In Praise of Gold Leaf
Frank's one of my favorite writers, so I asked him to sub in. - Jason
Hello, friends. I’m Frank Spring, and I’m your substitute teacher while Jason finishes his writing sabbatical. You’ll note that some of the form and content of this newsletter has changed, because I am not Jason. He’ll be back soon.
by Frank Spring
When the setting for your staff meeting is a little on-the-nose.
You could be forgiven for thinking that human affairs are unusually prone to going wrong these days, that maybe it’s all falling apart. Of course, in a host of incredibly meaningful ways human progress has been just that - actual, honest-to-god progress. Things go less badly, lethally awry now than at any point in human history; the data is pretty clear on this.
But even so: we are humans, and our best-laid schemes, they gang aft a-gley. You really do hear it, more and more, how a-gley our schemes gang these days. So, so true.
It does feel that the way things have tended to gang a-gley in the last few years has taken a turn for the worse, not to say the unnecessarily florid. The various crises and collapses that characterize human affairs have always been driven by malice and incompetence but we really are living in a golden age of those two great tastes tasting great together.
Amongst 2019’s stronger entrants in the category of sudden, severe, incomprehensible clusterfucks was the swift demise of the website Deadspin. For those who didn’t read it: Deadspin was part of the Gizmodo Media Group, formerly the Gawker family of blogs; nominally about sports, it was a haven of brilliant, funny, provocative writing that refused to accept the idea that sports is somehow separate from the world and the world from sports.
Some of Deadspin’s writing was great; most of it was good; all of it was distinctive. Much of it wasn’t about sports at all. Which, to make a long and painfully absurd story short, was what precipitated the site’s untimely murder.
Early in 2019, a private equity firm bought Gizmodo Media Group (renaming it G/O Media) and in remarkably short time managed to kill the profitable website stone-dead. The final straw was an edict issued late in October of last year: “stick to sports,” which to the private equity guys who ordered it probably meant “stop calling Trump ‘our big wet president’” but in essence was designed to neuter the voice of the staff. “Stick to sports,” of course, means “don’t speak truth to power,” and is an admonition so absurd that Deadspin used to sell merchandise bearing those words as a joke. Sports is always more than what happens on the field; pretending otherwise is imbecile.
Deadspin’s acting-editor (whose predecessor had quit after months of shockingly juvenile and unprofessional ill-treatment by the new upper-management) refused to abide by the dictat, so management fired him. The rest of Deadspin’s staff quit en masse shortly thereafter, and the site went from being a profit-generating venue for quality writing on sports, culture, and politics to effectively dead over a period of about three days.
Did I mention that Deadspin was profitable? I see that I did, twice. Good, that’s important, that’s what makes this an extremely 2019 absurdity; by not sticking to sports, and by taking an idiosyncratic angle on sports when it did, Deadspin continued to attract large audiences and, with them, ad revenue. Its non-sports features were some of its most popular.
The people nominally charged with ensuring that G/O Media made money killed a profitable website for no reason other than a personal conviction that a sports blog can only be a kind of stripped-down version of ESPN, and a refusal to look at any of the (dispositive) evidence that suggested otherwise. Those people, especially CEO Jim Spanfeller, are bad at their jobs, and should feel bad, but have neither the moral compass nor the mother-wit to do so.
The end of Deadspin was such a transparent example of private equity screwing over its employees, the public, and basically anyone but themselves, that Bernie Sanders condemned it on Twitter; other presidential candidates followed suit. G/O Media’s upper-management has since tried to sell interested parties on the notion that Deadspin wasn’t, in fact, profitable, a contention which is pretty clearly false based on the site’s web traffic and the going rate for digital ads, both of which are available information. It is still dead; Spanfeller recently announced a plan to relocate the corpse to Chicago (presumably to dump it in Lake Michigan).
And so in this case incompetence (not to say sheer, jaw-dropping stupidity) triumphed over greed. But never let it be said that greed didn’t give it the old college try, because what G/O Media was trying to achieve (in the process stepping on an entire yard full of rakes) was deeply rooted in an assumption typical of this stage of capitalism: that by being good Deadspin was, definitionally, inefficient.
There is a compelling case to be made that minimalism and capitalism go hand-in-glove. Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson’s February 2019 takedown, titled “Death to Minimalism,” aptly quotes the manifesto of The Congress on the New Minimalism:
The ceaseless quest for profit means shaving a thing down to its bare essentials, asking the question “What is the minimum degree to which a Mexican restaurant must resemble a Mexican restaurant for people to accept that it is one?” This makes profit-seeking phenomenally efficient. It also means dullness, decrepitude, death. If a thing cannot justify itself economically, it must disappear.
This idea, more than anything, accounts for the absurd misjudgement behind Deadspin’s death. The new management of G/O Media looked at a profitable website and decided that it could make more money if it did less, because that’s how capitalism works to them. Deadspin’s sin was doing more than the bare minimum necessary to be a sports website.
If this seems incredible, witness what happened at Sports Illustrated, also recently taken over by private equity: dozens of professional journalists and editors were fired, with coverage of teams reverting to cheap, locally-based contractors whose work is edited lightly or not at all. Vox Media used the same approach to team coverage for its SBNation property.
The theory here is simple: what consumers of sports media want is words on the internet about their favorite teams; any words will do, quality be damned. More than that is just inefficient.
If you subscribe to that theory, then Deadspin was colossally wasteful, because its staff did more than just slap together copy about the latest games. What they did at Deadspin, more than anything, was write. People went to that sports website to read about politics and cooking and parenting. All of that gilding, that artful writing - on sports or lasagna or Trump or bears - was totally surplus to the minimal purpose of a sports blog, and also what made Deadspin a) good and - relatedly - b) profitable.
Good writing is, by definition, artful; it must, to some degree, be gilded. Strunk and White may admonish us to omit needless words, and in many circumstances they are perfectly right, but give me a choice between “humans always experience problems” and “yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward” and I’ll take the sparks every time. Sometimes the value is in the gilding; sometimes the gold leaf makes the house.
So it seems appropriate here to note a few master crafters of the sort of gilding which so offends late-stage-capitalism’s eye. Here are five writers (his modesty forbids nominating the worthy Jason Stanford to the list, here in his own newsletter) presently publishing who commit the unpardonable sin of writing well when they don’t need to:
Tressie McMillan Cottom. Dr. Cottom, author of Thick, is a sociologist; no one would blame her for constraining herself to plain, academic prose to confer her (trenchant, profound) insights. She does not; for this we have cause to be grateful.
Sara Benincasa. She turned surviving a debilitating case of agoraphobia into a career as a comic, writer, and social critic, in which last capability she turns a phrase as well as anyone, and better than most. Read her books Real Artists Have Day Jobs; DC Trip; and Agorfabulous! among others.
David Roth. I’m limiting myself to one Deadspin alumnus for this, and it has to be Roth. Nominally a baseball and basketball writer, in 2019 alone Roth wrote on sports for various outlets, on food for Food & Wine, on foreign policy for The New Republic, and on politics for several publications including The Baffler. He is, without doubt, the best writer on Trump working today.
Eve Ewing. Another sociologist, Dr. Ewing is a gifted poet and author of Electric Arches, a moving and compelling work of poetry, narrative prose, and visual art. She is an incandescently original voice, proving again that academia and art are hardly mutually exclusive.
Jia Tolentino. I might be cheating a little here by adding Tolentino, who is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a place where style has always mattered. But Tolentino is not just an capable cultural critic; she also has a rare gift for delivering precise insight in a masterful mix of high and low register language that is both modern and part of the best traditions of feature writing.
You can find all of these people on Twitter, a venue which might be the final argument against the value of minimalism. Enjoy the gold-leaf, friends, and by all means include needless words, if they’re any good.
What I’m reading
I came late to the party and just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, which y’all should read.
What I’m watching
If you haven’t watched Dolemite is My Name on Netflix, you’re missing out on a treat. There’s something about hilarious stories of classic American bullshit artists that warms my cold, dead heart.
What I’m listening to
Over the holidays I listened to the Christmas album of an artist I haven’t thought about in years. Natalie McMasters is from Cape Breton, Novia Scotia, home to a distinctive type of Scottish music. There’s a phenomenon in migration where a migrant group will land in a new place and their culture and language will be preserved for generations in an older and different form than in their homeland. That’s apparently what happened here, and Cape Breton fiddlers are famous for their quality. McMasters is the island’s most famous artist.
What do you think of today's email? Tell on me to Jason, but go easy on me, it’s my first day.