It works like this: My agent sells my book IDEA to a publishing house. The house pays an “advance”: a sum of money upfront that I can live on while I research and write the book. It’s not much money — in fact it’s an embarrassing amount of money and I also am fortunate enough to receive financial support from my spouse.Without that assistance, I couldn’t do what I do. Period. Again, it’s not much money, and it’s the ONLY money I earn from my books. (If I were lucky enough to write a bang ‘em up bestseller, I’d earn more than the advance, but I’m not that lucky. Er, um, not that talented a writer.)
The self-publishers, in my opinion, have a distorted view of “books” and of “publishing.” In their minds, every writer is cranking out novels that don’t require much time to research and write, and the lag time between creation and payoff is short.
So I ask them: What happens when the agents, editors, and publishing houses go away? Who will write non-fiction then?
So when digital evangelists prognosticate about the future of publishing, as they love to do, and about what “needs” to go away, serious nonfiction is now one of the first things I think about. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and want to read more of it and notice twentysomethings have little perceived patience for weighty tomes. Maybe it’s because I’d rather have pragmatic conversations about what categories are best suited to digital — genre fiction obviously, certain commercial strains of literary fiction, basically any book that needs to have a completed manuscript done before it’s shopped around, or can be finished very quickly post-proposal — and which ones won’t be. Maybe it’s because the very institutions that support serious nonfiction are themselves in more financial trouble than they used to be.
In my time working [at Apple], I must personally have seen years-worth, probably decades-worth (and, from afar perhaps even centuries-worth) of work simply discarded because it turned out not to be ‘right’ or ‘good’. This was done with very little animosity towards the people who did the work. There was a distinct difference between working on something that turned out bad and had to be discarded (fine - admirable, even) and doing bad work (bad)…I think this highlights two things that many other organisations would do well to learn. First, what you have is what it is, it’s not the effort that was put into it. If it’s not worth keeping, it’s not worth keeping. Second, if you want the best results, you need to give good people the room to start over without feeling like they are failing.
the road not taken
If you’re part of the editorial leadership at the Chronicle of Higher Education, you have a problem. You know that the American academy regularly comes under fire from conservatives who believe that universities are places where conservatism is mocked, traditional values assaulted, and students crassly indoctrinated into left-liberalism. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia — no righty he — has noted in his own discipline a “statistically impossible lack of diversity” in political affiliation. So what do you do?
Well, here’s one thing: you hire as a blogger a well-known and very serious critic of the academic enterprise, Naomi Schaefer Riley. This demonstrates that you’re not afraid of harsh criticism, that you’re modeling a university culture that’s open to widely varying points of view. You know that much of what your audience holds dear will get treated pretty roughly at times, but that’s a price you’re willing to pay to demonstrate an open mind and open ears.
But then Riley writes a blog post that thousands of your readers think rather too rough, and an unapologetic follow-up. You perceive that the angry people come from your core readership. These times are not kind to the balance sheet of many periodicals, and the Chronicle isn’t immune to the general affliction — especially now that a serious rival has emerged. To keep Riley on will court further outrage in the form of boycotts and canceled subscriptions, and those consequences will be hard to face. So you can her.
That’s the story to this point.
It’s a tough situation with no clear win, but did you do the least bad thing you could have done? In the short term, maybe so. You could have tried editing — i.e., let’s admit it, policing — your bloggers more rigorously, which would mean not singling out one offender, but trying to hold everyone to certain standards of civility. But even assuming that your bloggers would consent to be edited, you don’t have the staff for that. So given the petitions and the likelihood of canceled subscriptions… .
But that’s thinking in the short term. Perhaps in the long term there’s something to be gained by keeping an advocatus diaboli around. By firing Riley you’ve pacified your base, but you’ve also created a mini-martyr and have re-solidified the liberal-indoctrination narrative. Might there not have been some virtue in writing an editorial on the necessity of tolerating a wide variety of views within the discourse about the academy — even views that most of your readers find offensive? Might you not have encouraged further responses to Riley, on the principle that the best remedy to bad speech is more and better speech? Might you not have allowed the other Brainstorm bloggers to handle whatever criticism seemed to them necessary? By taking such action, and explaining it carefully and (if necessary) repeatedly, you might have been able to create, admittedly only over the long term, a better environment for debate about the academy. I can understand why you didn’t, but I feel that the road not taken was probably the better road.
Now for what’s disturbing about Specter’s piece (beyond the subject itself!): it essentially bypasses all of the decidedly sane responses to the climate crisis that haven’t really been tried yet — like, say, carbon pricing, massively increased investments in clean energy technologies (both deployment and R&D), and real global commitments on both emissions and adaptation — in favor of the far sexier “true Sci-Fi” angle of geoengineering. As an attention-getter, fine. It works. But as a “Serious” treatment of the climate crisis? Can’t we at least talk about the other stuff — the stuff that would jump-start a transition away from fossil fuels, with all deliberate speed — before we trot out geoengineering again? (At least Specter’s treatment is better than that found in SuperFreakonomics, which his colleague Kolbert eviscerated in a 2009 review.) And given that a whole lot of climate change is already “locked in,” shouldn’t we be talking about the immediate necessity of adaptation — “managing the unavoidable” — especially in the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the world, before we talk about last-ditch gambles? It strikes me as another form of avoiding the real subject.
keeping a tidy mind
These are separate questions:
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Whether Naomi Schaefer Riley should have dismissed as “claptrap” dissertations she hasn’t read;
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Whether Riley is a racist;
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Whether the Chronicle of Higher Education should have dumped her from the Brainstorm blog for her post;
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Whether Black Studies is or is not a bogus/biased/incoherent/politicized field;
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Whether the Chronicle maintains its self-proclaimed journalistic standards across the political spectrum, or, to put it another, way, whether the Chronicle shows the same respect for Christians and conservatives that it does for people working in Black Studies.
I have only weighed in on the first question. I know that some people think that the others are more important and deserve fuller attention, but you know, that’s life: sometimes people talk more than you’d like them to talk about things you’re not especially interested in. I hate that too.
So for [furniture maker Harrison] Higgins, there is no simplistic opposition between nature and culture, between a pristine creation and human artifice—the creative “work of our hands” that gives birth to artifacts, to cultural goods. To the contrary, good artifice is its own kind of grace: to make is to serve, is to bear God’s image to and for the creation. A Christian theology of creation is not the same as Mother Earth mythologies of ‘the natural’ that ultimately end up lamenting humanity’s presence as a blight on creation. No, we worship the Maker of all, the Artificer we come to know in Jesus of Nazareth, the son of a carpenter. A Christian affirmation of the goodness of creation is also an affirmation of artifice — redeeming the very word, we might say, from its association with the fake and the faux. In an older sense, artifice attests to creativity and craft.
Abraham Lincoln Did Not Invent Facebook: How a Guy and His Blog Fooled the Whole Wide InternetThe fun/chaos started, as it so often does, with a bad day on Monday. Come the evening of the 7th, St. Pierre says, “I was crabby; I was in a bad mood; I was tired of looking around at all the boring, lame stuff online — all the same people rehashing the same things.” He enjoys writing, so he took to his computer “to write something that would be exciting to read.” He started crafting a sensational story that would tell the tale of the epic day St. Pierre wished he’d just had — revisionist history meets personalized fanfic. “So I thought, ‘Okay, what would be just fun and crazy?’ What if Lincoln invented Facebook?”Starting with that fun and crazy and also totally false premise, St. Pierre spun the rest of the tale of his alt-universe adventure. He wrote the story in bed, from 9:30 in the evening to 2:30 in the morning, impelled by the catharsis and amused by the absurdity of it all. Lincoln inventing Facebook! So ridiculous!
Really, he says, “I just wanted something that would make me smile.”
Read more. [Image: Brian Fung]
Scores of critics on the site complained that I had not read the dissertations in full before daring to write about them—an absurd standard for a 500-word blog post. A number of the dissertations aren’t even available.
If you go back to Naomi’s original blog post, you’ll first note its title: “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” She then continues, “If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.”
So her position is clear: just from reading very brief descriptions of dissertations, written not by their authors but by a journalist, you can tell that the dissertations are “irrelevant” “left-wing victimization claptrap” that make “a case for eliminating the discipline” of Black Studies. The most universal and absolute condemnation of an entire field possible, based only on fifty words of description of each dissertation by a journalist. This is the claim the legitimacy of which Naomi is steadfastly defending.
To cap off her argument, Naomi further insists that since “a number of the dissertations aren’t even available,” she can’t be faulted for not having read them. We’re getting into some highly peculiar territory here. Indeed, I haven’t read the material I’m condemning, but since I couldn’t possibly have read the material I am condemning, my condemnation of it is thoroughly justified.
I don’t see how this position is defensible on any grounds whatsoever. You could point out that the Chronicle is unlikely to be as vigorous in disciplining left-wong bloggers who say ignorant things about conservatives, and that would be right. But the conclusion to be drawn from this observation should not be “Let a thousand lilies fester”; rather, it should be, “Let’s try to learn from this situation what standards of civility and journalistic responsibility we want to uphold here, and enforce them consistently.” I don’t think the Chronicle will do that — I’m pretty sure that other writers for the Brainstorm blog will continue to say bigoted and uninformed things about conservatives and Christians — but that’s what ought to happen. We should certainly not agree that everyone can be uninformed and bigoted about everyone else.
I would say to Naomi, and to her defenders, that I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to allow your political adversaries to establish your own behavioral parameters. “If they say unfounded things about us we can say unfounded things about them” is not good ethics. It’s much better to have high standards for yourself and then challenge your adversaries to hold the same standards. To those who reply that that won’t work, I would say (a) that depends on what you mean by “work” and (b) anyway, it’s just the right thing to do.
One more thing: people keep talking about Naomi being “fired,” but I would be surprised if she had been paid to write for the Brainstorm blog. Certainly that wasn’t her job; it was a gig at most. If she wasn’t paid, then I think that the Chronicle people could disinvite her from participating at any time, and for any or no reason. If they were paying her, though, the ethical standards for dismissal ought to be higher.
UPDATE: Sonny Bunch points out that in the very piece I’m quoting Naomi mentions that she was a paid contributor. That’s what I get for reading another journalist’s summary of her op-ed instead of the op-ed itself. HAR.
SECOND UPDATE: I just discovered that some readers think I was being serious when I said that I read “another journalist’s summary of her op-ed instead of the op-ed itself.” No, that was a joke. I thought it was obvious that I read Naomi’s piece since I quote from it and link to it directly. I absolutely failed to notice the word “paid” in her description of her role at Brainstorm, and as soon as Sonny pointed that out to me I added the update. But that didn’t seem like a big deal to me because my post was about the validity of judging dissertations by titles and descriptions, and I was just adding a brief postscript about whether she was paid and how that affects the judgment of whether she should have been fired. I wasn’t yet weighing in about the firing: I did that later. But really, I should have been more careful and less ironic here. Irony is risky in these matters. My apologies for creating confusion.
In 1086 William the Conqueror completed a comprehensive survey of England and Wales. “The Domesday Book”, as it came to be called, contained details of 13,418 places and 112 boroughs—and is still available for public inspection at the National Archives in London. Not so the original version of a new survey that was commissioned for the 900th anniversary of “The Domesday Book”. It was recorded on special 12-inch laser discs. Their format is now obsolete.The digital era brought with it the promise of indefinite memory. Increased computing power and disk space combined with decreasing costs were supposed to make anything born digital possible to store for ever. But digital data often has a surprisingly short life. “If we’re not careful, we will know more about the beginning of the 20th century than the beginning of the 21st century,” says Adam Farquhar, who is in charge the British Library’s digital-preservation efforts.