No episode playing
The n+1 podcast is a monthly show of arts, politics, theory, and literature, featuring interviews, readings, stories, and more. Produced by Elisa Wouk Almino, Malcolm Donaldson, Moira Donegan, and Eric Wen with n+1 magazine.
On this episode of the n+1 podcast, Jenny Zhang reads her short story “Why Were They Throwing Bricks?” featured in Issue 28. The story is excerpted from her new story collection Sour Heart.
Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen
Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson
Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen
Graphics by Eric Wen
Music from Dinosaur L, Laurel Halo, and Poppies
Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (102.6 MB)
n+1 coeditor Dayna Tortorici interviewed Jenny Zhang about “Why Were They Throwing Bricks?” Their conversation is below.
Dayna Tortorici: The grandmother’s voice opens the story and carries it throughout. Where did this voice come from?
Jenny Zhang: When I was in middle school we did a unit on “Asia,” which was really a unit on China, and every time my teacher made some kind of pronouncement on what Chinese people are like she turned to me and said, “Isn’t that true?” Well, I had no idea if what she was saying was true for 1.2 billion Chinese people. My sample size was much smaller. When we learned about filial piety and the treatment of women in China, she said, “Is it true? The women in your family are forced to be subservient to the men in your family?” I burst out laughing. “Hellll no,” I said. “It’s the total opposite.” I struggled to apply the concepts of patriarchy and sexism to the women I grew up with.
As I got older, I recognized that the ways they exerted power and dominance were responding to limits I did not see. My grandmother lived with my family in America on and off. She had a distinctive way of talking because she was partially deaf and had learned to speak louder, more insistently, as a result. I suspected her hearing problems were often employed selectively, strategically—she literally heard what she wanted to. The grandmother in the story ends up being a different person from my grandmother, but I started with this old woman who speaks without hearing. She refuses to be a victim and takes up space—two things feminists historically have encouraged, but sometimes the praxis ends up more annoying than the ideology.
DT: You depict the push-pull of repulsion and tenderness in intimate familial relationships so well—here between Stacey and her brother, and both of them and their nainai. Is that a dynamic you think a lot about? What draws you to it?
JZ: I’m really drawn to how in close relationships it’s easy to swing in either direction. You know that feeling of spending days convincing yourself that you despise someone, and at the end of it you’re left with this strange affection for them? To think intensely about why you want to pull away from someone is a kind of intimacy.
Stacey initially finds her grandmother repulsive, needy, too obvious in her attempts to get close, but after a while, she gives in. It feels good to be so intensely the object of someone’s else focus—it feels almost like true love. Because the grandmother never gets to stay long in America, Stacey is able to emancipate herself from her. Ironically, when her brother Allen is born, she re-enacts that codependency with him. Like her grandmother, she enjoys the feeling of someone needing her, relying on her. At times, Stacey is in competition with her grandmother: she wants to be the one her brother clings to and listens to. She wants her brother to do what she did—break free. Because caretaking is often gendered female, it’s idealized as something that must be done with pure intention, pure goodness. But often we take care of people because we love them and because we want to be needed. Or we think being needed is the only form of love we’ll get. To make other people, especially children, our reason for living is not necessarily good, nor is it some kind of villainous evil. I wanted to shift who we empathize with throughout this story, and make it difficult to hold to a stable judgment of any of these characters.
DT: There’s a moment in the story where Stacey sees her grandmother as “laid bare,” no longer a tyrannical, cloying figure but a small woman whose life unfolded within a set of historical circumstances. I have a vague memory of you reading a biography of Mao not too long ago. Did your nonfiction reading influence this character, or how Stacey reflects on her?
JZ: I did read a biography of Mao written by his personal physician, and it was very dishy and juicy in the way only biographies of genocidal dictators can be. He was so afraid of dying, and one of the ways he dealt with that was by trying to fuck his way to immortality. The Cultural Revolution was a time of terror, violence, chaos, and death for many, many, many, and the way it is remembered and studied is warped by ideology. On one end, white-supremacist imperialist historians are invested in describing it as one of the worst travesties in modern history, when stupid Chinese people let their country be destroyed by a demonic demagogue. On the other end, Leftist-Marxists cannot afford to see that era as proof of the failure of communism. As a result, there are a lot of stories that don’t quite “fit,” that are lost to the annals of history.
One of the stories is that for many women, life changed drastically during the Cultural Revolution, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, and more often, both. The grandmother in this story grew up dirt poor, illiterate, in one of those villages where women have so many children that it makes sense to just name them by order of birth: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, et cetera. After living through two wars and joining the Communist Party, she is given the opportunity to have power—something no woman in her lineage ever had. But at such a great cost. In another world, she would have been diagnosed as having severe PTSD and many other mental health issues, but you know, compassion is for the wealthy . . . In this world, she is an overbearing old woman who thinks her grandchildren will sleep in the same bed as her until they are old enough to vote. As a teen, Stacey only has a vague notion of what her grandmother has been through. To her, her grandmother is simply annoying. The weight of the Cultural Revolution is not something Stacey considers when dealing with her grandmother, and it goes both ways—the grandmother has no idea what Stacey is going through, either. Their worlds are too far apart. A time and place when a young girl could join the army and march through the mountains for months on end is as foreign to Stacey as a time and a place where Chinese people can’t speak Chinese to their grandmother.
DT: I love the part where Stacey draws a picture of her grandmother with a dialogue bubble that says, “Kill her! It’s the LAW!!!!!” It’s the perfect expression of how young people perversely wish to make their elders helpless before an outside authority the way they feel helpless before their parents’ authority, even as they don’t actually want anything bad to happen to them. It’s also an example of how first-generation kids who assimilate faster than their parents experience a kind of power imbalance, in which they know “more” about “the world” than the adults in the family do, even though they hardly know anything. How specific to the first-generation experience do you think this is? Do all kids feel this way?
JZ: There is a power reversal in how the children of immigrants are often better able to navigate the country they’re living in than their parents. Just being able to speak the language fluently goes a long way toward making a child seem more grown up than their parent. Later in the story, the grandmother has a run-in with a police officer who knocks on the door when she’s alone in the house. It’s very terrifying to be in another country, not speak the language, and have an armed man knock on your door. The grandmother deals with it by hiding a knife behind her back. Her audacity bothers Stacey, perhaps because Stacey is someone who follows the rules. She keeps prodding the grandmother like, “Aren’t you scared? You should be scared.”
Something that’s less talked about is how there can be a courage gap between immigrants and their children. Immigrant children may have parents who have crossed land and sea, survived harrowing conditions on the journey over, escaped war, famine, poverty, and hardship to make it in another country. Immigrant parents develop a kind of fortitude that their children do not have to, especially if the parents succeed in making a decent life for themselves and their children. Spontaneity and verve are supposed to be the province of the young, but Stacey, who is young, is far more timid and conservative than her grandmother, who thinks nothing of speaking to a cop with a knife behind her back, or trespassing in someone else’s property and using their things. Just as you said, Stacey, who is often made to feel helpless by her grandmother, perversely fantasizes about what would happen if the authorities intervened. They are the ones who have the power to put her grandmother in her place, so to speak; they can arrest her, lock her up, deport her. But later, when the grandmother does have a run-in with a police officer, Stacey feels pity. She finally sees her grandmother’s confidence is a front. She realizes that sometimes the people who behave the most bombastically are the most vulnerable.
DT: What’s your favorite moment in the story, either as a writer or a reader?
JZ: I like it when the grandmother re-enacts Allen’s birth and convinces him she gave birth to him, not his mother, and they do this whole bit where he runs underneath her nightgown and then tumbles out and exclaims, “I’m born! I’m born! I’m zero years old.”
DT: What was the most difficult part of the story to write or figure out?
JZ: This is going to sound disingenuous, but the hardest part was comma placement. I crazily oscillated between wanting to take out commas and wanting to add more in.
On this episode of the n+1 podcast, Nausicaa Renner interviews Meghan O’Gieblyn, author of the essay “Ghost in the Cloud” from Issue 28, to discuss her spiritual history in relationship with Transhumanism.
Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen
Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson
Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen
Graphics by Eric Wen
Music from Dinosaur L and June West
Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (86.8 MB)
This episode of the n+1 podcast features an interview with n+1 cofounder Mark Greif about his book Against Everything. Greif spoke with Steve Paulson, of the Wisconsin Public Radio program “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” and the program’s extended interview is being co-released with the n+1 podcast. We thank everyone at WPR for producing this episode.
Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (106.2 MB)
This month on the n+1 podcast, Aaron Braun interviews regular contributor and Columbia University professor Bruce Robbins about his essay in Issue 24, “The Logic of the Beneficiary,” on Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.
Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen
Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson
Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen
Graphics by Eric Wen
Music from Dinosaur L, ESG, Leonard Cohen, Philip Glass
Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (65.3 MB).
Malcolm Donaldson: Hi, and welcome to the n+1 podcast. On today’s episode Aaron Braun interviews regular contributor and Columbia University professor Bruce Robbins. Bruce spoke about his most recent piece, titled “The Logic of the Beneficiary,” on Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. Here’s Bruce.
Bruce Robbins: So, I’m a supporter of BDS—Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—and I wanted to write a piece supporting BDS. I wanted to write it for n+1—I thought that n+1 was a good place for tormented writing. And maybe being tormented is actually not such a bad thing, given that some of what I feel is tormented. So what I finally wrote was a somewhat tormented piece that starts in favor of BDS and ends in favor of BDS but in the middle goes through a certain period of torment. And I think it was actually good for me, in a sense—I’m grateful to n+1. It was good for me to spend that time in a state of torment and uncertainty, working through some of the more complicated feelings I have, which seemed practically relevant in the sense that on one level, what I was looking for was to try to get at some of the deep and unarticulated sources of resistance among people who I think should know better and do know better. Why don’t people just come out for BDS when it really is consistent with their principles? What is it that’s holding them back? So my sources of torment seem to me a way of getting at some of those sources of resistance in other people—whom I respect a lot and kind of expect to be more on the same side as.
Aaron Braun: What was the closest thing you found to a resistance to BDS that didn’t seem to be completely based on some kind of ideological strategy?
BR: You know, in a way I wasn’t really interested in the bad motives for resistance. I was only interested in the good motives. And the most obvious one was the argument that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. That is, it seems to me a lot of people that I agree with about almost everything—some of them would hesitate to support BDS on the grounds that—“who are we to boycott anybody?” I mean, look at our history—look at the awful things we did for our nation, how could we possibly hold any other country to a higher standard than that? If there is any boycotting to be done, it should be boycotting of ourselves, which is the position that I associated Chomsky with based on an essay he had written in The Nation. Chomsky has clearly felt this—the idea of people in glass houses—on various occasions in a very intense way. That is, the business of Americans is to be critical of America. There was a certain working through, for me, of that argument.
Then the other thing—I’ll get to the point about moral consistency in general—but the other point was definitely part of my own torment and corresponded to something that I found in Todd Gitlin. Todd Gitlin responded to this essay in Tablet, and this was the one thing he liked about the essay. He otherwise thought I was a complete idiot, as people tend to think about people with whom they disagree on issues like this. But the idea is that the passage of time is morally significant, and that it is relevant to the question of the right of return—the third plank of the BDS platform. I do believe, and it was part of the argument of the essay, that the passage of time—alas, uncomfortable as it is to think of—the passage of time really is morally significant, and there is no way one can undo that. That as time goes by, the worst atrocity cannot be dealt with in the same way after ten years or a hundred years or a thousand years. We can all think of examples of things where time has changed our moral reaction. That’s a true thing about this situation, and it’s a true thing even if we know, if we speculate that the Israelis are very self-consciously and deliberately exploiting the passage of time so as to get away with murder, so to speak. So that was very important.
And then the third, as I say, is this question of moral consistency. I became interested in Ari Shavit because he seemed to be arguing that in the name of moral consistency, if one is the beneficiary of acts of atrocity in the very specific sense that one’s own life depends on these terrible things, then one is not in the position to repudiate them. That seemed to me very, very important in terms of really deep, unarticulated sources of emotional resistance that would work for people. So again, some of my torment was: okay, so, if that’s moral consistency, then I must be in favor of moral inconsistency, but that doesn’t sound like a very desirable position, and in various other moments in my life I’m not in favor of moral inconsistency! On the contrary, I’m calling out to people to be more morally consistent. So, you see the torment.
AB: One of the things I think was so interesting about this piece was that you could see two people—Noam Chomsky on the one hand, Ari Shavit on the other hand—going through these questions about moral consistency. Understanding that all suffering is not equal to a certain degree: it changes, it’s dependent on time and place, and this poses problems of consistency. They could have that same moment and clearly be reflective on that and just come to such radically different—or perhaps not radically, but very different—positions. And I’m wondering what makes that possible, where does the difference lie?
BR: It seems to me that it’s not quite so diametrically opposed as one might think, in the sense that in both cases—at least if we associate Chomsky with the people in glass houses argument—there’s a constraint, a limitation, almost a little bit of paralysis that Chomsky feels is imposed on the American, at least to the extent that you have to do the work of criticizing America first. And there’s also a constraint, a much greater constraint on Shavit, who doesn’t really do much criticizing at all. I suppose David Remnick of the New Yorker did say that he was kind of a hero for being as honest about Israeli atrocities as he was, and I don’t know how much credit he deserves. I know that there’s an incredible Israeli novel, published already in 1949, which talked about atrocities committed by the pre-IDF, which has been taught in Israeli high schools. So maybe it’s not quite as new a thing—I’m told it’s been optional on the curriculum of Israeli high schools, but it’s been taught since the ’50s, right, so it’s not as if nobody had been admitting this stuff.
AB: And even Benny Morris was considered a revisionist historian. Here was this person airing our dirty laundry, shining a light, saying that no, the war of 1948 didn’t start because the Palestinians conspired with Egypt and Jordan to drive Jews into the sea, there was a plan to expel. And he’s now definitely aligned himself with the more right-wing elements in Israel. So again, being reflective about the element of history doesn’t necessarily lend itself to one political argument versus another.
BR: That’s right. It seems to me that, to the extent that this essay struck a nerve—or maybe I’m just flattering myself to think that the world is jumping up and down about this essay—I think there really is something in our historical moment that resonates with this idea: what do you do once you recognize that you don’t speak from a position of moral purity? If you realize that you are stuck forever, inescapably in a situation of moral impurity and then all decisions have to be made on that basis? I think there are a lot of young people, in particular, who would absolutely get that.
BR: Let me say something about proximity. That’s another thing that really grabbed me, though it’s something I’d been thinking about anyway because of this book, The Beneficiary, which I’m just in the process of finishing now. There’s a longstanding debate in the theory of humanitarianism about people’s obligations to those who are suffering far away. How much moral significance is there in proximity versus distance? I’ve been trying to think about this, and it turns out to be really, really interesting. There’s a historian of abolition called Thomas Haskell, who argued—and this must have been thirty years ago—that moral obligations are relative to the technology and the social infrastructure that connects the sufferer to the distant spectator, that that changes as the technology and the infrastructure change. This is a crazy idea in a way: that there’s no such thing as an absolute moral obligation to help the person far away, but it depends on how much you want to give up, how far away it is, what you mean by “far away,” what you mean by “proximate.” And of course what he was saying—and it’s become even truer, in the years since the 1980s, when he made this argument—is that a lot of things that seem further away now are in some real way more proximate. Therefore, our obligations to the faraway are also more pressing, and that seems right to me. So it’s certainly a very, very relevant consideration in the case of the people in glass houses argument as applied to Americans and BDS, because nothing could be more proximate to Israel than American policy. Without American money, none of this stuff could have been happening, and if you could shut off that money supply, it would change overnight.
So in that sense Chomsky is right—aim by all means at trying to restrict the almost infinite supply of funds to Israel. But then the question is how are you going to do that? Obviously by legislative means, it’s out of the question—there’s no way this is going to happen. And moral pressure at the international level, of the kind that BDS proposes and that’s clearly modeled on South Africa, the anti-apartheid movement, and the premise that Israel has reached its South African moment—when if we are not at it, we are very close to it, and most of the rest of the world is going to look at this and say, this is unacceptable.
AB: A lot of what I hear—and I think there’s a certain cynicism in this—is that faraway issues are kind of raised for us to fill our need to be politically engaged without having to confront the hard truths that we might otherwise be forced to if we were, say, working at home, which I think I’m used to hearing on the left.
BR: Oh absolutely. That argument goes at least as far back as Rousseau, where cosmopolitanism looks like evasiveness. You are paying attention to all the suffering and injustice elsewhere because you don’t want to face your privilege or what have you, up close. Obviously I don’t see it that way, and this is really kind of an answer to one of your other questions: it seems to me that when I think about the mobilization—either emotional or organizational—there’s a lot of willingness to mobilize on college campuses, exactly to the extent that people recognize that that which is most proximate to them at home in their everyday lives is connected to very faraway stuff. That’s why the anti-sweatshop movement was as powerful as it was, at least before 9/11, why the politics of food and the locavore movement—but also now, thinking about the labor rights of people that produce the food, which I think is the big new thing that is going to come in, in the wake of the environmental side of it. Okay, so what are the labor practices, what’s the legislation and so on around the people who are picking the apples on your organic farms? It’s been clear that no one has been forced to really think about that very hard. But there is a way in which thinking about what is closest to you is also a way of getting into the system, which leaves you very, very far.
Now I mention this both because I think it’s important to us as citizens, but also because it’s the premise of this book on the beneficiary that I’ve been working on. Standard-issue humanitarianism would say that we have to do something about the sufferings of people far away because of our common humanity. That’s it. They’re human, we’re human. We have responsibility on that basis. Now, that has proved to be a relatively weak motive, as we all know. What I’m curious about—and it may turn out to be even weaker, who the hell knows—is when people realize that the clothes they’re wearing and the food they’re eating is the result of labor, injustice, and suffering in distant places. That puts an entirely different moral obligation on people. You are benefiting from this—this is not just common humanity. On the contrary, that is a tight causal relationship. As that comes home to people, how do they respond? I’m a literary person, so I’m not organizing on this basis myself, but I’m at least organizing an archive of people who have been thinking about this, and it was partly working on the literary side of that issue that led me into the use of the term “beneficiary” and kind of sticking it onto the BDS stuff in this essay.
AB: The whole time I was a member of SJP and part of these conversations, the one battleground that I got really familiar with was this question of anti-Zionism versus anti-Semitism. I think it’s a really powerful battleground for a lot of people, so in a lot of ways I’m tired of the argument, but I also understand that it’s an important argument. And I’m wondering about your thoughts on that—and if that relates to the points in your piece about the effect that time and history have on our understanding of suffering.
BR: I’m not sure if I’m going to get at exactly what you’re looking for, but I can make a connection. I think—and not everybody would agree with me—but my general position is that you can be as critical of Israel’s policies as you want and you should not be accused, for that reason, of anti-Semitism. It seems grotesque, or really just a cynical ploy on the part of Israel’s defenders, to shout “anti-Semitism” all the time when there is no anti-Semitism there—it’s just calling on Israel to respect its own universal principles. That’s just not anti-Semitism. I think time has had an effect on anti-Semitism in a way that not everybody would want to accept.
I say this as someone whose father was a Rabinowitz, and I’m a Robbins. When my father got back from flying missions in World War II, he decided with his big brother to change Rabinowitz into Robbins, and that was a very practical response to anti-Semitism, which they perceived even in the world of textiles, which they were both going into, which was a pretty Jewish industry. As an intolerant adolescent, I said “Dad, how could you have done this? I’m gonna change my name back!” but I think anti-Semitism was a significant enough factor so that he wasn’t crazy to change his name. When I was growing up, I think that was no longer the case. In other words, the passage of time in the United States had had a real impact on anti-Semitism, which permits me to say that a lot of the shouting, of the complaint of anti-Semitism, is really phantasmatic. People are not talking about something they have experienced—they’re talking about a phantasm that exists in the world, but probably not very much in their world. I work in the academy—we are overrepresented in the academy, all over the damn place. Once upon a time that wasn’t true. Lionel Trilling was the first Jew allowed into the department where I teach, at Columbia. So it clearly was real at a certain point, but just as clearly it’s not real now.
I think this is a distinction that has to be made: I’ve encountered real anti-Semitism, mainly in other countries, and I think I can tell the difference. Of course there’s anti-Semitism all over the place in the same way that human beings are casually racist about other groups pretty much everywhere. I also think that what has contributed most to the rise of anti-Semitism, to the extent that it has risen, have been Israel’s policies since 1948. So, if there’s real anti-Semitism out there—and there is—that’s where to look for it, and not in some primeval, atavistic feeling that they have always wanted us dead, they will always want us dead, you know, in their eyes we are always drinking the blood of Christian children or whatever.
I’ve had some bad reaction to the term “anti-Zionist.” I was recently told by an Israeli, in Israel, that it’s a really bad idea to use the term because people in Israel simply think that if you use the term, you’re saying that they should all be thrown into the sea, that they should be made to leave. And of course, I don’t even know anybody who would mean that by it. But on the other hand, why turn off a lot of potential allies in Israel if you don’t have to? The thing that I liked so much about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s argument for reparations is its insistence on the present. When you talk about redlining, for example, you’re talking about the way in which the racism of the past didn’t stay past, but has persisted in objectively measurable ways into the present. If you visit Indian reservations in this country, you will see the same kind of thing. This is a past that is absolutely present. To suburban New York Jews like me, the Holocaust is a subjective reality, there is no question, but it is not a present reality in the same way as the genocide of the Native Americans or slavery are present realities for those people. And I think that is a distinction that absolutely has to be respected.
AB: It’s one thing to say that time is a variable that we need to consider when we think about suffering, but it also doesn’t treat everyone equally.
BR: Exactly. You can turn that off now—I hope you get the last word because that’s a good last word.
MD: Thank you to our guest Bruce Robbins, and as always, Dayna Tortorici. You can read the whole of Bruce’s piece in Issue 24, accessible online at nplusonemag.com. Keep an eye out for Bruce’s forthcoming book The Beneficiary. The podcast was produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen. Until next time, thanks for listening.
On this episode of the n+1 podcast, Kristin Dombek, n+1 Senior Writer, Help Desk columnist, and author of The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism answers your questions about narcissism and selfishness. She’s joined by coeditor Dayna Tortorici.
Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, Dayna Tortorici, and Eric Wen
Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson, Frances Harlow
Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Frances Harlow, Emily Lyver, Dayna Tortorici, and Eric Wen
Graphics by Eric Wen
Music from Dinosaur L
Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (76.7 MB).
Dayna Tortorici: Welcome to the n+1 podcast. I’m Dayna Tortorici, coeditor of n+1, and on this episode, Senior Writer Kristin Dombek offers the latest edition of her advice column, The Help Desk. Her first book, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism, was published earlier this month, and today she’ll be answering questions that touch on some of the book’s themes.
Dear Help Desk,
Last week I read Franny and Zooey for the first time. I loved it. At least until I found out that Joan Didion had dismissed the book as “spurious,” and like “self-help copy,” at which point I realized that that was exactly how I had read it. Explaining why she quit the theater, Franny tells us, “just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.” Didion, for her part, wrote much the same in “On Self-Respect,” arguing that a man with courage could live without reputation. I’m inclined to believe that narcissism, in the sense of excessive self-importance and arrogance, is often just a psychological substitute for what Didion and Franny are getting at: real confidence. So my question for you: how do we build that sort of pure confidence, and how do we distinguish it from its less palatable relatives—self-importance, narcissism, and such?
Franny
Kristin Dombek: Pure confidence. I love the idea, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to describe how to get that, exactly, but I thought I would read Didion’s condemnation of Franny and Zooey. This is a few years after she’s arrived in New York and has finally gotten used to the idea of meeting Democrats at parties. And then she starts talking about Franny and Zooey. She writes:
However brilliantly rendered (and it is), however hauntingly right in the rhythm of its dialogue (and it is), Franny and Zooey is finally spurious, and what makes it spurious is Salinger’s tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers, his predilection for giving instructions for living. What gives the book its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as Positive Thinking for the upper middle-classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.
And earlier, she accuses Salinger of encouraging his readers to look for Christ in their date to the Yale game. That’s what’s wrong with this book.
DT: Oh, burn.
KD: Totally. You know, the opinions of the Help Desk don’t necessarily represent n+1, or sometimes even me, but I do think that the Help Desk believes it’s all right to use literature and theory and whatever else we can get as self-help. It’s funny to me that it’s Didion saying this—these days, at least, she’s the essayist whom I most see people kind of using as self-help. And especially those two essays. “On Self-Respect,” and “Goodbye to All That,” about leaving New York. I’ve heard people claim New York is only for the very young and the very rich, or that, you know, you should never stay too long at the fair, and these phrases kind of haunt us. And we live our lives—or in my case, test our lives—against them. Like, no, I’m staying too long at the fair and it’s fine. “On Self-Respect,” which you’re talking about, holds up the standard for a kind of solitary confidence that I’ve always been drawn to, but which bothers me. In the place you quote, she writes
The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation—which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.
And the thing that you’re asking about, pure confidence—I think we have this idea that it has nothing to do with the approval of others. If we could only get to that thing, that solitary internal confidence that doesn’t have anything to do with other people, then we’d just be okay, no matter the situation. So I guess I want to point out that what Salinger actually says at the end of this book—and what Didion insults as looking for Christ in your date to the Yale game—is not that you want to find a confidence that has nothing to do with the audience. He shifts it a little bit. He says, you don’t perform as an actress, or in any way, for yourself. You do it—and he and Franny both agree—you do it for the fat lady, right?
DT: That’s right.
KD: And they both have these images of the fat lady, which their brother Seymour gave them, and we can deconstruct these images, critique them. For both of them, the fat lady is an obviously poor, obese woman who has flies buzzing around her and listens to the radio all day. But I kind of buy Salinger’s point a little bit, in that the specter of narcissism is just the thing that we should never do. We should never do something just because it’s a performance—because we’re going to get attention for it, because we’re going to get acclaim for it—but this can get in the way of the very simple idea that actually, no, you do things for other people.
Salinger is bringing in the Christian idea that you do things to reach out to people who may be suffering. For me, the only way to get to a confidence that works in the world—a confidence that’s neither narcissistic, nor attention-getting, nor this impossible kind of constant, solitary, isolated confidence that Didion recommends and that Franny’s longing for—is by acknowledging that you do things for other people. You get experiences, you interpret those experiences, and you listen to other people’s interpretations, and you have to keep doing that over and over and over again, and that’s the only way it happens.
Dear Help Desk,
You know those voices in your head that tell you to break up, even when everything is going perfectly in a relationship? Well, I’m having a problem understanding how the same choice—i.e. to leave or to stay—can simultaneously be described as cowardice and narcissism. For instance, I choose to leave my girlfriend. Is it fear of commitment (cowardice), or is it that I think I can do better (narcissism)? Or if I choose to stay, is that cowardice? (I’m afraid I’ll be alone if I leave.) Or is it narcissism? (She can’t live without me.) I don’t mean this to be a contrived question. This was my situation, and I never came up with a satisfactory answer. So then here’s the question: in a relationship, if cowardice or narcissism can so easily be confused with the other, how can we take intellectual responsibility for decisions that are essentially emotional?
Thanks,
Skull-fucked in Schenectady
KD: I think this is a good question about the relationship between intellectual responsibility and emotional decisions. But I just want to point out that what you’ve done here, Schenectady, is taken two terms that both mean “you suck” and opposed them to each other, so that in both cases, whichever one you choose, you suck. And I’m curious about why you’re doing that.
I was researching this book on narcissism for a couple of years and reading many, many, many self-help sites advising people to run from narcissists. And on these websites, narcissism is always opposed to something that’s its opposite. I’ve never heard it opposed to cowardice before, but it’s a kind of word that’s used to police in a way, right? And the way it’s often used to police is by opposing it to something else—like empathy, or naturalness or whatever. So I was trying to figure out why you picked these words and why you made these combinations: fear of commitment, thinking I can do better, being afraid to be alone, she can’t live without me.
They remind me of certain stories that get told on those websites about what men and women do in straight relationships. There’s a story that straight dudes are afraid of commitment, and that they’re using women, right? I think I can do better. One of the things that might be going on here is that there’s a story about—I don’t know if it’s a story about masculinity so much as a story about what dudes do that’s creating these impossible alternatives for you, if that makes sense. And I think this also happens in same-sex relationships. I’ve been in both, but it happens for me in straight relationships, where these stories about gender are very strong and they get invoked whether you like it or not. You end up playing with them—switching roles and kind of shaking them up. You kind of have to—that’s what happens, I think, as you love someone. But in these crucial, vulnerable moments when you’re trying to do something very difficult—like leave, or, commit yourself, or whatever—they arise and they fuck us. So I don’t know.
I’m speculating wildly because it’s a brief question, but I wonder if that’s part of what’s going on here. All of your alternatives assume not just that you’re a jerk—that you’re selfish—but that this is a decision that somehow has to do with you in isolation. Isn’t the thing about love that the center of your world shifts, that you start seeing your world not only from your own position but also as the other person sees it? That you’re as dedicated to their growth and their thriving in the world as much as your own, and they do the same for you and with you, if you’re lucky? It changes you. You’re in this constant negotiation because of that.
So this is why I think your question about your intellectual responsibility is really good. But I also want to say that if you didn’t know how to describe this situation to yourself, you might find out later that the intellectual reason—if there is one—might be different from what you thought. But I do think there’s a way to talk about a breakup and to think about it yourself that’s a little bit better than the way you’ve set it up.
This made me think of a passage from from the beginning of Anna Deavere Smith’s play Fires in the Mirror. She’s interviewing the playwright Ntozake Shange, and Shange says this thing that made no sense to me the first time I heard it, when I was very young. She’s talking about knowing who you are, and she says that you don’t know what you’re giving if you don’t know what you have, and you don’t know what you’re taking if you don’t know what’s yours and somebody else’s. If you’re in the desert, she says, you have to know what’s you and what’s the desert. And I first heard that when I was like twenty, and it didn’t make sense to me. I was like . . . what? The self is a construct. What’s all this stuff about knowing who you are and knowing what’s yours and what’s other people’s? But those words have stayed with me, and I think it’s one thing that you can sort of test and know in those crucial moments in relationships, when everything is a mess. Over and over again, you bring stuff to relationships, right? And you might start to notice what that stuff is. And you are capable of saying and thinking, “what is this thing that I’m always bringing, what is this story that always starts getting told whenever I’m in a relationship?” You can take responsibility for that, I think. You can take an intellectual responsibility for that, for sort of tracking it, and for not imagining that that story is the way it is because of the other person. And so if you ended up hearing the same voice over and over again—“I’m afraid of commitment, I’m afraid of commitment”—then you could say, “wait, I’m always afraid of commitment.” But maybe that’s not this relationship.
DT: That’s very wise.
Dear Help Desk,
I have a friend—several friends, but one in particular—who has a habit of, in the first few moments we get a drink, launching into a monologue that will sometimes go on (I tested this once) for as long as forty-five minutes if she is not interrupted. The topics seem to range from how she’s been mistreated to how she’s been ignored or misunderstood. She seems like she’s talking to me, kind of, as she makes eye contact and acts very much like I must be interested, but it’s really difficult to be interested. And yet, this is the thing: I really like this friend. I’m drawn to her. I care about her. I’m not going to stop being friends with her. She can be wildly generous in other ways. For example, she once took care of my cat for three months. I just want it to be more of a, you know, back and forth. What should I do?
Breathless in Budapest
KD: My advice here is simple. Interrupt her. This is actually a really hard thing to learn to do. There’s something that’s very tempting to do in that situation, which is: stop breathing and start judging and start diagnosing, right? And the minute you do that, you’re abandoning that person in a way, but you’re also at risk of turning cold yourself, and then you’re stuck, right? I’m a recovering really shy person, so I spend a lot of time not speaking unless someone asks me a direct question. But what I’ve learned is that actually, people who are really fluent talkers, sometimes they need help, they want help, they want not to be left alone in this monologue, so what if you’re actually just like, tormenting your friend by abandoning her to go on and on?
Sometimes when you interrupt someone like that they look at you gratefully. I mean, sometimes they don’t, but because you say that you’re drawn to this person and that you care about her, there are two alternatives. The first is kind of promoted by the self-help realm: this is a person who doesn’t care about you, this is a person who doesn’t have empathy, this is a person about whom you should say, “this is a toxic person. It’s an imbalanced relationship.” And maybe that’s true sometimes, but if you don’t want it to be that way, it might be that you act differently with this person than you do with others. Give her a life raft.
DT: Yeah, I’m not waving, I’m drowning.
KD: I’m not waving, I’m drowning. Exactly.
Dear Help Desk,
My brother thinks I’m selfish because I refuse to give him rides when I don’t feel like it. I think he’s selfish because he won’t learn how to drive. He’s twenty-five, able-bodied, socially active, and claims to enjoy “relying on other people.” Who’s right?
Sincerely,
Keys to the Street
KD: I would view this from a purely utilitarian perspective. We don’t know very much about the situation. So while you’re riding in the car, does your brother entertain you with witty anecdotes? Does he tell you stories about his day? Does he ask you questions about your own life? Is he contributing anything to this ride situation at all? Or is he sort of sitting there, like some kind of prince who expects to be driven around? Is he sort of sulking because his goal isn’t to rely on other people, but to feel like some kind of celebrity? I don’t usually think of things in utilitarian perspectives, but in this case—in the case of sibling relationships, and it’s also maybe true in romance—we kind of weave a web of transactions where we rely on other people and they rely on us, and if there’s some other location other than the car-riding situation where he’s doing things for you, then this might not actually be a bad thing. We don’t need cars. We don’t need to have more cars. Not everybody should have a car, you know? Maybe there’s a reason to live that way. However, you are siblings. You’re brother and sister. I would bet that there’s something about this car-riding situation that is part of something that’s been going on since you guys were very young. And I think that one of the most interesting and important things that you can do in life is be friends with your sibling, and learn what that stuff is. Because this is the only person who’s lived in the closest thing to the same world as you, and yet also lived in a completely different world. And so now you’re in these two worlds, these two different definitions of selfishness and generosity, and I would kind of suggest you throw those terms out and, like, get down to business.
Dear Help Desk,
I’ve been thinking a lot about the simultaneous worlds people live in. The physical world, in the personal world of heart and mind, and the virtual world of the internet. We are all living in all of these worlds at varying degrees at all times. What happens when more and more people decide to spend the majority of their time in the virtual world, while others don’t want to? I’m thinking about Pokémon Go as a phenomenon for more people moving themselves into a digital space. As a willing participant in the physical world but not a willing participant in the virtual game occurring on top of my physical world, do I become a prop in the game, like a tree? Is there a Pikachu on my head? This somehow feels like a violation, a breach between worlds. What happens when the social contract between personal physical space and virtual physical space is violated by an unseen computer program that I have not chosen to participate in? Do I then become an interloper, or a trespasser in the virtual world that is using my physical world as their game board? Do I become a piece of the game that I didn’t decide to play? Or are the players of this game intruding on my world? Can you please help me figure this out?
Sincerely,
Lost in Space
KD: Right? A lot of people, around me, at least, are having this kind of threshold moment where it’s like, okay, now we’ve crossed over to this thing we’ve been expecting for a while, where these worlds are coming together. I was at a bar a couple of weeks ago and my friend was bartending, and three things happened. Her manager, who was watching the bar from her home, started changing the music in the bar. Her boss called and told her that she shouldn’t have done something she’d just done. And then there was a woman next to me, and there was a Pikachu on the bar in front of us for her—but not for me. And for me this was the moment when I was like, oh, this isn’t the past or the present anymore, this is the future. Here we are. This is what’s happening. Right? Whatever it is. So it’s a great question. My head kind of explodes when I think about this. Doesn’t yours? Because I’m wary of treating it as a violation or fearing it just because it’s happening. You know, that’s the way I look at it. I don’t think there’s any way around it, so it’s more about, how do we deal with it?
Dear Help Desk,
I tend to avoid talking politics with my relatives because we often disagree, and confrontation is not the family style. My sympathies slip out from time to time: yes, Obama is a U.S. citizen. No, ebola isn’t spreading via immigrants. But I’ve never argued outright, because staying on good terms feels more important than changing their minds. Recently, though, I’ve been thinking I should at least broach the subject with my younger Floridian cousins, some of whom are voting for the first time. Maybe I can talk them out of voting for Trump, if that’s the way they’re leaning. I feel it’s selfish of me not to, since the only reason I haven’t is that it’s uncomfortable and difficult for me. But I also feel like I should just let them vote how they want to vote, since I’m not that interested in hearing their arguments for Trump. They’ll only drive me crazy, and if I try to listen I fear I’ll snap. Is it more selfish to try to sway them my way, or try to leave them be? If I do approach them, how do I do it without losing my head?
Yours,
Chicken in Chinatown
DT: This is actually just me.
KD: This is your question.
DT: This is my question.
KD: But it’s a lot of people’s question.
DT: I think it’s a lot of people’s question.
KD: Yeah.
DT: So what do I do?
KD: I want to say first that to me, this is an example of a situation where . . . even though I know I asked for questions about selfishness and narcissism, selfishness is maybe not a helpful word here, right?
DT: Well kind of. I do think that my instinct—which feels like a self-preserving one—is not to do anything. And I do feel like the negative consequences are more obvious and immediate and personal. Selfish. Because, you know, obviously the right thing to do is to talk to them and really listen to what they have to say. Like, really listen and try to understand what’s underpinning their arguments. But, knowing my family and knowing how these arguments usually go in the broader culture, I’m going to hear headlines I’ve read. I don’t want to talk about Benghazi, but I know that the right thing to do—the unselfish thing to do—is to talk to them, but to talk to them about Benghazi. So that’s why it feels selfish—that’s why selfishness feels like it has to be part of the question. I’m like, is there a corner I can cut here, where I can have this conversation and convince them and win without doing a lot of work?
KD: Or, can you have the conversation because you’re interested, even if that’s not extended to you, as well?
DT: I am interested, or I feel like I would be interested if I felt like they had . . . I think this is why it’s important that these are my young cousins—that they don’t appear to be political. They don’t post Donald Trump memes. They post beautiful pictures of themselves having finished their second half-marathon, looking awesome and being sweet. And so I don’t really imagine that they have a rich interior life on this subject. I kind of imagine that they’re just doing what their parents do. So in that sense I’m not that interested, but maybe I should be more interested.
KD: This brings up something I really struggle with. I was politically conservative for the first half of my life and then completely changed, and when I was inside that world I had no sense of a world outside of it. When I started to meet people who were more progressive, they were so shocked by my existence that they didn’t have a way of talking to me that wasn’t kind of condescending. Even so, they made a huge impression. They started to make these chinks in the unity of the world that I lived in. Clearly, we have at least two very different worlds in this country. It’s so hard for people on either side of this election to understand people on the other side. And I think you’re right that if we don’t have a sort of evangelical mission to inform the whole world of our rightness—and this goes for people on either side—what is it that keeps us from trying to understand the others? It’s going to be uncomfortable, right, so what is it that motivates you to do it?
DT: Right now it’s fear of the consequences.
KD: Right.
DT: Which is not exactly a generous motivation. It’s like I feel like I have to.
KD: But isn’t the bigger issue that those of us on either side aren’t writing to each other more generally? Or writing against each other? I think the problem here is not about your family—it’s about what motive we have to talk to people outside our filter bubble, the little virtual world that we make. One piece of advice would be to try to have those conversations with people here, not putting the fabric of your family, as you put it, at risk, right? So that you’re kind of channeling that guilt toward . . . but what does that mean? How do we do that?
DT: What’s funny about that is that I think that my family is one of the last few places where I encounter people with seriously differing political opinions and cultural backgrounds, as odd as that may be.
KD: But that’s probably true for a lot of people.
DT: I think it’s true for a lot of people.
KD: So maybe that’s a place to start. If I say anything about this, it would just be like, super cheesy: I think we all kind of have to try. We really do.
DT: What’s the best way to do it? And maybe some practical background would be: I’m not super tight with this family, but pretty close. I love them a lot, we see each other on holidays, and we have a lot in common, if not this particular thing. The other thing is, I’m not even sure if they are voting one ticket or the other. I haven’t even talked to them about it because nobody’s willing to go there. I just know that their families usually vote Republican. I feel so embarrassed and chicken that I don’t know how to handle this, but what do I do? It’ll be like, “oh hey, it’s me, your cousin you haven’t seen in a while. I’m sending you a personal email.” They’re going to be like, “I’m on Snapchat. “
KD: Oh, you’re not actually going to be visiting them. You’re just wondering if you should reach out and bring up your political views.
DT: I’m just like, how do I even enter the world of Pokémon Go? I think I just need to accept the fact that I’m not going to be cool. And I don’t mean cool as in, impressive or whatever, I mean, like, I’m going to seem mad awkward.
KD: You’re just going to write to them and be like, “so who are you voting for?”
DT: Yeah, maybe. “ This is awkward, but . . . who are you voting for?”
KD: I wish you were hanging out with them.
DT: My sister is closer with them. And they worship her, they love her. Worship is strong, but she’s the coolest, and I’m kind of trying to pawn it off on her, because they actually have hung out more recently. She’s like, “I’ll give them money.” I told her that she didn’t have to give them money—she should just say, “oh my god, you’re so cool, I’m obsessed with you, who are you voting for?” And they’ll do it.
KD: Maybe your sister should do it.
DT: Okay. Maybe I’ll make my sister do it.
KD: But I’m worrying about the larger question, which is: how do we cross these lines to talk to people and write to people more generally? But, I need a cigarette.
DT: Let’s have one.
KD: Okay.
DT: This has been the Help Desk on the n+1 podcast. Thanks to Kristin for answering our questions, and all of our advice-seekers for writing in. To submit a question to the Help Desk, you can write to Kristin at askkristin@nplusonemag.com. Kristin’s book, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism, is out now. Thanks to Frances Harlow for producing this episode, and to Malcolm Donaldson, in absentia, for producing the n+1 podcast. Also to Aaron Braun, Eric Wen, and Emily Lyver. Thanks for listening.
Anna Wiener speaks with editor Dayna Tortorici about her essay “Uncanny Valley,” a fictionalized account of her time working in the Silicon Valley tech industry. Anna and Dayna discuss the background of the story and how it became one of the magazine’s most popular pieces.
Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen
Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson
Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen
Graphics by Eric Wen
Music from Dinosaur L, The Smiths, The Clean, Neil Young, Gary Numan, Teengirl Fantasy
Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (88.4 MB).
Malcolm Donaldson: Hi, and welcome to the n+1 podcast. In Issue 25, Slow Burn, Anna Wiener contributed her story, “Uncanny Valley,” a fictionalized account of her time working in the San Francisco tech world. Anna talks with Dayna Tortorici, who edited the piece, about how this quickly became one of the magazine’s most popular pieces, and why.
Dayna Tortorici: I want to start by telling people about how this article came to be. What’s your story?
Anna Wiener: The story that I have been telling people is that I started writing this as a way to entertain you.
DT: To entertain me?
AW: To entertain you.
DT: Me personally?
AW: Yeah, you specifically. After you came to San Francisco and stayed with me and sort of saw a little bit of the tech industry and the start-up world . . . I was under the impression, perhaps the delusion, that I was writing these anecdotes for you. But I think you have a different story.
DT: I do, I have a little bit of a different story. I do remember coming to stay with you in San Francisco, and I remember going to the coffee shop around the corner and being totally delighted and surprised by the fact that everyone who was working on their laptops seemed to be editing code in public, which I had never seen before. Because in other cities, when people are sitting in coffee shops working on their laptops, they’re . . . I don’t know, writing their novels or their screenplays, or looking at Twitter. And so I came back and told you how amazing it is when things conform to type, because it was all so perfectly clichéd. And then I asked you if you had written about this, and you said you had some stuff stowed away. And then I forgot. And months later, I asked you to review a book about women and feminism and sexism in tech. And to my memory, you said, “Hey, I read the book, it’s fine, but I don’t really have much to say about it. Can I write something else instead?” And then you sent me the first draft of the piece.
AW Right. That’s right.
DT: Is that correct?
AW: That is correct. I guess I’ve deliberately washed that out of my mind. Lean Out is a book of first-person essays by women in tech about working in tech, and it’s very critical. It’s good, but I think I might’ve written to you that it felt like a zine to me.
DT: You did.
AW: So it didn’t seem like I needed to add anything to that conversation. But I do wonder if writing this piece in the first person dovetails with that project more than I might have acknowledged initially.
DT: So then what happened? You sent me the piece. I sent it to Nikil Saval, our coeditor. He was delighted by it because he used to live in San Francisco, and of course when he was writing his book, Cubed, about the history of the office, he visited many tech offices. And he said that the piece was very true to what he had seen. And I think we just . . . ran with it.
AW: Sort of. I then rewrote the piece in a fit of anxiety. I wanted to be compassionate to everyone involved. These are people I’m friends with, these are the people that I date—they’re the people I admire and respect. So anything critical felt a little bit like a betrayal. Even though there aren’t that many specific characters in the piece and a lot of them are composites. It’s fiction. So I rewrote it in a much softer tone—it was a little mopier and had longer sections about my failed love life, which was totally off topic. There was some silence after I sent in this second draft, this updated version, which was more about a girl alone in the city than a specific piece about start-up life. My start-up life. And then you sent back a version. You were like, “so I brought this to the editorial meeting, and I cobbled together pieces from both drafts,” and I was like . . . that’s a nightmare. But it turned out a lot better than what I had written. I was really hedging, in your words—trying not to offend anyone, trying not to poke fun without qualifying at length. And so I think you had more of a vision for what this piece was than I did. And for what the value of this kind of writing would be. The value of this kind of writing is not to criticize and apologize. I think you really teased out a voice from the piece.
DT: Well, not to be like, “no, you!” but it was all there in the beginning. What surprised me from the jump was that anyone who wanted to write about start-up culture for n+1 would probably be much meaner, would be more likely to paint in broader strokes and just anti-Silicon Valley in the style of, say, Rebecca Solnit. The things you were hedging on were so anodyne. You wrote that all of this was “getting some kids unfathomably rich,” but then you were like, “well, technically they’re not kids, and technically it’s the shareholders who get rich.” And I was like, “Come on. That’s a really good line.”
AW: You were like, “that’s exactly what someone drunk and indignant would say.”
DT: Yes.
AW: Which is true.
DT: That’s what I would say.
AW: I probably wrote it while drunk, indignantly, so . . .
DT: Which is the best way to write.
AW: I don’t write drunk. I just write stoned and then email it to myself.
DT: Yeah, what’s your . . . This is now a Paris Review interview.
AW: What’s my process?
DT: What’s your process?
AW: Well, Dayna, I portion out six almonds into a small dish for breakfast.
DT: Then I take some sour diesel reserve and sprinkle it onto my almonds.
AW: And then I meditate for eight hours.
DT: I wanted to talk about the response to the piece, because it seemed to catch you by surprise.
AW: That’s for sure. I’ve said this before, and I apologize in advance, but I really didn’t think anyone was going to read it. You know, n+1 has a really dedicated niche audience on the east coast—that would be my guess. The fact that anyone was reading it in the first place was surprising to me because I figured that people on the east coast wouldn’t care that much about a narrative about the tech industry in San Francisco, and I didn’t think anyone in the tech industry would ever see it. Which was naive because it was on the internet.
DT: People who work on the internet love reading about the internet on the internet.
AW: I think that’s true. And also, I think the tech industry is typically represented in one of two ways. The more common one is this snarky, shady, quasi-satirical way that doesn’t really acknowledge that the industry is full of people who, for better or for worse, really believe in what they’re doing. To make fun of it in that way isn’t nuanced. And the other way is through a non-critical tech press, which is boostery—and has to be, because they need access. So for people to read something about the industry that was neither boostery nor mean was interesting, I think. I don’t mean to say that I wrote anything about the tech industry that was definitive. I think there’s a lot of space for people to contribute between those two poles.
DT: Can I tell you my theory about why people liked it so much?
AW: Yes.
DT: This is a completely unsubstantiated theory.
AW: That’s the best kind of theory.
DT: I think that one of the reasons it hit home for so many people (it’s one of the most widely circulated pieces n+1 has published online, second only, I think, to the Pussy Riot closing statements from 2012) was that you wrote about a group of people who spend a lot of time looking at a screen and thinking very carefully about how they present themselves on the screen and interact with other people on the screen and the entire universe that’s happening inside the screen. So the idea that they are visible to people beyond the realm of the screen catches them off guard. It’s a very simple and sort of naive thing, but just to remember that you’re embodied and that other people can see you in the office with your shot blocks and your baggies of wet meat and the things you say in person “off the record” . . . I think a lot of people didn’t feel seen, in that way. They feel very seen in the register they’re used to presenting themselves in, but not as humans in the workplace.
AW: That’s interesting. The embodied workplace can go one of two ways. In a lot of small companies there’s a bit of what we used to call the ass-in-chair metric, where the number of hours you were sitting at your desk was noted. Your physical presence in the office was very important. I’ve spoken to a lot of people—especially a lot of women who have children—who say that it’s hard to work at a small start-up. This is probably true for a lot of different companies, but it’s hard to work at small start-ups because leaving at 5 PM to pick up your kids from after-school programs puts you in a place of scrutiny where people think you’re not doing your job, or you’re not doing your job as well as the people who are in the office until 9 PM. In some ways, you really do need to be seen in these workplaces. But on the flip side of that, I work in a company where more than half of the 550-plus employees don’t report in to the San Francisco office—they don’t work in any office. I work for someone who lives in Amsterdam, and the people on my team are from all over the United States, and I’m in New York right now, and I worked this morning from six until noon. (I don’t think anyone else on my team noticed that that was a shift, really.) So I don’t really agree that it’s people who felt seen for the first time, physically, but I’m really compelled by that thesis.
DT: Unsubstantiated theory.
AW: Unsubstantiated theory.
DT: I’d like to read you a tweet.
AW: I wish you would.
DT: By Chris Sacca, who is on ABC’s Shark Tank. He says, “If you’ve worked in Silicon Valley, you’ll recognize yourself in this genius @annawiener piece. Frankly it should start with a trigger warning.” So this is one of many guys who tweeted the piece. Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed tweeted the piece. This guy at the White House said something about how he was scared to read the piece for a week, but then he was finally going to read it.
AW: That might be the great achievement of my writing career: scaring a man on the internet away from reading it.
DT: What were some notable reactions to your piece?
AW: I got a lot of email.
DT: From whom?
AW: Mostly from people who worked in tech or once worked in tech. Some people who have worked in tech for twenty years who wrote to say that it looks like not much has changed.
DT: People who are still in tech or people who have left?
AW: Both. I got a lot of emails from people who work in the industry now and who saw something articulated that they recognized from their own experience—or just felt was missing from the larger narratives we tend to hear about the tech industry. I do want to clarify that I mean the start-up universe. There’s a difference, culturally, between working at Google and working at a twenty-person company. Having never worked at Google I can’t speak to what the former experience is like. But when you work at a start-up—especially when it’s quite small—not only do you know every other employee, but you basically know what’s going on in most parts of the business. And your investment is not necessarily more personal, but perhaps it’s more distributed across a company.
DT: What do you mean?
AW: What I’m trying to say is that this is very much a start-up story and not a tech industry story.
DT: Got it.
AW: So I tended to hear from people who had worked at early-stage start-ups, or still do.
DT: You texted me to say that you were getting a lot of emails from men.
AW: I continue to get a lot of emails from men.
DT: Are these men asking you out?
AW: I don’t think so. Maybe. I’ve been trying to figure this out.
DT: But they’re not not asking you out.
AW: Well, no. I don’t think anyone’s explicitly asking me out. I think people maybe identified a kindred spirit in this narrative voice. A couple people asked me for coffee or for a beer—there was one email that I thought was particularly funny, when a guy said “it would be fun to meet you.” I laughed and laughed because no one I’ve ever met has ever called me fun, and I’m just so tickled by that assumption. But mostly, I think people were just looking to connect. And a big part of that is that you really do connect with coworkers, and you feel as if you’re in this thing together. You get to know each other’s partners, you get to spend from 9 AM to 11 PM in the same space getting meals together, getting drunk together. It can be really hard to sort of step outside of that and say, “wait a minute, I actually do feel like an outsider in this culture we’ve created.” Maybe for some people, I’m the outsider that they want to talk to, like we’re at a party and they’ve identified me as the person standing against the wall looking uncomfortable.
DT: So there aren’t that many public wallflowers. All the public expressions of identity are either “we’re all in!” or “I’m quitting because this is not for me.” People seem to be surprised that you still work in tech.
AW: I understand that surprise.
DT: They assume that you had worked at this job and then quit.
AW: Which I did. I just quit with another job in hand, also in the tech industry.
DT: Speaking of criticism, there are two moments in the piece where you quite gently call out some either unconsciously or consciously sexist behavior, or mostly just unprofessional behavior. One is an anecdote about being interviewed by the technical cofounder of a company who says he’s never interviewed anyone before, so he just has you take the LSAT. You do well, but then you say you feel lower than low for having taken it. And the other one is a guy whose screensaver—or maybe the background of his phone—is an animated gif of breasts bouncing.
AW: That’s an app on his smart watch.
DT: A skin, as it were. Did those people reach out to you in any way? Did they recognize themselves in those anecdotes?
AW: Some of them did. My former coworker and friend with the smart watch app emailed me and apologized profusely. He said he didn’t even realize when he was in it that this could have been alienating.
DT: I saw a tweet about the piece that said something like, “this is the most deliberately not shared but privately emailed by women piece I’ve ever read in my life.” Which is a weird construction, but I took it to mean that there are so many women in my life who are reading this piece, emailing it to their friends, sharing it on private Slack channels, but not posting it on social media. Because it speaks some truth about the pervasive—if sometimes anodyne—sexism of Silicon Valley. I was curious about what you thought of that—and also if you had any theories about why people didn’t feel comfortable sharing it publicly. Because it’s not a terribly subversive piece—it was shared very widely by men and embraced wholeheartedly by men.
AW: There are a lot of questions in that question.
DT: I know. I’m sorry.
AW: As an editor, or as a reader, did you think that it was a piece about sexism?
DT: Not primarily. I wouldn’t say that it’s a piece about sexism, but I did think of it as a piece that addressed sexism in start-up culture, or the sexism that is inevitable—unfortunately—in male-dominated workplaces. One of my very best friends worked in tech, but she quit because she was so tired of having to fight for very basic dignities at work, like being granted the same benefits and titles as her male co-engineers. So hearing about the culture from her, I was sensitive to it in what you were writing. The section where you talk about writing the email to your mom, and how she tells you not to put complaints about sexism in writing unless you have a lawyer at the ready—that section drove it home. There’s also been some really good writing about this recently in the context of the literary world. I’m thinking specifically of Jia Tolentino’s Jezebel piece about VIDA. There’s a desire for accountability greater than nothing, but less than something that would be penalized by law. You see the legal system—including NDAs—used by men all the time to quash “false accusations” of sexual harassment before they even happen. So here you were, calmly noting to your own mother the things you’re seeing at work and expecting her to tell you that you’re the change this industry needs, and instead she told you—very wisely—not to put complaints about sexism in writing unless you have a lawyer at the ready. This speaks volumes to me about a culture that’s armed with many legal instruments to prevent certain kinds of conversations from even happening. Which is to say that I did think it was a piece about sexism, but not primarily so—I didn’t think that was its only or central merit, or its central aim.
DT: I want to talk about your NDA. I know you can’t talk about your NDA.
AW: We can talk about the NDA. NDAs are super common. Like, you sign an NDA when you walk into any tech company.
DT: You sign an NDA when you walk into most companies, I think.
AW: I signed an NDA when I walked into this apartment.
DT: I thought it was interesting how the NDA became a kind of formal constraint on the piece. For as long as people have written in the nonfiction genre—for as long as they’ve written longform literary journalism or memoir—writers have had to take on a certain responsibility to make sure that they’re comfortable with how they represent other people. They’ve had to be willing to accept the consequences of that representation. If there hadn’t been an NDA, you would have felt some sort of fidelity or responsibility to your friends and coworkers—you wouldn’t have wanted to put them on blast because you like them and you’re a nice person. But the NDA creates an obstacle that’s different from the dictates of journalism and different from the ethics of the journalist or the memoirist. It’s a legal hurdle that also affects this kind of writing. So I have two questions. First, did it feel like an impediment when you were writing, something that you were conscious of and had to edit around? Second, do you think that NDAs hamper—or in some ways prevent—more people from writing narratives like this?
AW: Those are good questions. It was an impediment, but maybe not in the way you’re suggesting. An NDA isn’t there to protect people’s feelings. What I mainly wished I could have written about—but which I can’t and won’t write about—is what it’s like to work at a company where the product is a data analytics product. So a lot of your customers are other tech companies. Theoretically one might say that a lot of the customers of a company like that are other tech products. So when you’re working one-on-one with these different companies—many of which are well known software companies—you get some insights into how some of these businesses are doing. Even something as seemingly benign as going on-site to another company’s office—I wish I could write about that, because it’s so fun to see how these other companies are run, and what’s important to them, and who these people are who are building and selling and working on the apps that people use everyday. But that’s something I just really can’t get into for many reasons. That’s really where I felt impeded—it wasn’t emotional, it was just not getting to write about the ins and outs a little bit more. I’ve forgotten your second question.
DT: The second question was whether you think NDAs prevent people from writing more stuff like this.
AW: Well, there’s a difference between an NDA and a non-disparagement agreement, or a non-disparagement clause. The paperwork I signed when I joined this company included a non-disparagement clause, I believe. Or basically it said that within a year of leaving this company you agree not to—
DT: Talk shit.
AW: Yeah, you agree not to talk shit or do anything that would hamper the business.
DT: But it only lasts a year?
AW: It lasts a year.
DT: They’re really counting on people to not hold grudges. They’re like, “the average grudge lasts one calendar year.”
AW: Data analytics for grudges.
DT: I could use that in my life.
AW: I do know people who quit or got fired, and in order to get a severance package, they had to sign a non-disparagement agreement that is longer than a year. I think this is also boilerplate. You also agree not to poach people for your own company, or where you go next, or you agree not to work with a competitor. I think the assumption is that after a year, your sense of trade secrets is slightly diminished. I know no trade secrets, so this doesn’t apply to me. I’ve read a lot of first-person accounts of working at start-ups. People post them on their blogs, they post them on Medium, they post them on Twitter and write tweetstorms that are really specific and negative and very personal. And that has to do with the fact that in some cases, companies don’t ask their early employees to sign an NDA because it doesn’t occur to them—and also because some people are just ballsier than I am, so to speak. People have more guts than I do. What was the name of that book that came out recently? Disrupted.
DT: I had never heard about that book, and then I saw people refer to it in reference to your piece. They kept saying that your piece was better than that book.
AW: I resent the comparison, although I understand why people would compare the two. Dan Lyons is a journalist, a former editor of Valleywag. He went to work for a company in Boston, a big company I’m forgetting the name of, and he worked there for a year and then wrote a tell-all book about it, which is exactly the sort of writing I hope never to do. I don’t have beef. He’s a good writer, and he’s very funny. But my sense is that he took this job so that he could write this book.
DT: So it seems opportunistic. And disingenuous.
AW: It does. I would be lucky to have the sense of humor he has, but Disrupted really skewers a culture without investigating its human side. And I guess I’m just sort of sensitive about it because I did join this industry and did feel a part of it for a while—I always felt like an outsider, but I did want to be a part of it and joined it out of sincere curiosity and excitement, as I think so many people do.
DT: Do you think it’s a bubble?
AW: The economy?
DT: The industry specifically. There’s a saying that as soon as the schoolteachers and preachers get in on the action, you know you have a bubble. It seems like everybody and their mom has an idea for an app. Does this mean that this is the beginning of the end?
AW: No, I think that’s the point of the technology—to be accessible for everyone and their mom and their priest to have an app idea. That’s the point. Culturally, sure there’s a bubble. But I don’t think it’s any more of a bubble than the one I lived in when I worked in publishing. All my friends worked in publishing, and all my conversations were about books. And I loved that bubble. And I think the only reason this bubble is getting so much publicity is because unlike publishing, there’s a lot of money and power associated with it.
AW: Ellen Ullman told me a story when I was interviewing her for a profile last year . . . this isn’t really my story to share, but I’m going to share it anyway because it might be interesting. She told me about how she went to speak to a college class about how the industry really needs to change—about how more queer people, more people of color, and more women should be encouraged to move into the industry, and that that’s how tech is going to move forward—that’s how it’s going to change. She said that a guy came up to her afterward—a shy-looking young man, a little socially awkward. And he said, “it’s not gonna change that much, though, is it?” It hadn’t occurred to her that for him, and for people like him, everything that makes the industry so hard to break into—so alienating for people who are not the archetype of the soft-spoken nerdy coder—actually made it safe.
DT: I confess I’m much less sympathetic than you are. The first thing I think is . . . well, that’s great, but did they have to destroy the city of San Francisco to build their safe space? And did they need to become the richest people in the world in the process? And isn’t it kind of scary that people who feel like outcasts or nerds precisely because they lack social skills are now tasked with social responsibility because they are the wealthiest people in the country? Yikes!
AW: Yes, all of this is great. I’m on board with all of this.
DT: Well, thanks, Anna.
AW: Thank you, Dayna. Longtime listener, first-time caller. Such a pleasure.
Malcolm Donaldson: Thank you to Anna Wiener and Dayna Tortorici. The n+1 podcast is produced by Malcolm Donaldson, Eric Wen, Aaron Braun, and Emily Lyver. Thanks for listening.
This month on the n+1 podcast, we talk about baseball. First, Will Augerot joins us to lay out the statistical qualities of the game. Then, Richard Beck and Cosme Del Rosario-Bell question whether baseball goes beyond group therapy.
Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Moira Donegan, and Eric Wen
Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson
Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Moira Donegan, and Eric Wen
Graphics by Eric Wen
Music from Dinosaur L, Peter Lang, Judee Sill, Kevin Morby, The Feelies, James Chance and the Contortions
Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (62.1 MB).
Malcolm Donaldson: This is the n+1 podcast. This month, we’re talking about baseball, and we’re talking about talking about baseball. In the first interview, podcast editor Aaron Braun speaks with Will Augerot, our resident Mets expert. And in the other, Aaron sits down with associate editor Richard Beck and business manager Cosme Del Rosario-Bell. Will lays out the statistical qualities of the game, while Cosme and Rich question whether baseball goes beyond group therapy. Here’s Will:
Will Augerot: It’s simultaneously a team sport, but each moment and action in a game is discrete, and other than turning a double play, some things like that are more collaborative. But for the most part, each player is on his own. The pitcher is on his own, coordinating with the catcher of course, but the pitcher has to throw his pitch—it’s not the same as a point-guard getting an assist or something like that. And the batter is just there. He’s on his own. Unless someone’s stealing signs and telling him what the pitch is going to be, or something like that. But it’s less of a team sport than other sports, and it’s also more random because you can string together hits. If you get a few hits in a row, maybe you’ll score a few runs, and if you spread the hits out, if you get one hit per inning and you have nine hits in a game, and they’re all singles, you’re not going to score any runs. If you get nine hits in a row, nine singles in a row in the first inning, you’re going to score, you know, seven runs or something like that. And that sort of randomness and ordering of things doesn’t exist in other sports that I can think of off the top of my head.
Aaron Braun: No sport does statistics like baseball.
WA: Definitely not. And, yeah, statistics are really important. You can look at a box score and recreate the whole game and know everything that happened in that game pretty well, and you can write a play-by-play of the game. You can write a report on the game, just based on looking at the box score, and you couldn’t do that with basketball.
AB: How do you feel when the national anthem comes on at a baseball game? Is it something that causes internal dialogue?
Richard Beck: Yes. Well, not dialogue—I just, I always dislike it a ton. Most of the time, when I hear the national anthem at a sporting event, it’s a baseball game, because I go to more baseball games than other sporting events, but it has always struck me as a horrible tick of U.S. chauvinism, that the national anthem gets played every time there’s a game played—and not just professional sports but every college sporting event, and I think high school sporting events have the national anthem, too.
AB: Yeah.
RB: You really have to get down to small children before they’re not doing the national anthem anytime a game gets played.
Cosme Del Rosario-Bell: Right.
RB: You were talking earlier about standing up vs. not standing up.
AB: Yeah, I was saying that my family, historically, has not stood for the pledge of allegiance.
CDRB: Pledge of allegiance?
AB: Wait, what was I saying before? The national anthem?
RB and CDRB: National anthem.
AB: See, I can’t even tell the two apart. But that, too. Yeah, anything except for the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” because good leftists—
CDRB: Great tune.
AB: —appreciate and respect Abraham Lincoln. And we would always just go get snacks, except for this one time when my parents weren’t there and I was with my Australian cousin, and he had this strange way that he thought he was being really respectful. The way he explained it was, this is not my country, so I will not stand for it, because it’s not my country.
RB: Like not taking communion at a Catholic mass if you’re not a Catholic.
AB: Yeah. I mean, I’ve never done it, the communion, but yeah.
CDRB: But did he still get yelled at by some Long Island dad?
AB: Yeah. And his son was there, too, and it was clearly breeding the next generation of Trump voters.
CDRB: The Long Island dad’s son was there.
AB: He was definitely showing off for the son—
CDRB: Nice.
AB: —when he was screaming at us.
RB: Did your parents not stand for the national anthem in any context, or was it only at baseball?
AB: Yeah, almost in no context. At my sister’s graduation . . .
RB: They also sat?
AB: Yeah. Ken Burns gave the commencement address. It was so long.
RB: Nine parts?
AB: Yeah, seriously.
RB: Nine hour-long installments?
AB: And I was like, seven. I had no time for it.
RB: Did your parents get grief for not standing for the national anthem?
AB: I think that contrary to the stereotype, they took really strong positions but did everything possible to hide those positions from other people, because they wanted to be able to take those personal stands but still, like, avoid them.
RB: But not make a spectacle of them.
AB: But not make a spectacle of them. So, yeah, always get snacks during the game, things like that.
CDRB: My tactic has been, since I’ve only just recently restarted going to baseball games . . . usually I’m coming from work, and I’m already pretty late, and I like to take notes for the game. I like to do the scorecard, so usually I’m just furiously pretending, or actually putting in the lineups because I didn’t get them in on time. So if somebody looks at me, usually I think—I hope—that they are seeing somebody very dedicated to the sport, just, like, behind.
RB: Or just an oblivious nerd.
CDRB: Or just an oblivious nerd, yeah.
RB: Right. Not a political actor.
CDRB: Not a political actor.
WA: You can really relive something just by looking at the box score, and it happens less and less, but you’ll see, you know, if you go to Citi Field, you’ll see people with scorecards filling them out, and it’s because they want to remember the game. And when I’m writing about baseball, the most helpful thing for me is baseballreference.com. I can go back and look at any box score of any game that’s happened in the last hundred years, and know what happened, and when and it’s really helpful. I wouldn’t have been able to write those pieces without that resource. And I’m sure that anyone else writing . . .
AB: There are all these discrete points of data. This person was batting .260.
WA: Yeah.
AB: But their slugging percentage was .400, as opposed to like .300.
WA: Yeah.
AB: And the pitcher was this, and had had a really bad day the night before. Or something like that.
WA: Yeah.
AB: If it was David Wells, he was probably hung-over.
WA: Yeah.
AB: Is there a downside to what you were talking about earlier, with being able to, reduce games to numbers? Because usually, when I hear people talking about that, it’s in a negative light. They’ll talk about Statcast, for example.
WA: Yeah.
AB: And the kind of churning of baseball into numbers and decisions by managers being made based on those numbers. Do you see that as a downside?
WA: I can see why someone would think that it’s a downside, that baseball is reducible to numbers in a way that other sports aren’t. But personally I think that the way that it is concrete allows a writer or a fan to create all these fantasies about what’s going on and have fun with it, you know, and I think that that’s why there are all these superstitions around baseball, and all these curses and stuff, because it’s . . . in a weird way, I think that baseball is kind of manageable.
AB: So in a way, what you’re saying is that the tendency towards reducing baseball to numbers—which at first glance would, at least to me, seem like a way of controlling, bringing order to something that seems completely random—is perhaps the very thing that kind of fuels superstition and, like, fantasy.
WA: I think so, yeah. You know, people who are really into math are really into baseball, and people who are really into writing are really into baseball.
AB: Is there something odd about that to you?
WA: No. I don’t think so. I think that it might not be the obvious thing, but I do think that it’s somehow transparent and mysterious at the same time.
RB: Is singing “God Bless America” during the seventh inning stretch . . . my recollection is that that did not happen before 9/11.
AB: At Yankee stadium, that’s how I remember it.
RB: That it didn’t happen before 9/11.
AB: Didn’t happen before 9/11.
RB: Because now they have—I mean, this is also just because there are so many more sort of special edition caps—but now they have the cap that has the American flag on the side. I forget what holiday that’s for.
CDRB: President’s Day, or something. All the holidays.
AB: All of them.
RB: Well, because now they have a Memorial Day cap, where they do it in camo—
CDRB: Right.
RB: —which in addition to being obnoxious is just so ugly. It’s unspeakable.
AB: Yeah. And they also have the Fourth of July cap, right?
CDRB: Oh, where the logo is in stars and stripes?
RB: It’s in stars and stripes. And they do a different version of it every year. I don’t think there’s a Labor Day cap. But there’s one that has the flag on the side.
AB: If they’re going to do camo caps, they should do the trendier camo that’s like the trees . . .
CDRB: Oh. Realtree.
AB: Yeah, like Realtree. It should be Realtree.
CDRB: I would buy a Realtree New York Yankees jersey.
RB: What’s Realtree?
CDRB: Realtree is what hunters wear.
RB: I remember that baseball, like everything else, got really nationalistic when 9/11 happened. And of course the World Series in 2001, the Yankees were in it. They had to stop the playoffs for a few days. That was the only playoffs that were happening when 9/11 occurred.
CDRB: Right.
RB: So they postponed things for a little while. And then everyone was so excited that the Yankees got to the World Series, and sad that they lost, I think, to the Diamondbacks that year.
CDRB: Oh my god, yeah.
AB: Wow. I had forgotten about that.
CDRB: Devastating.
RB: But it was still this very, very sentimental, heartwarming thing that they made it back. And that’s where George W. Bush threw out the first pitch, right?
CDRB: I think you’re right, yeah. I mean, my entire memory of that World Series is that one little hit by Luis Gonzalez off of Mariano to win in Game 7.
AB: I definitely remember being in PJs watching those games.
CDRB: Yeah. It was devastating. All other political, contextual—it was very much overshadowed by that dumb hit.
RB: The actual mechanics of the game and the way it’s played and who plays it I think map very poorly onto old-time American nationalism, because it’s such an international sport.
CDRB: Right.
RB: It’s got all these, you know, literary qualities, it’s slow, it’s fairly effete. Whereas when you watch someone play football, you think that must be American.
CDRB: Right.
RB: Who else could possibly invent that sport?
AB: But also, it’s meant to replicate war.
CDRB: Right.
RB: And also, the engine of the game is violent hyper-masculinity. That’s how you play football well: by embodying this ethos of violence and aggression.
CDRB: I mean, imagine if after every single groundball out, every single infielder just butted heads and slapped each other’s butt, every single time.
AB: That’s what was amazing about the Wilmur Flores thing: he cried on the field openly, the Mets shortstop, because he thought he was being traded to the Milwaukee Brewers, and he had basically been raised, had always been in their farm system, and he started crying—
RB: Yeah, since he was seven or eight.
AB: —he started crying, and everyone just loved him more for it, even though he wasn’t doing very well. There was a reason he was maybe going to get traded. He hadn’t been doing very well.
RB: Yeah.
AB: And, you know, fans aren’t that forgiving. And then—
CDRB: And even though he—
AB: —and then he cried and all these dudes, older dudes from Queens were like, that guy’s for real, you know?
RB: “Good kid.”
AB: Yeah.
RB: And I think football is also particularly nationalistic now because baseball, I don’t know what the percentage is, but some huge number of professional baseball players is not born in the US.
CDRB: Right.
AB: And baseball has always been kind of sucking talent from other countries, other places. The star pitcher for the Yankees right now is from Japan. And a lot of the reason why . . . I think if you asked Cuban fans, the average speed of pitches on Cuban baseball teams is lower than American teams because the upper, echelon of players, like Yasiel Puig, all go to the US.
RB: They all defect, or escape.
AB: Yeah.
CDRB: Yeah.
AB: To what extent are you cynical about the fact that there will be trading of players between the U.S. and Cuba, and to what extent are you optimistic about that? You know, in the same way that somebody can have an argument about whether it’s going to be okay that Walmarts are going to start popping up in Cuba. How do you feel in terms of baseball?
CDRB: In terms of baseball’s potential effect on the Cuban . . . I’m not an expert, but the thing that I think needs to be realized is that the Cuban political, cultural, economic situation is not a good situation. Like at this point, it seems, from what I can tell, it seems that all of the hope for the revolution is pretty much gone. You know what I mean? There’s like . . . I grew up with parents who were very much supporters—sympathizers of the revolution. My mom goes to Cuba every other year and has friends there, and so does my dad. But it seems that has all has been drained . . . so, like, I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t think that baseball needs to be the point. I think at this point, we just need to figure out harm reduction.
AB: Just a note—because we were talking about this earlier, off tape—there has been a proposal to form some sort of association that represents Cuban baseball players and the Cuban government and other sports professionals, Cuban sports professionals, so it’ll be interesting to see what that will look like.
RB: I think what you were saying is right, that whatever is happening with the government there and the U.S. relationship with Cuba, baseball’s not going to play a huge role in it, aside from a symbolic one.
CDRB: Right.
RB: So, to your question about whether I’m cynical or optimistic, I think basically optimistic, because the very good players in Cuba who want to play in the major leagues should be able to without having to try and escape to America via a cigarette boat. We were talking about this earlier, but—I had sort of known this story—but it seems wild to me that this isn’t an extremely famous story, that Yasiel Puig, in order to get to the U.S., had to contract with a drug cartel, and was essentially kidnapped for a while, and he paid somebody a bunch of money to kidnap him.
CDRB: He was, like, sequestered in a hotel off the coast of Cancun, or something like that.
RB: Right. They threatened to chop off his arm if someone didn’t show up with the correct amount of money.
CDRB: Because this was all being negotiated through some sort of talent handler in Miami, or something like that.
RB: Right.
AB: Well I had read that, because of the baseball regulations, it actually makes more sense for players—or players are more likely to get a better deal if they defect to Mexico—
RB: Yes.
AB: —and then try and get into the U.S. through Mexico, instead of just defecting and going straight—
RB: Right.
AB: —to Miami.
CDRB: Somehow paying drug dealers, or paying, like, actual cartels money for Cuban players is better than giving Cuba money—
RB: Right.
CDRB: —for, I guess, sports development? I would really want to hear somebody making that very hardline economic argument, in a political context.
RB: Well, Matthew Yglesias will get right on it.
CDRB: Right.
RB: I think someone died during Yasiel Puig’s trafficking process. I think someone was killed, so that he could come to the U.S. to play baseball for the Dodgers. So—
CDRB: So he could get all the conservative baseball fans in uproar about his Latino bat flip and how it’s ruining the game.
RB: Right. Although this is an area where I salute Bryce Harper, who . . . I’m a Phillies fan, so I dislike the Nationals as much as possible.
AB: Yeah, where are you going with this?
RB: Bryce Harper is the most prominent person to say openly, cut it out. Let people celebrate and have fun if they want to. It’s a game. It’s supposed to be fun. So I give him credit for that, about this dynamic that happens where any time a non corn-fed American player wants to celebrate or smile or clap or high-five on the baseball diamond, Peter Gammons and whoever come out of the woodwork to say oh, you’re disrespecting the game, and then Jonathan Papelbon throws stuff at your head, and everyone’s mad.
AB: That Chris Archer interview.
RB: Do you just want to set it up? Or just explain . . .
AB: Yeah. Absolutely. So Chris Archer is the star pitcher of the Tampa Bay Rays, no longer Devil Rays.
CDRB: No brighter light is coming from the organization currently than Chris Archer.
AB: Chris Archer, bright light, going to Cuba. He just is looking really good for the Rays, and he seems like a really sweet guy. And when the Rays played in Cuba—and this was at the time of the Brussels attack—and Chris Archer was the one person who kind of really introduced himself to President Obama, tried to give him one of his gloves, talked with Sasha and Malia—
CDRB: The glove was actually from the starting pitcher, who wasn’t able to shake his hand, I assume, because he was warming up. But he, being a good teammate . . .
AB: But see, he’s just a mensch, is the thing. And we were just listening to this interview, ESPN doing their best to kind of talk about Cuba with political seriousness, and . . . what did you guys think? What did you guys think about what he said about iPhones?
RB: Oh, he had a line in the interview where he was talking about his experience of Cuba and what it’s like meeting Cubans and walking around. And he had a thing where he said, it’s just great, they’re the most enthusiastic fans in the world, their love of life is contagious, and they don’t have phones so they have to interact with each other more.
CDRB: Which is just a classic kind of understanding of third world peoples in general.
RB: Right.
CDRB: Just like, oh, their lives are just so much more communal because they just don’t have what we have. I mean that’s just classic.
RB: And also . . . this is not to denigrate his intelligence, but this is also a professional athlete talking, and I think about the David Foster Wallace essay a lot—not the Federer tennis one, but he has one about that second-rate tennis player, or someone who’s ranked 98th in the world, someone who’s good enough to be a professional tennis player. The point he’s making is just that when you’re a professional athlete, in order to be good enough to be even the worst professional athlete in the league, you’ve never done anything else with your life. All of your time has been spent playing that sport and thinking about that sport, and the extent to which you get to think about other things is very limited. So whenever I see a well-intentioned athlete say something a little clueless like that, I just think about that.
CDRB: Yeah. Totally. And this is absolutely not to bad talk Chris Archer. He’s doing his best as a young, thoughtful athlete to comment on something that is so much older than he is, and so weighted, without slipping up and making any major blunders on television, which is just like a classic sports-athlete-in-front-of-a-camera thing. And the fact that the team trusts him enough to have him be their spokesperson, especially in such a momentous game, is a pretty big deal.
AB: I thought it was kind of incredible that he was as complimentary as he was. I get what you’re saying about how romancing failed revolutions can be really misguided. But I do think it makes a difference, for example, if you live in a country where all baseball players make the same amount of money. And they do—the players that they really like, they’ll . . . it’s not actually fair.
RB: I think Puig made 17 before he signed with the Dodgers.
CDRB: Yeah. And I saw somewhere else that professional Cuban players now make 300 a month, or something like that. But I don’t know.
AB: I think that that is different than what people might say in American sports and American baseball. It’s a much more kind of hyper-individualistic way of thinking about your work and your goals and your—
RB: You mean because the salary discrepancies are so huge?
AB: Yeah. Because it is this kind of race to the top that allows organized baseball in turn to make a race to the bottom, in terms of treating the players that don’t make it.
CDRB: I mean, I think baseball is probably one of the—and I don’t know the exact details—but baseball, from my understanding, is one of the worst in U.S. sports in terms of equality between teams, in terms of wage books, you know. Even in football, there’s salary caps—
RB: Basketball too.
CDRB: Basketball too. Soccer. In the MLS, you need to have a certain amount of homegrown players vs. foreign players, and I think there’s also a kind of . . . there’s revenue sharing amongst the teams in the league. In baseball, it’s almost—
AB: I would disagree just in the sense that I think maybe football is more oligopolistic than baseball is, because at the same time, baseball, historically, has a really strong players’ union.
CDRB: Right.
RB: That’s true.
AB: And I actually think the percentage of money that goes to players as a whole, even though that might be unequal between teams, is much higher.1 And I think football might be the worst, actually. So it’s like with football, all of the owners are working together to make sure that all of their teams are doing the same thing, but they’re also collectively pushing down on the players, where I think with baseball it’s a little—
RB: Yeah, baseball has clearly rich teams and poor teams, and teams that just will never have a shot at signing a superstar player, like they’re not even going to be in the conversation, whereas football, that playing field is a lot more level because of the salary cap. But also baseball players just get paid a lot more. You frequently read stories . . . there’s cautionary tales about, first of all, your career in the NFL is extremely short. On average, you only play for something like three and a half seasons. And if you’re a rookie, if you’re not a star player, you can make something like a couple hundred thousand dollars over the course of 3, 4 years, and then that’s it. Your career’s over and that’s the money you’ve made. Whereas, there was a post a couple months ago that I think Deadspin put up, which just warmed my heart, where it said, just to remind you about how good life is in baseball, here are the lifetime earnings of eight middle of the road middle relievers who you’ve never heard of. And it’s some guy who’s just been on eight different teams, he’s been in the league for nine years, he’s made like $52 million.
Malcolm Donaldson: That’s it for this episode. Thanks to Will Augerot, Richard Beck, Cosme Del Rosario-Bell, Dayna Tortorici, and the Brooklyn Public library. The podcast is produced by Aaron Braun, Moira Donegan, Malcolm Donaldson, and Eric Wen. Thanks for listening.
Turns out I was only half-right when I cited the MLB’s reputation of giving players overall the greatest share in league revenue. This was certainly true following the last MLB strike in 1994, but the trend has reversed dramatically in the last 10 years (fangraphs.com recently laid this out in chart-form). The players’ share has decreased by a third since peaking in 2002 falling behind the NFL (second) and the NBA (first). Some have blamed the union’s crusade against salary caps, which has made them dependent on a steady stream of mammoth contracts for a select few. —AB ↩