The Honest Broker Podcast

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



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


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Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.
Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with C. Thi Nguyen.
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Nguyen is a former food writer who became a philosopher. He’s now an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, where he also teaches in the Division of Games. His first book, Games: Agency as Art, won the 2021 Book Prize from the American Philosophical Association.
In January, Nguyen released The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. It’s an exploration of the philosophy of games and a critical examination of the detrimental effects of gamification and institutional metrics. (I wrote a review of The Score on my own Substack.) Jennifer Szalai described The Score in a review at The New York Times: “This may be the only book in existence that discusses the game of Twister, the ethics of Aristotle and the mechanics of bureaucracies.”
Below are highlights from my interview. For the rest of our conversation, check out the video at the top of the page.
Highlights from the C. Thi Nguyen Interview
Jared: Thi, thank you for joining me.
Thi: I’m happy to be here.
Jared: I want to start off with a big broad question: why are games fun?
Thi: There are so many answers to that. I’ve given much more complicated answers, but maybe the dumbest answer is one of the deepest. Games are actually designed to be fun. Not all games, but a lot of the games we find fun are not accidents. It’s an ultra-careful fine-tuning process.
Designing for fun is so delicate. If you just tweak a few little bits in the incentive structure or tweak a few little rules, the fun will fall out of things. People think fun is mysterious — it’s not for game designers. There are micro-issues of exactly how you pace the timing and exactly how you pace the rules that seem to emerge. A lot of people are most impressed by the game designs that are elaborate and complicated, but what a lot of game designers are most impressed by is a five-rule party game that’s fun, because that’s the hardest thing to build.
I think it’s important to acknowledge that these things are designed objects that have been subject to brutal design cycles.
Jared: If I’m playing games, I have two very different preferences. One of them is that I really like cozy games, like Stardew Valley. But then my other love is roguelikes, which are so frustrating. I played Slay the Spire last night, and I never made it to the last level. It was an intentionally frustrating experience, and I went to bed happy. I think that’s weird. The challenge is why you want to keep playing, and it makes it more satisfying.
Thi: Roguelikes are probably the center of my video game universe. But when you asked about fun, I immediately thought about laughter, the social part of fun. In game design circles, ‘fun’ is used a little more technically, where they are talking about ‘fun games.’ I have the same experience as you that most of what I love is intensely, gruelingly difficult and mostly involves failure and pushing your way intensely to get tiny moments of success.
I have a theory about why that is deeply enjoyable for us. In games, unlike ordinary life, you can seek exactly the balance of difficulty, frustration, skill, and success that suits you. That’s unlike the world, which says ‘Now you must work on this thing at this difficulty.’ The choice structure is that you get to choose whether you’re playing Stardew Valley or Slay the Spire, and that ability to adapt the challenge environment to you makes it much more possible to find the deliciousness wherever it may lie for you.
Jared: This is probably related to our mutual love of rock climbing.
Thi: Rock climbing taught me a lot. Climbing is what taught me to pay attention to my body and the way my body moves, and part of it was exactly the difficulty scale. It gave me feedback.
Godfrey Devereaux, who is one of my favorite yoga writers, has this amazing passage where he says that one of the reasons we do yoga is that a lot of us want meditation, but we fail at seated meditation. In seated meditation, when your mind wanders, you don’t notice because your mind has wandered. But when you’re in a hard yoga pose, if your mind wanders, then you wobble. That feedback tells you to go back.
I think climbing is a particularly neat example of this because in a lot of games, the choice of difficulty is kind of hidden in the background. But rock climbing really surfaces the subtle degree of choice.
Jared: I’ve only sustained one major injury from climbing. I cracked my fibular head on a warm-up climb. It was my second climb of the day. And what I thought was, ‘I can skip that hold because this is an easy climb.’ I was craving a certain kind of experience, and I rushed to get that experience. I rushed to the difficulty I was getting ready for. There’s also something potentially misleading about difficulty scales.
Thi: You’re opening up two completely different universes to talk about right now. One is about the pleasure of games, and the other is about data compression of seemingly objective scales.
Jared: Let’s stick with the pleasure of games. I’m trying not to lead with dystopia.
Thi: You’re making me realize something I hadn’t quite thought about. I had an original model with games where games set an exact mental state and attitude that you entered into as you entered the game. But as I was writing The Score, I ended up thinking a lot more about variable games like rock climbing and fly-fishing. We plunge ourselves into a goal, but we often step back and are able to modulate what that goal is to chase a particular kind of experience. You’re making me realize that there’s careful modulation of the game experience even in the process of warming up.
Jared: You get to be in control of your experience in a really nice way, which is related to what you said earlier, which is that life often does not give us that sense of control. Games give us a sense of power over our circumstances.
Thi: When I started working on games, I did not realize that they were as interesting as I have now found them to be. When I started working on it, I was just going to write one little paper because I was annoyed. I’d read a couple books on the philosophy of video games, and they were all using cinema theory, and I was like, ‘This is dumb.’
I think the big unlock was reading Reiner Knizia saying that points give you the motivational system. I was sitting around with friends, and I said, ‘The most important thing about games isn’t that they’re fiction. They’re like art governments. They’re governments for fun.’ You play around with rules and incentives and shape people’s actions—not to rule them, but to create a beautiful experience.
Jared: Let’s talk about The Score. One way of explaining your book is that you have a theory of games, and you give that to us early on in the book, and then you have a theory of something like pernicious gamification in which metrics are imposed, and we start playing these games in the rest of our lives. The big question you open up at the end of the first chapter is: ‘Is this the game I want to be playing?’ Tell me a bit about what led you to go from thinking about games, which are a source of joy, to thinking about this.
Thi: I was writing my first book, which is a love ode to games. Toward the end of writing it, people were like, ‘Oh, you love games, so you must love gamification.’ I hate gamification! My gut sense was that if you actually understood what was good about games, then you’ll see forced and pervasive gamification as kind of horrible.
The term I’m using for this process is value capture. This is when your values are rich and subtle, and then you are presented with a simplification of your values in an institutional setting, and these are typically quantified. The simplification takes over your reasoning and seizes your attention. It starts to replace your values.
Jared: Here are some examples: language apps, fitness trackers, law school rankings. In my own world of YouTube, we have views, likes, comments, revenue, and more. These become markers of good videos rather than thinking about educational quality, entertainment value, or just making something you’re proud of.
One thing you note is that when our values are rich and subtle, they’re usually qualitative. They can even be a bit ambiguous. We’re both analytic philosophers, and we’re always told to take the ambiguous and make it precise. But part of your book might be that ambiguity is where the freedom is. Ambiguity gives you a sense of ownership and agency. That clarity might also be fake clarity.
Thi: Yes! When I first started doing this, I used the term ‘gamification.’ But I’ve come to think that what actually matters is the long progress of the last thousand years of an emphasis on institutional accountability at scale. The thing I’ve been chasing is an attempt to explain why a lot of our values might be better captured by ambiguous, fuzzy, rough language, or by poetic, metaphorical language.
There are two dimensions, and I think they’re not quite the same. One of them is that when things are ambiguous, we have more degrees of freedom. The other is that there might be a real value there, but that drawing a clear, definable line is going to mess the essential fuzziness of the real thing.
Theodore Porter has this book, Trust in Numbers, where he’s trying to explain why bureaucrats and administrators compulsively reach for quantitative justifications. He says that qualitative communication is rich, open-ended, and context-sensitive, but it travels badly between contexts. Quantitative information is design to travel between contexts and make aggregation possible. What Porter made me realize is that the thing that makes metrics socially powerful is precisely that they have had context stripped out of them. It’s a design feature and a design bug in one.
Jared: One thing about quantified systems that I find so striking is that once you enter into this realm of legibility and numbers, it becomes nearly impossible not to engage in rankings.
Thi: One of the big lessons for me from philosophy of technology is that one of the best ways to think about the impact of a technological system—and I think metrics are a technological system —is to think about what they make easy and what they make hard. Consider maps. Dennis Woods in The Power of Maps has all these great questions. Why don’t maps show sound quality? Why don’t they show where the pleasant nature is? It’s because the map-maker is often interested in things like property lines and commuting by car. Not every game has a scoring system. You can have a competition without a scoring system. You can go to the skate park and skate with your friends. Even if you have a similar goal, like Be the coolest, you can judge that in different ways. When you transition to official contexts like ESPNX, which require an official verdict, then you get this movement towards more easily countable targets, like flips and the height of jumps. The same thing happened in yo-yoing. The rise of the competition scene happened during the YouTube era, so there are records. The space of what counted as good yo-yoing was once much wider. There were a lot of tricks that were just done for beauty, or grace, or flow. Now, the scene is locked in on speed and difficulty. It sucks a lot of the joy out of those activities.
Jared: We could talk for hours, but we need to end. Do you have a book recommendation for our audience?
Thi: I want to recommend a book that I think is incredibly important for right now. It’s a technical book. It’s by a law professor, Julia Cohen, called Between Truth and Power. It’s an attempt to understand precisely the changes in property law that make our current world of data-ownership possible. The current world of data that we’re in right now didn’t have to be. It is a particular construct of a particular way of envisioning data as ownable that was created by very specific laws that are entirely changeable.
Jared: C. Thi Nguyen, thank you for me.
Thi: Thank you so much, man.


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Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.
Today, I’m sharing my conversation with Jennifer Frey.
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Jennifer is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa. She is also a faculty fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. She earned her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 2012.
She’s also a fierce proponent of liberal education. She brought that passion with her to the University of Tulsa, where she built a new honors college and served as the inaugural dean — until, after just two years, the administration cut its funding by 92%. When that happened, Jennifer responded in the New York Times, offering an ardent defense of the value of liberal education.
In that piece, she wrote:
When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it. The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for—and deserves.
I knew I wanted to talk to Jennifer about these issues. She joined me here in Austin to discuss the story of Tulsa’s honors college, the many problems facing higher education in the United States, and the value of helping students craft intellectual friendships.
Below are highlights from the interview. For the rest of our conversation, check out the video at the top of the page.
Jennifer’s family recently experienced a serious medical event, and her husband Chris had to be hospitalized. There is a donation page for her family as Chris recovers.
Highlights from the Jennifer Frey Interview
Jared: Jennifer Frey, thank you for joining me.
Jennifer: Thanks for having me.
Jared: Why don’t we start by just telling everybody the story of what happened at the University of Tulsa?
Jennifer: I’m a philosopher, and prior to moving to Tulsa, I was at the University of South Carolina. In 2020, we were all on Twitter a lot, and I post a lot about higher ed. One day I posted about the University of Tulsa and how terrible it was because they had eliminated their philosophy department, which is happening at a lot of places, and there was an acceleration during COVID. You actually don’t need to have a financial calamity to just want to murder philosophy. You simply need to not value it.I checked my replies, and I got a reply from the president of the University of Tulsa that said, ‘Hey, Jen, we’re not that bad. You should come visit us.’ He followed up and said, ‘I probably agree with a lot of your criticisms. I’d love for you to come out.’ In November of 2021, I went to the University of Tulsa, and I gave a talk in which I criticized the university, but I also talked about why philosophy should always be at the center of a university. That was the first time in my life I got a standing ovation for a talk.It turns out the president had an ulterior motive. He wanted to start an honors college, which he said would be like a mini St. John’s College. Great books, liberal education.
“We grew enrollment by 500%, and we were bringing 26% to 27% of freshman into honors….We were bringing in money, grants, and donors. Then it all ended.”
Jared: For many people, building something like that is a dream.Jennifer: Yes. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. You should do that.’ Then he asked me to come lead it. I said no, but he was very persistent. Eventually, we agreed that I would help him build a college on paper. We worked together for about a year, and at the end of the year, I kind of fancied what I had come up with. Then he said, ‘I still need someone to run this college.’ I interviewed, and I was hired and decided to move the whole family halfway across the country to Oklahoma to start this new college.
The transition to administration, and away from an intellectual life to a very practical life, was very difficult, but it was incredibly rewarding. But to make a long story short, it was really successful. We grew enrollment by 500%, and we were bringing 26% to 27% of freshman into honors. Jared: Were these students who probably wouldn’t have applied to the university if it weren’t for the honors college?Jennifer: I think some of them, yes. They had to do a separate application for honors, and we’re very clear that it is a lot of effort. I was always impressed by how many young people wanted to do this, because it’s reading thousands of pages of difficult books every semester for two years. We built a residential college, and they were living together in a community, with all kinds of activities. We were bringing in money, grants, and donors. Then it all ended just about as quickly as you might imagine. Jared: Before we go into exactly how it ended, let’s talk a little bit about what the curriculum was like. Jennifer: We built it to be collaborative with the faculty who are teaching it. The most controversial thing was that it was a set curriculum. Everyone is going to teach the same syllabus. And that was for the simple reason that I wanted to build community. It was four semesters of great books from Homer to Hannah Arendt.
The first semester of freshman year, it was Three Ancient Cities: Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. You’re reading texts that would be considered sacred. You’re reading epic poems. You’re reading philosophy. You’re reading tragedy. You’re reading history. Then the second semester is the Long Middle Ages, emphasis on long. We read Augustine’s Confessions, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, the Divine Comedy — and we read all of it, because if you just read Inferno you’re not going to understand what he was up to. We also read St. Benedict’s Rule, because medieval monasticism is so important. Jared: If they’re reading Benedict’s Rule, they’re also going to get something like lectio divina. They’re going to get some kind of an idea of close reading that’s not deconstructive reading.
Jennifer: In your first year, you’ve gone from Homer to Calvin. That’s a huge range of time. And I want to stress that these are seminars. There are no lectures or secondary sources.
In your sophomore year, it’s the Birth of Modernity. That’s basically Machiavelli to Mary Shelley. You get Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Marx. We read Don Quixote, which is a lot, but also very fun.Jared: This is probably where students are likely recognizing names more. Maybe they recognize some names early on in the Greek stuff.
Jennifer: But I’m not expecting incoming freshman to be conversant yet. Then in the last class, it is just the 19th and 20th century. That starts with de Tocqueville. Then we get to Hannah Arendt, and then every instructor gets a free text so they can end wherever they want.
Jared: What semester do you think the students enjoyed the most?
Jennifer: I didn’t run a survey, but I would put a lot of money on Three Ancient Cities being the most popular class.
Jared: So the students would do this for two years and then finish their studies in the broader University of Tulsa.
Jennifer: Yes. Our idea was that what we really needed to fix in higher education is general education. When you go to university, you have general education requirements. And the way that it functions in most universities is like a big cafeteria or buffet. Somebody hands you 10 categories, and they’re like ‘You need a green vegetable, you need three proteins, you need dairy.’ And students kind of look and see what’s left over or what looks good. That’s your general education. It’s incoherent. It’s mostly a matter of luck.
It used to be obvious to everyone that general education should be liberal, right? It’s not yoked to expertise or any sort of output. It’s a kind of formation, and it was thought that you needed a certain kind of liberal formation. Small ‘l’ liberal, not political or partisan.
Jared: I’m ashamed of this fact, but I managed to get a PhD in philosophy without reading The Republic.
Jennifer: It wasn’t your fault.
Jared: I took the history classes that were available. I checked the boxes. Then I went to grad school, and they assume that you’ve read Kant, The Republic, things like that.
Jennifer: Where did you go?
Jared: The University of Connecticut.
Jennifer: Did they even hope you’d read it? Did they care? Honest question.
Jared: One or two people there probably cared.
Jennifer: Were they Pitt people?
Jared: They were. Do you know Lionel Shapiro?
Jennifer: Of course.
Jared: Lionel cared.
Jennifer: What a good man. He’s from the old days of Pitt where it was like ‘You’re going to know your stuff.’
Jared: His history of philosophy seminars were notorious for the sheer intensity you had to bring to them.
Jennifer: Because he had experienced it!
Jared: My speculation is that new graduate students are coming in and have already started specializing. They’re pre-specialized. I started specializing as soon as I could.
Jennifer: I could go on a really long, angry tirade about how much I’m opposed to that. But back to the general point about higher education. Honors colleges are uniquely American. They function as a way for a very bright student to do their general education with honors classes. I sort of saw this as an opportunity to provide a general education that was truly liberal. My hope was that we could prove this is popular, that students want it, and that it works.
You just want to really kind of develop what Aristotle would call intellectual virtues. And you want to do it for the sake of human excellence, human flourishing.
Jared: So what happened?
Jennifer: I got fired. The president who courted me left, and then the provost did too. A new provost comes in, and the first thing she did was get rid of honors. They cut the budget by, I think, 92%. Almost everyone I hired was gone. We were pretty disruptive of the status quo, and I think maybe that wasn’t appreciated by everyone.
Jared: There’s this story that we tell about higher education: student’s don’t want to read, students aren’t interested, the kinds of things you’re offering doesn’t speak to students’ experiences, interests, or needs. I don’t think that’s a narrative you buy.
Jennifer: No, it makes me so angry. It feels patronizing to students. It’s also just false, and it’s a great way to excuse oneself from doing your job. And I think that everyone needs to ask themselves to what extent is student disengagement a reflection of problems in class or the university that need to be addressed? Maybe we can’t teach in the same way we’ve been teaching. I don’t think that the traditional lecture is the best mode of doing philosophy. Philosophy is dialectic.
Jared: When I was still in the classroom, even if I had a class of only 30 for an introductory class, my goal was to see how quickly I could get them talking to each other. As soon as they do that, and they see that there is a real disagreement, that what one person thinks is obvious another thinks is absurd…suddenly, they’re doing philosophy.
Jennifer: I learned pretty early on that if you start out lecturing at students, it’s disruptive to expect them to talk. So, I just decided to flip that. I would start every class by asking questions. That totally reorients them.
I think that one thing that was so important about the honors seminar is that it was a conversation. It was conversation sustained over an hour and some change. There’s a lot of formation going on in conversation. Wisdom requires the cultivation of certain virtues, and the best context in which to pursue both of those things is intellectual friendship. The students were friends, and they were friends who did not agree.
Jared: What is honors at Tulsa like now?
Jennifer: You’d have to ask the students. I’m on sabbatical, and I’m not teaching honors.
Jared: Were there any texts that you had in your curriculum that students hated?
Jennifer: What a great question. There were some texts that didn’t land as well as others. Some of the history texts were like that. A lot people did not like the Federalist Papers. Some people really didn’t like Sappho. Everybody loves Homer.
Jared: With many of these texts, they are so much weirder than you expect them to be.
Jennifer: The students are always surprised by how how naughty medieval literature is. They were like, ‘Oh, wow, there’s a lot of adultery in this.’
Jared: I want to ask you for a book recommendation for our audience. We’re looking for books that you think everybody should read. Do you have something for us?
Jennifer: People should read a book by Zena Hitz called Lost in Thought. It’s very much related to the things that we’ve been talking about. Zena is a tutor at St. John’s, a philosopher, and a friend of the perennial philosophy. It’s a beautiful book. It’s part memoir, part defense of the liberality of liberal learning. She really leans into the idea that seeking knowledge for its own sake is deeply, deeply connected to human flourishing. And she does it by showing it.
Jared: Jennifer Frey, thank you for joining us.
Jennifer: Thank you.



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Welcome to the latest installment of our interview series here at The Honest Broker—also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.
Today, I’m excited to share my conversation with Ross Barkan.
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Ross is a busy man. He is not only the writer behind Political Currents by Ross Barkan — he’s also a contributor to venues like New York Magazine, the author of the novels Glass Century and Colossus, and editor-in-chief of The Metropolitan Review. So naturally, I wanted to talk to Ross about writing and publishing.
Once we started talking, we couldn’t stop. This interview is cut down from nearly three hours of continuous conversation. We discussed the state of publishing, the difficulty of launching a new culture review, America’s political and literary history, AI art, and the ways that platforms like Substack are changing how we write and what we can get away with.
Below are highlights from the interview. For the rest of our conversation, check out the video at the top of the page.
Highlights from the Ross Barkan Interview
Jared: I was prepping for this interview, and I was talking to a mutual friend of ours, Alexander Sorondo. He asked if I was going to talk to you about politics or about literature and writing. I had to confess to him that I didn’t know you wrote about politics. I knew you exclusively from novels and things like The Metropolitan Review.
Ross: I like politics, but my love lies with literature and culture, and I think that comes across on Substack. That’s why Substack’s been so great, because the literary world is very hard to penetrate. Media is hard, but there is a very straightforward way that I could tell someone to break in. Come up with an idea, look at what the publication publishes, find the editor’s email, pitch them. They might not respond, but you can always pitch again, and at some point they might respond.
The media world still moves at a pretty quick pace, and even though it is very desiccated due to all these economic forces, there are still outlets out there. The literary world is still this very strange organism, and it really took Substack for me to have any kind of literary career or stature of any kind. Substack’s not perfect. I don’t want to turn into a Substack fanboy, but it is different. It has opened up so many pathways. You mentioned Alexander Sorondo. We published his 15,000-word profile of William Vollmann in The Metropolitan Review. This is a piece that he could not get published anywhere. And to me, that’s insane.
Jared: I think I was the third reader of Alex’s novel, Cubafruit. He sent me a copy before it was released, and I read it, and I was like ‘This is great. I love it.’ He went through that whole slog. He had an agent who loved his novel. He was getting personalized rejections, and every rejection would be effusive with praise, and they would say “We don’t know where to place this.” He’s a writer who just doesn’t fit into an easy mold. There is no niche for him right now. He’s doing something interesting, and the current media environment doesn’t know where to place him, and so he had to just go find something on his own. Insofar as I’m ever a fan of a platform, it’s because it gives people an opportunity to do something cool.
Ross: I was starting my career at the height of the 2010s digital upstarts. That was supposed to save writing and media, and it did not. And it’s fascinating to see with Substack that it has inculcated genuinely original writing. Sorondo, Naomi Kanakia, John Pistelli, Henry Begler, Sam Kriss. They write differently. That’s what’s so exciting.
You don’t see that from a lot of mainstream outlets anymore. There’s less room for literary nonfiction. When you look at New Journalism, with people like Tom Wolfe, or Joan Didion, or Gay Talese — they had very particular styles, right? They didn’t all sound the same. What bothered me about the internet era was it felt like there was a real flatness to the prose. I have really enjoyed this era much more.
Jared: It’s gone past that kind of voiceless, generic, Millennial snark.
Ross: I called it Gawker speak. The snark voice. That was so dominant. Very irony-drenched, very casual, humorous but kind of bitter. When it started, there was something refreshing about it. But then that took over the internet. I felt like the capital ‘L’ literary was lost in that, and I also felt like other types of idiosyncratic writing could not break through in the same way.
Jared: So tell me a little bit about the thought that went behind founding The Metropolitan Review. What are you trying to accomplish with this? Because I do think it sits in a really interesting space. It’s long-form. Pieces are usually over 3,000 words, which on Substack is huge. You’re also going to have a print edition.
Ross: Yes, we are planning for a print edition. It’s going to be very nice. We have a great team: Lou Bahet, Vanessa Ogle, Django Ellenhorn. Lou wanted to do something longer-lasting, that could sit on your bookshelf. So, we’re taking our time to get it there, and we have a printer in place, and now it’s really just getting these logistics in order.
I wanted to start a publication that’s going to review books, because it is harder and harder to get books reviewed. I also wanted a publication that lets the writer be the writer. We do edit The Metropolitan Review, but the edit will never erase someone’s voice. You will sound like yourself. We don’t have a single house style.
Jared: I think that the choice you’re making to have a premium printing is the right one. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy authors as well. They expect that their books won’t sell well unless they get big on TikTok. But you make your money by then later printing 1,500 copies of an ultra-premium edition.
Ross: That’s amazing. It’s a great idea.
Jared: We’re not going to see a return to the old paperback era, where you could make a living just churning out science fiction paperbacks over the weekend. But you can cultivate a fan base that will pay for the real thing, and they don’t just want a hardback. They want a really luxurious item that they can put on their shelf.
Ross: Exactly.
Jared: When I was reading Glass Century, I noticed that the way you write it had an ambivalence about identity throughout. Very early on, there’s a fake wedding between Mona and Saul. There are these little conversations that let people know everyone’s ethnic backgrounds. Saul will tell you the difference between German Jews and Russian Jews. So, I thought this was an ‘identity-first’ book. But your main character, Mona…she doesn’t care. Was that intentional?
Ross: I think I have always felt very ambivalent about it. I am a secular Jew. I had a bar mitzvah and did a little Hebrew school, but I never identified myself first as a Jew or even as a white person. I always felt that I am me and my interests. Some would say that’s a luxury and a privilege, and I accept that. Having grown up in New York City, I always understood identity was very complicated.
I didn’t grow up with a great distinction between the German and the Russian Jew, but I knew my history. I understood that the German Jew and the Russian Jew are, in fact, quite distinct. I’m descended from the Russian Jews, the Jews who came from the pogroms of the 19th century. The fled here during the era of mass immigration, and that’s why I’m always going to be pro-immigrant. So, it’s a little similar to Saul in the book. The German Jew is very assimilated, was wealthier. They also tended to be almost Christian-passing.
Jared: I think Saul uses the phrase ‘barely part of the tribe.’
Ross: Yes, that’s how the German Jew is seen. Dianne Feinstein, the late senator from California, is a great example of this. She was a German Jew who grew up in San Francisco. She attended a Catholic school, and that was something that was not uncommon if you were part of this older community.
Jared: I liked Glass Century because it was a book that took identity seriously, but it didn’t make it the only focus.
Ross: I’ve found the woke/anti-woke binary very exhausting. I think we need to move back to universal values. There’s a very healthy way to talk about identity. You can’t talk about American history without the sins of slavery. Before we recorded this, I walked to the Texas capitol. It was very interesting to see a Confederate monument. And it sits there, very distinctly, a block away from an Austin pride flag. We can’t dismiss the sins of the past, but we have to acknowledge progress.
Jared: One of my favorite cultural institutions in the United States is the Library of America. I ask myself ‘Why doesn’t every country have a publisher that does this?’ And I love the fact that in the Library of America, you read the foundational documents of the United States. You read Black writers during Reconstruction. You read New York City Jews in the 1970s. It’s remarkable.
Ross: You see throughout American history that there’s this push-pull. It’s cycles. It’s battles. It is great terror and great failure, mixed with great hope and great success. And that is the story of America that should be told, because that is the story of America.
Jared: Let me read something to you: ‘We are fattened, bloody flesh sacks doomed to obsolescence, pacified by programs that will do all the thinking and feeling for us. If we stop thinking, what is left? To submit? To putter along like amoebae?’
That’s you writing about the New Romanticism and AI. So why don’t you tell us how you really feel?
Ross: New Romanticism is very interesting to me. Ted Gioia originated the idea, and it drew me in right away. I think it captures a general mood. A growing number of people are very disenchanted with technology as it stands today. They are looking to older forms, a return to a more interpersonal and in-person dynamic, a real turn away from techno-optimism. I believe that we are in a space where we understand technology’s ill effects.
Why is it for tens of thousands of years, humanity could paint paintings, write novels, use imagination? Why do you need a machine to replace that? I get why you need a machine to lift a heavy object. I get why you need a machine to do complex mathematical calculations. I get why you need a machine to do medical exams. We need machines for many things. The proponents of AI don’t really say why you need a machine to make what is now very mediocre art.
Jared: Do you have a book recommendation for our audience?
Ross: Ken Kesey is very famous for writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is a great book. No one knows his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, which is this wonderful epic of the Pacific Northwest. It was a formative novel in my youth, and I highly recommend it.
Jared: Ross Barkan, thanks for joining me.
Ross: Thank you for having me. This was wonderful.



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