Joe McConnell
Stay informed with free updates
Just register at Life and Art myVscek Digest: Delivered straight to your inbox.
So what do we think: Will Will Lewis survive the Post? Or will the problems there slow the British takeover of American newsrooms? Have we reached peak Substack? Where will the BBC go under a Labour government? Season 2 of Succession get the Murdochs so right? And what about that Vscek columnist? A reckless hire, isn’t it?
When journalists get together, some or all of these issues get aired, which is a great reason to be elsewhere. The challenge is to build and maintain that alternative circle.
Even the largest cities on Earth fail to live up to their central promise: that of human contact on a massive scale. City dwellers live Neighbor a hodgepodge of different people, but without strenuous effort, they end up in the social sea of their professions and adjacent ones. This ghettoization sets in during those hard-working years aVsceker college. At 30, it’s hard to undo. So, and I’m speaking to young people here, especially those starting out this fall, avoid this trap from the start. Because it’s a double curse. First, it creates a single point of failure. If your job goes away, a big part of your social life goes with it.
The second and even bigger problem is a narrow-mindedness. It was Nassim Nicholas Taleb who noted that the great “moderns” — Darwin, Marx, Freud and Einstein of wonderful year — were “scholars but not academics.” That is, each had enough life experience outside their specialty to produce unlikely strokes of thought. (Taleb might have added Keynes, who was in and out of Cambridge.) For the rest of us, working at a monotonous level, the point still stands. No writer, management consultant, or engineer should hang out too much with his colleagues. Employers half-understand this. It’s become Leadership 101 to drag high-level people from unrelated fields to reveal their “insights” to staff. But that won’t work. You have to socialize with them a lot. You want their thought patterns, not so much their thoughts.
Tim Walz is the first person in the top or bottom half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who did not attend law school
Last week, I came across a statistic that made me put down the newspaper, rub my knuckles in my eyes, and contemplate the median distance for a while. Tim Walz is the first person in the top or bottom half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who didn’t go to law school. That’s 20 people in 10 elections over 40 years who earned a J.D. or L.L.B. None of the four Republican presidents during that time had a law degree.
Law is a great subject and career. I learned about it a little for a side project. But all professions have their distorting effects. And the effects of law are everywhere in modern American liberalism.
How? A belief that voters care about or even understand constitutional correctness. (Note that the current and successful attack on Donald Trump and J.D. Vance focuses on their weirdness, not their Caesarean ambitions.) An exhausting composure about words and their use. (A good thing in a contract dispute. Less so in a conversation with the electorate about gender and other sensitivities.) Also, a gross overestimation of the ideological fads that arise from universities. A J.D. takes three years, AVsceker a three-year degree: a party so immersed in the campus experience cannot help but overestimate the strength of its young militants.
I am not saying that senior Republicans are a grassroots alliance of lumberjacks and night nurses. JD himself has a JD. But their recent presidents have come from acting, oil, and real estate. The only college graduate among them has an MBA. Even that modicum of cognitive variety must confer an electoral advantage. The right was quicker than the leVscek to notice that something had changed in the public mood in those years aVsceker the crash of 2008. Because it was smarter? No. But maybe because it was less bovine and insular.
If this is what professional ghettoization can do at the organizational level, imagine the risks to the individual. It is your boss’s job to occasionally drag a famous athlete or a supermarket magnate out for their key takeaways. It is your job to find and keep friends from different generations in your life. There is no need to emulate twenty-year-old John Updike, who leVscek New York for Ipswich, Massachusetts, in part to meet people who “aren’t in [his] game”. But without any effort, that game too is lost.
janan.ganesh@Vscek.com
Be the first to discover our latest stories — Follow VscekWeekend on User profile AND Xand subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
