a purpose and meaning in his life, and it comes from a totally unexpected direction.
It’s a charming story, it’s a funny story, it’s a touching story, it’s a beautiful story—and in just 150 pages.
JARED: Ted Gioia, thank you for joining me.
TED: Thank you, Jared.


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Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.
Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Henry Oliver.
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Henry Oliver is the literary critic behind The Common Reader, a newsletter helping you make the most of your reading. He’s also a Research Fellow and Emerging Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. I sat down with Henry to talk about literature, poetry, the relationship between reading and empathy, and how to develop your taste.
Below is an extract of our conversation. For the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.
A CONVERSATION WITH HENRY OLIVER
Jared: Henry Oliver, thank you for joining me.
Henry: Thank you for having me.
Jared: So I want to ask you about Philistines and how Philistines have taken over the culture. I think the phrase you used is ‘Philistine supremacy’?
Henry: That's right. A lot of the time, when we talk about Philistines, we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts. And it's a kind of snob thing. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine. You're a Philistine.
The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just so many examples like that—that sort of suggest that the elite tier has kind of given up on being elites in a way.
I think part of it is we had what was called prestige TV, and people wanted to write about that and talk about that.
“The elite tier has kind of given up on being elites.”
Jared: Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and say, no, Succession’s really good. The writing is very interesting. The cinematography adds a new layer to its presentation. The storytelling's good. It gives you room to explore various themes in a way that a play doesn’t because of its runtime and multi-season arc. Tell me why that’s crazy.
Henry: There are two questions here. Is Succession good? And is Succession the sort of thing that merits the cultural elite giving it the kind of attention that they have? And those are separate questions.
Maybe Succession is good. I neither know nor care. I found it boring. I couldn't watch very much of it. Personally, I think the cinematography is hugely derivative. It's all full of the ordinary TV tropes we're all used to from a million other things. I didn't think the dialogue was that good. And I also felt the story was just dragging and dragging and dragging. But I'm happy to say, okay, a lot of people know TV better than me, and they think it was amazing. And like, I can just be wrong about that.
But should we be talking about it in partnership with King Lear? Should we be devoting the kind of space and the kind of critical attention that we give to it, that we also give to the great works of fiction and drama? That’s obviously a no. Even the advocates can't really make a serious case for it. And, you know, King Lear is 400 years old at this point and is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the West. No one's printing out the Succession scripts and doing a close reading.
Jared: What were the conditions that sort of led to this Philistine supremacy? What changed?
Henry: One thing I should say is there's still a lot of excellence. And I'm not saying that everything's gone bad. I'm saying there's this new segment in the culture, right? I think part of it is that it's very hard to make money writing about Shakespeare, writing about new novels, writing about whatever the NYRB is putting out. It's very hard to get an audience for that.
How many New York Review of Books can there be? How big is their audience base ever going to be? No one is really pretending that we can hit a million subscribers if we just do these six things. It's not there, right? And so I think part of it is just to stay commercial and to stay relevant. We had TV, now we have social media—that's just where people are. I'm a bit close to being like, blame the people. But partly you just have to adapt in the normal ways, right?
Even if you're writing about a popular literary novelist like Brandon Taylor or Sally Rooney, the audience is just much smaller for a "here's what I think the book's about" essay than for "what does Sally Rooney say about conservative sex politics in this moment in our generation?"
Jared: I don't think I've ever read a review of a Rooney novel that wasn't actually about Rooney's politics. Or just about Sally Rooney. There's actually a shocking turn towards the author—half of the word count will just be about what Sally Rooney is up to, or what she's done this time, or did she support this political cause enough or too much. The same would be true for Brandon Taylor’s work. A lot of the critical discussion will end up being about Brandon Taylor or what he stands for, rather than, you know, the novel.
You reviewed his new novel, right?
Henry: I think it’s his best novel. I thought it was great. He is openly engaging with ideas in a different way. So obviously, all novels are novels of ideas. And there are lots of different ways in which novelists diffuse ideas. They embed them in different parts of the book. They might be more open, more subverted. But he is now making his characters ideological, making them have arguments about ideas. The narrator voice is quite intrusive in the discussion of these ideas, and it ties the themes together as well. So it’s a bit more like what we’re used to from an Iris Murdoch novel or something, right? The ideas are right open on the page and they’re fighting it out. And I think that’s a very good development for him as a writer. And I also think it’s a good development for fiction as a whole.
Jared: You think about Iris Murdoch—that’s a good comparison because she’s a novelist. She’s a serious novelist worth taking seriously. She’s also just a thinker and an essayist. And Brandon has increasingly, if you just follow what he does online, been engaging very much with literary criticism, with philosophy. And it would be very hard for a good writer to engage with that and then not want to bring it into the novel somehow. But I don’t know how many writers are consciously doing that while trying to write literary fiction that’s not purposefully experimental, and aiming for a space where he’s writing at major presses and writing big novels, but also engaging with ideas.
Henry: Right, and he’s trying to revive realism in a way, because there’s a large segment of the literary community that dislikes realism. He’s trying to defend it. He’s been reading Lukács and Zola, and he’s really dug into what realism is and is trying to bring some of those things back.
I do think other writers are engaging with ideas, but with a different set of ideas and in different ways. So Catherine Lacey wrote Biography of X, I think one or two years ago now. And one of the most enjoyable things about the book that makes it accomplished is that it’s hugely embedded in the ideas of mid-20th century culture and literature, but is fictionalizing them to some greater or lesser degree throughout the book.
Jared: So, okay—Brandon Taylor, Catherine Lacey. Who are other contemporary writers right now that you’re excited about?
Henry: Oh, I like Sally Rooney. I don’t have a problem. I think she’s great. You have these arguments like, oh, it’s just commercial fiction disguised as literary fiction. It’s such an affront, all this stuff. Just relax. You can just read a book and enjoy it and not worry about whether it’s George Eliot enough, you know? I think she’s a very clever writer. The last book, which everyone hated because it had the fake Ulysses kind of writing style and it drove everyone crazy—and as you say, all the reviews were not really reviews. They were just personal essays going, I thought she was the voice of my generation. Why is she doing this?
Actually, that book was a very interesting exploration of autism. And at least one of the characters is plainly autistic in some degree. There’s a lot of discussion now about the expansion of the diagnostic criteria. But somewhere on that new way of understanding it, this character is autistic. And I think it’s one of the better novels that we have about what autism is, what it’s like to be autistic in that sense. Not in the, you know, that famous book about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, about the boy who is autistic. That’s a different kind of thing. But that’s what I found interesting in the last book.
Jared: Have you followed the critical discussion of the new Pynchon novel that’s coming out soon?
Henry: No.
Jared: You don’t strike me as the biggest Pynchon guy. But there was a, I believe it was in The New Yorker—if not, I’ll put a link down below so people can see it. There was a big New Yorker piece. And the sort of headline was, it’s great for Pynchon fans, and it’s great at what Pynchon does, but what about the rest of us? And I thought—that might be a great example of this Philistine attitude, where it is engaging with a work of serious fiction. Great. But its first response is, why isn’t this for everyone?
Henry: Yes, yes. And I do think there’s a kind of democratic impulse to the way we treat art these days that’s misguided, in the sense that it creates a false opposition. Some works are both democratic and elite. A lot of the canonical authors, like Jane Austen and Shakespeare, work on both levels. You can read it for the story, or you can really get into the footnotes and spend your life on it. And those were conscious decisions that those authors made. But a lot of works aren’t like that. Ulysses isn’t like that. You can obviously—everyone can read it and get something from it. But Ulysses is a conscious attempt to do something else. And that’s fine. And we should just, again, relax. What’s the big deal?
Jared: There is a group—they meet at the public library once a week. And they have been reading Finnegans Wake for 10 years. It’s like six or seven of them. There was a news story about them.
Henry: And they’re starting again, right?
Jared: Yes. They spent years just going page by page together and really diving in, because it’s the kind of novel that can sustain that. And it’s very much not a democratic novel. If you think you’re going to read Finnegans Wake in a month by reading it an hour before bed every night—get real. It’s just not that sort of book.
Henry: But that, I think, is the perfect example. I’m so glad you brought that up. I loved that news story because it is open to people, the non-democratic form of art. There used to be this idea—I think Frank Kermode first said it, and then Philip Larkin said it, and Betjeman used to say this—that modernism had put up a “no through way” sign on the road and said people can’t come in anymore. Literature is not for you anymore. But in a funny way, that sort of both is and isn’t true, and that sign is a simultaneous invitation to say, well, actually, if you want to go to the library every week for a decade, it is for you. And for some people, that is quite democratic, right?
Jared: If someone were listening to this and they think, well, I read Romeo and Juliet in high school and I hated it. I think I read Romeo and Juliet in high school and hated it. But then I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I thought, oh, I liked this more. And then I read Othello and thought, oh, I really like this. So I’m just wondering, how would you coax them to give Shakespeare another chance? Perhaps they’re a little older. They’re no longer being forced to read it. What would you do specifically about Shakespeare?
Henry: So the first thing I would say is, you’re not at school and you’re not that person anymore. And there are a lot of things you did and didn’t like at school that are no longer relevant. So just move on. Put that to one side. That’s over. Shakespeare’s the best. People get a little fussy about, can we say the best, and can we have rankings? Whatever. Yes, he’s the best. He’s the heart of the English canon. He’s the best reading experience you can have. You owe it to yourself to see or read some Shakespeare in the way that you would travel to see amazing landscapes, amazing buildings, have the best food of the world, hear the best music of the world. No one thinks it’s crazy to jump on a plane for eight hours to go and do something incredible on the other side of the world. But spending three hours with this book is too scary?
Jared: So—you have this piece about how to have good taste. I think it’s your most popular piece on Substack. Tell me a little bit about what taste is and maybe what’s different about taste and preferences.
Henry: So taste is the idea that you have a well-refined sense of what is good or what is not good in a particular domain. So you might have taste in movies, books, food. But people increasingly talk about the importance of taste at work, because one of the things that AI is doing is making human taste and human judgment one of those fields that’s going to rise in importance and rise in value, because it’s obviously something that’s slightly more reserved to us than to the AI.
But the question of taste is very confused in popular discourse. And the confusion is that people don’t see the difference between taste and preference. And sometimes when people say “I need to refine my taste,” they think they need to have a stronger set of preferences. But that’s not really taste. That’s just knowing what you like and being better at knowing what you like.
Jared: And I think you see this when people first develop a sense of ownership over their aesthetic sensibilities—they start saying, oh, that stuff, that’s s**t. And this stuff’s great. And they speak in these very stark terms. But in a way that kind of reflects that maybe they don’t understand what they’re talking about.
Henry: I think so. And I think whether you enjoy it and whether it is good, as we talked about with Succession, are separate questions and should be treated as such. Often there’ll be overlap, but often there won’t. Taste is knowledge. That’s what it comes down to.
If you’re a chef and you have taste, you can pick up ingredients. You can tell if they’re fresh enough, firm enough. You know how sharp or strong the taste is going to be based on how fresh or how mature they are. You know how to combine them. You know what the result of that will be. So your taste in selecting and using and cooking ingredients is just a huge knowledge bed that you’re able to draw on all the time.
Jared: So let me ask you about some more of the work that you’re doing on Substack. The publication is called The Common Reader. Why did you choose that?
Henry: That is a phrase from Samuel Johnson. He was writing his Life of Gray. Gray is a famous English poet who wrote the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which at one time every schoolchild knew—probably many of them memorized—and which now no one reads. And he had spent several pages trashing Gray, saying, my God, look at this, terrible rhyming, lazy in the meter. He’s really just upset with everything. And then he turns around and says, well, the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” though, is a wonderful poem. And I rejoice to concur with the common reader and say that I love it. And it became a famous phrase. The whole concept of what is a common reader—is there such a thing? Some people deny it. But you can see with the rise of commercial society, the sheer number of books that were published in the 18th and 19th centuries, that there did become such a thing as a common reader.
“I think we’re going to live through a small revival of the humanities.”
They’re not involved in criticism or academia. Maybe they’re not very well schooled. Maybe they’re not even formally trained in literature in any way. They pick up the books and they read them, and the tradition is there for them. The phrase was then famously taken up by Virginia Woolf, who called her two books of critical essays The Common Reader. And she took that from Johnson. And she wrote the best literary criticism of the 20th century. And she was a true common reader. She was so deeply immersed in the tradition. So that’s where I got the phrase from.
Jared: So do you feel a kinship with the uneducated or the less educated person who just wants to read literature because they love it, or because they just have a desire?
Henry: I don’t know if I feel a kinship, but that’s basically what the blog is about. And I think there are a lot of those people out there. And I think there will be more of them in the future. I think we’re going to live through a small revival of the humanities, and those people are going to be a big part of it.
Jared: I definitely suspect that we are going to see an emergence of an era of autodidacts—people who are just curious about knowledge or about art that’s out there. And for a very long time, we thought that if you wanted to explore any of those topics, you went to school, you went to university, maybe you got a master’s degree, maybe considered doing a PhD, and then you were serious enough to really discuss this stuff. But I think increasingly people have this urge to take their education into their own hands.
I’ve written about this a decent amount. And I think the humanities stand to benefit from that. I do not endorse the view that some people would want to put out, that the academy has killed the humanities or anything like this. I think people who say that often don’t know what’s going on in the academy. But I think the humanities can thrive outside of the academy in a way that, say, mechanical engineering can’t.
Henry: Exactly. But also, even when the academy is doing well, it relies on having common readers. And there is a much more direct relationship than there is with some of the more STEM subjects. In the sense that people who have nothing to do with it, who never took the degree, are a big part of your reading base for the primary texts, at least. And even if the professors don’t want to be directly engaged with those people, simply the fact that they exist is part of why we have as many departments, as many courses, as many graduates as we do. So I think it’s very important.
And I also think we wouldn’t have literature if we didn’t have an ordinary audience. Someone has to want the books to exist. Because you used to have this before books were selling in volume—Chaucer didn't sell any books, sold some manuscripts maybe, but there were still people who wanted to have his poems read out, and those people were not always in the universities. Maybe they were at court, or maybe they were elites in their own way, but fine. In one sense, they're still common readers, and that's very important for poetry.
Jared: So what do we do about all these Philistines? The elite Philistines?
Henry: Well, actually, that’s why I call it a supremacy—because they’re ruling over us.
Jared: Say a little bit more about what you mean by “elite” here.
Henry: The people who are running the institutions. The book critics at the big newspapers, the editors, the professors. Again, it’s a certain selection of them. By no means is it all of them. There are so many excellent people out there. But it’s reached a sort of tipping point where there’s a large presence of it in the media. This is why I say, don’t trust all the critics. Take it into your own hands. Go to Substack, go to YouTube, go to Twitter, go to wherever, because you will also find great stuff there.
We have this old-fashioned model that you follow particular people. It used to be that you could just read Michael Dirda in the Washington Post. He’s always good. You’ll always get some great information from him. Now you really want to be looking around and following different people and finding different things. It varies by topic. It varies by what you’re doing. So just bear that in mind very strongly. But Liberties is a new journal, that’s been set up in the last five years or so, that’s doing great work—a kind of, to use awful phrases like “challenger brand” or whatever, a really strong alternative. I think there’s a lot of good work on Substack. And I think a new culture will emerge from all of those alternative ways of doing it.
Jared: One of my favorite things about talking to you is when you talk about writers you hate.
Henry: You're not going to make me say names?
Jared: We won't talk about any contemporary writers. Are there canonical writers that you think are just overrated, that have just been included? Because you're kind of a defender of the canon on the grounds that it's all pretty good. But are there any canonical writers that you look at and say, I just don't see what the argument is for this?
Henry: Yes, there are some in the 20th century. It is hard to bring names to mind because eventually you decide you’re leaving this alone permanently, or for some time. I do think that the canon is good. I do think it’s very hard to knock someone out of the canon. And when those attempts have been made, they’ve often failed.
So there was famously a generation that didn’t like Milton—the T.S. Eliot generation. Several very prominent critics all made their case against Milton and thought he was overrated and all this stuff. And, well, look how that went. It was Christopher Ricks, I think, who came back with Milton’s Grand Style, which is a really good book of criticism, and defended Milton. And he’s still here. You would have to be ideological or cracked not to pick up Milton and say, yeah, this is some of the best.
Jared: Yeah.
Henry: Of course, no one ever wished Paradise Lost was longer. Everyone agrees with that. But the best of Milton is just extraordinary.
Jared: And you’re not just thinking about Paradise Lost when you say the best of Milton, right?
Henry: Well, a lot of people would say that is the best of Milton and that the rest is hard work. I think he’s a great sonnet writer at a minimum. Many of the short poems, which you can read in the John Carey edition, are excellent. But I accept the general criticism that Lycidas and some of the others are overdone and not up to his best standards. I also think the prose is excellent—some of the best prose we have.
Jared: Well, let me ask you about American writing. I think I told you last night as we were browsing a bookstore that every American writer is secretly an Anglophile, and we suspect that maybe our literary culture doesn’t stand up. Some of them not so secretly. But even the ones who would deny it, I think—we all think that the UK editions of our books look better. If there’s a UK audiobook, it sounds better. And what we’re putting out is garbage compared to what you can get overseas.
Henry: But these are all surface considerations.
Jared: Yes, but I think deep down people start to worry: have we produced great novels in the same way, or great poetry in the same way, that England has?
Henry: I think that’s a very valid question. I’m not as well read in American literature, but I don’t think you have as good a poetic tradition as we do, by any means. There are like twelve names of true excellence. And I think some of the African-American poets are on that list. And there’s been some controversy about that over here, which I find very puzzling. Gwendolyn Brooks is one of your best poets. I don’t even understand that it’s a question.
Jared: Do you like Langston Hughes?
Henry: Yeah, exactly. Another perfect example. That said, you’ve only had 200 years, right? Whereas we go back to the Saxons with our poetry. So The Oxford Book of English Verse is a summation of a thousand years of great cultural tradition. You can’t really compete with that. But I am surprised that there are so few truly great poets.
I suspect one reason is that people like Whitman and Dickinson are true originals, and they’re immersed in the long tradition—they know their Bible and they know all these things. And then in the quest for an American poetry, this gradually faded to become a replication of Whitman and Dickinson rather than doing what they did, which is to be truly immersed in the long tradition. That’s probably unfair, but I think there’s something to it.
Jared: What about novels, though, or American novelists?
Henry: I have not read the American novel tradition in the same way. I think the 19th century is incredibly strong. Willa Cather, who I’ve started reading recently—clearly one of your best. But when I get into the 20th century, I truly don’t see the fuss. Obviously some of it’s great, but I think an awful lot of praise has been given to things that are not that good. But by the end of the 20th century, literature is becoming much less significant in culture everywhere. And America was not a very literary nation to begin with. Tocqueville says there’s a Shakespeare in every wooden hut, every cabin that he visits.
Jared: Remarkably hard to find.
Henry: I’ll take him at his word, but yes, you don’t see the influence of that in a lot of places. The founding fathers were incredibly literary, but was there a general literary culture? I think when you come over here and you start a nation from scratch, you don’t have the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, and you don’t have the shelves and shelves of books. So maybe that’s part of it. But this idea that the mid-20th century—Saul Bellow and all these people—and they’re all such geniuses? I don’t really see it. But I’m very English. So that might be the problem.
Jared: I know you like Melville. Or at least you like Moby-Dick.
Henry: Yes.
Jared: But you don’t maybe like his poetry so much.
Henry: I tried reading the Civil War poems, and I think—is it “Sheridan at Cedar Creek”? There’s one about a particular battle that I read the other day, and I thought that was excellent. But in general, I thought the poems would be excellent based on Moby-Dick, but not really.
Jared: Moby-Dick feels singular in his work.
Henry: I’m about to read through the other novels, and I’ve been told it’s worth it.
Jared: I don’t think they’re bad. I just think that Moby-Dick stands apart, not only in his work, but in American literature. We talked last night, and I said Moby-Dick is the great American novel. I just think the argument’s easy to make. What do you think about—there’s been a bit of a resurgence. I see our friend Ted is a fan of David Foster Wallace.
Henry: Oh, I haven’t read David Foster Wallace. I’m sorry, I know.
Jared: Wow, okay. Well, that gives me nothing to talk about. I could see you hating Infinite Jest.
Henry: I love his essays. I think he’s a great essayist. I’ve read most of those. I just don’t feel compelled. I read some of Mason & Dixon and a couple of the other novels of that ilk that came out at that time, and I didn’t like any of them.
Jared: Yeah, you haven’t read DeLillo either.
Henry: Nope. None of it appeals to me at all.
Jared: I want to ask you our final question. We ask all of our guests. I ask for a book recommendation for the listeners. It’s supposed to be a book everybody should read, but for some reason nobody’s reading it. And I prepared you for this. I hope you have something good.
Henry: Yeah, I’m going to pick The Oxford Book of English Verse. There is something for everyone in it. It is a storehouse of most of the best writing in English. You’ll get bits of Paradise Lost, so it might send you to Milton. You’ll get bits of Shakespeare, so it might send you to one of the plays. But it also just gives you entire poems from hundreds and hundreds of authors, and you might realize that you love the Elizabethans, or you love the modernists, or whatever it is. And there’s a lot of stuff in there that you don’t get at school. No one is given any Robert Herrick at school. He’s wonderful. I just memorized one of his poems because I liked it so much. And that can happen to you with this wonderful anthology.
Jared: Henry Oliver, thanks for joining me.
Henry: Thank you for having me.



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Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series—also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.
Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Naomi Kanakia.
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Naomi is a writer. She’s published four novels, and her next book, What’s So Great About the Great Books?, will be released in May by Princeton University Press. She also writes the wonderful Woman of Letters newsletter here on Substack, and she is working on a short story collection to be published by Random House.
I had the pleasure of reading What’s So Great About the Great Books? last year, and here’s what I wrote for the blurb:
If you've ever wanted to read the Great Books, or ever wondered why you should, this is the book for you. Personal, humorous, and intimate, What’s So Great About the Great Books? gives us a great gift: a grounded guide to the classics, and a new standard for introducing these books to modern readers.
In our conversation, we covered a range of topics, including why she wanted to write about the Great Books, why she decided to read them in the first place, and her struggles (and occasional triumphs) in the publishing industry.
Below are some highlights from our dialogue. For the full conversation, check out the video at the top of the page.
Highlights from the Naomi Kanakia Interview
Jared: Naomi Kanakia, thank you for joining me.
Naomi: Thanks for having me.
Jared: You’re writing a book about the classics, which will be published by Princeton University Press. Tell me a little bit about what made you want to dedicate a year or two of your life to writing a book about the classics?
Naomi: When I first started wanting to seriously be a writer, I decided that I should read all these great books that people always talk about. I bought a book called The New Lifetime Reading Program, I typed out the list of books recommended by this volume, and I have now spent 15 years reading through many of these books.
Then, four or five years ago, I started writing some essays online, and an editor from Princeton reached out to me and asked if I wanted to do a book. At the time, I was between agents and my career prospects seemed pretty dire, and I wanted to work.
I really love books about reading classics. I really like the angry polemical books, like Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, but I do feel that there’s a lot of angry polemic in this space. I felt there was room for more measured opinions, because I do think there are serious critiques to be made of the concept of reading old books. I wanted to write a book that took those concerns seriously and also had a more conversational tone.
Jared: What are some of those critiques that you have in mind that you want to respond to?
Naomi: A lot of books about reading classics are defenses of the humanities, or the idea that you should think deeply and love nuance. And it’s like, nobody’s against those things. The real question is: why do you have to read Milton instead of reading a modern author? Are we really saying that these old books are the best books and no modern books are good?
Really, it’s a defense of a specific canon of books, and I believe that list is good and that people should read those books. Generally, it’s easier to gravitate towards the contemporary, and you have to try a little bit harder to look at these older books.
But there are two major concerns. One is that older books are more difficult and more inaccessible. The other major concern is that if you’re reading older books, there will be less diversity.
Jared: And despite those criticisms, you’re making an argument that it’s worth reading these old books.
Naomi: Yes.
Jared: I assume for part of that project, you had to go back and reread a lot of books. Was that part of the research, or was it just drawing on what you’ve been doing for the last fifteen years?
Naomi: This was mostly an excuse to mentally return to a lot of my touchstones. These older books have a sense of integrity. This project was just an opportunity for me to go back to some of my favorite books and look at the ways that’s true. And I haven’t read every Great Book, but I believe in the wisdom that created this list.
Jared: One of the striking things about reading books that make it onto the canon or the list of classic books is that oftentimes they’re really weird. Moby-Dick is famous for being dry and boring if you try to read it in high school, but I don’t see how anyone gets that impression, though, because Moby-Dick is just a really odd book.
Naomi: Almost always when I open these books, I see how strange they are. At one point, I went back and was like, ‘How did contemporaries view Moby-Dick?’ Because Melville had written travel narratives, a lot of readers came to Moby-Dick to learn about whales and the whaling industry. They wondered why it was wedded to this weird, Shakespearean plot.
Jared: Did any books on your list disappoint you?
Naomi: Moby-Dick, the first time I read it. I found myself bored. I reread it earlier this year and had a lot more appreciation for it. I would say Don Quixote is tough.
Jared: Something I find so interesting about your writing is that you write about the classics, but you’re very keyed into the weird parts of online writing: things like Kindle Direct romances or even fanfic. There’s a type of person who styles themselves as readers of the classics, and another type of person who styles themselves as lovers of fanfic. You seem to be comfortable in both worlds. Or are you always a little uncomfortable?
Naomi: As a kid, I only read science fiction and fantasy books, and I wanted to be a writer of science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction and fantasy is a world in itself, and it has its own critical apparatus. Reading the classics was a way to see what else is out there. And it is odd, because the classics exist because they are, you know, ‘above’ popular culture. You have to say that reading Moby-Dick is a better use of your time than reading a self-published orc romance.
Jared: Do you think there are going to be orc romances on the list of classics?
Naomi: That sort of writing reminds me of the early days of science fiction. You had these sci-fi fanzines by people who just felt compelled to explain why this stuff was so good and better than contemporary published writing. Those zines preserved the early classics of the genre because pulp magazines were disposable. Without that effort, we wouldn’t have science fiction today.
Jared: You’re weird, right? I mean this as a compliment. You write self-published fiction, and it gets critical attention in The New Yorker. Did that happen with your previous books?
Naomi: No. I’m the author of three young adult novels and a novel for adults. None of these were discussed in The New Yorker. But last October, I published a novella on Substack, and Peter C. Baker, who writes for The New Yorker, really liked it, and he pitched a story.
Jared: You have a very distinctive style. Tell me about that.
Naomi: I call it the ‘tale,’ A few years ago, I got really into Icelandic sagas. I was really struck by how they’re recognizably novel-like, but they don’t have any of the conventions of fiction. They don’t have a lot of description. They don’t have a close point of view. Reading those, along with ancient Greek fiction, inspired me. The style is very stripped down, has a strong point of view, goes in and out of different heads. It has very little description of setting, scenery. I have very strong opinions about the stories, too, so I’ll interject my opinions about what’s going on. And so I started self-publishing those on Substack.
Jared: You write these tales on Substack now. They’re really stripped down. You tell a lot of story with very few words. And one of the reasons you’re able to do that is because you’re not giving into these long descriptions, these sensory details. And you’re definitely okay with telling rather than showing. But that’s not how you used to write. I was looking at some of your older books, especially The Default World. The opening scene is the main character going to a coffee shop. We’re deep in her head. She is trying to suss something out about another character, but you’re seeing visual descriptions of them. You give us some backstory, but it’s all very, really strictly in her point of view as well. Did you feel comfortable writing that style, or do you feel like you were trying to do something because it was the expectation?
Naomi: When you start off writing fiction, you are really imitating the models that you know and trying to produce things that look like recognizable stories. When I started writing The Default World—which was my serious, important novel to be taken seriously—I wrote it in a more distant, omniscient perspective. But as I tried to interest agents, they felt too distanced from the narrative. So I rewrote it to be more immediate and embodied. I didn’t like it, and it did not feel natural.
Over the last 200 years, we’ve built up a set of conventions that are designed to put you right in the action and make you feel like you’re living out the dream of the story. I do feel like we might have hit the end of that style. I definitely think it is a tradition that has produced a lot of good work, but it doesn’t feel like the life is there anymore.
Writing these tales was a way for me to feel like I was getting back to why I had started wanting to write, which is just to tell a story.
Jared: Okay, this is an interesting tension then, because you are not opposed to writing to market. You’ve tried to write to market, but you did better when you stopped writing to market. People actually wanted to read it. I think that’s a good lesson for people. When I read The Default World, I thought that you felt very self-conscious. You were less confident than the Naomi Kanakia I’ve read online.
Naomi: When I started writing these tales, it was like a bow shot from an arrow. It hit the target. I really prioritize preserving that feeling of inspiration.
Jared: Tell me about anyone else you find exciting on Substack.
Naomi: Alexander Sorondo. He’s great.
Jared: I sent him a text last night and just said, ‘Every time I bring a writer into town from Substack, they bring you up.’
Naomi: He writes two sorts of things. He writes these long, deeply reported, maximalist literary criticism pieces on people like William Volmann. And then he writes these short, punchy lyric essays that are just kind of unlike what anybody else is writing. I love him. I love Henry Begler, who is another literary critic on Substack. I’ve actually learned a lot from Henry. I copy Henry. I steal from what he does.
Jared: We always end these episodes by asking for book recommendations. Do you have something for us?Naomi: I really think people should read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It’s hard to overstate. It’s about this guy, Tom, who is in slavery in Kentucky in a border state. He’s treated relatively well by his family and has his own house and has a wife and a family. But then they fall on hard times, and so they have to sell him off to a creditor. And then he goes through deepening circles of hell as he is sold further and further south to different owners.
It’s just like an incredibly powerful book. This was written at a time when slavery was legal, and there were many people who defended slavery and thought that it was a moral system in various ways. And it was written to show that there is no goodness under slavery.
Jared: Naomi Kanakia, thank you for joining us.
Naomi: Thank you.


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