Good evening. There is no shortage of copy – some of it quite good – about how much worse journalism has become in the past 20 years as the market for print newspapers has collapsed. But it’s not true. British journalism is far richer, more varied, and more substantial today than it was 20 years ago. I think we’re living in a golden age of copy, and it’s only going to get better.
The big British media houses, and most of the small ones, have all survived the transition to digital and are now thriving. They’re making money, and the work they produce has been sharpened online, where it’s clear what is and isn’t working.
Outlets did often chase cheap traffic in the 2010s, but they are all now more sophisticated in what they pay attention to: viral pieces that people barely read don’t matter. What matters is copy that leads to subscriptions, or that subscribers spend a lot of time reading. When you have good data, quality rises.
It’s also never been easier to put a piece together. We used to transcribe interviews ourselves – a process that took so long it could drain the life out of an idea. Now Otter does it for you in minutes. Shorthand is redundant. Google provides a searchable archive of all the copy ever written. Twitter has turned the opaque lives of profile subjects into a web of visible connections and thousands of public thoughts. You can learn about almost anything by simply reading and reaching out to people from a computer the size of a notebook.
Getting paid to be a journalist is trickier, and younger journalists can get caught in a bind, forced to produce copy too quickly to make it good. But there is usually time in life if you make it – in the evenings, on the weekends. And as someone put it once, "everybody is one exceptional essay away from a flood of career opportunities".
Maybe you need to write a few exceptional pieces to be noticed. But you can rise quickly once you do: look at the comment or feature pages of the Times, Guardian, FT, Economist, NS, or LRB – they are full of young writers. If you were young and brilliant in the 1980s you had to toil in obscurity, with no chance of escaping the hierarchy of your institution and with few slots to fill if you did. A great piece today can put you on air, land you a contract, lead to a job, a podcast series, a book deal.
If we’re in a golden age, perhaps you’re in need of a guide to the best writing out there, as well as links to some old classics and great books. That’s the point of this newsletter. Let’s get to it.
1 — “Imagine that the assassins of John Fitzgerald Kennedy come to tell you how they killed him and kept a tooth or a finger. How would Americans feel?”
Patrice Lumumba was only four years older than me when he was arrested, tortured, executed by firing squad "in the presence of Belgian officials", and dismembered in 1961. He had been elected as Congo’s prime minister the previous year.
The CIA wanted him dead, seeing him as a “commie” threat, in the words of its local station officer. So, in all likelihood, did President Eisenhower. If that sounds extraordinary, a Senate committee detailed as much in 1975. The CIA had begun plotting to kill Lumumba when rival Congolese forces seized him. (I think I’m going to send you a separate email about the US’ efforts to bring about the "permanent disposal" of Lumumba.)
For now, here is a finely-written 4,000-word piece by Andres Schipani from the FT Magazine, on the long-awaited return of one of Lumumba’s teeth to Kinshasa. The tooth was taken in 1961 by a Belgian police commissioner who dismembered Lumumba (unbelievably, the policeman went on to write a novel about it).
Lumumba believed in democracy and the rule of law. In a letter smuggled out of the cell in which he was kept in the final days before his death, he wrote with desperate clarity: “The penal code in effect in the Congo expressly stipulates the prisoner must be taken before the examining magistrate investigating the charges on the day following his arrest at the very latest . . . Whatever the circumstances, the prisoner is entitled to a lawyer . . . No warrant for our arrest has been served. We have simply been kept in an army camp for thirty-four days, in punishment cells.”
Nobody with power listened. No lawyers came. As De Witte recounts in his book, an ally of Lumumba tried to give the letter to the UN secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, who was visiting the DRC at the time. Hammarskjöld, a Swede, reportedly turned red and asked that it be given to his private secretary. Just five months earlier, Hammarskjöld had told a US representative at the UN that he believed the “situation in Congo would not be straightened out until Lumumba was dealt with” and that Lumumba must be “broken”.
2 — “You know, these people forget,” he said. “Politicians tend to forget.”
This Trump piece isn’t that new, but it might be new to you, and it’s newly relevant: Trump has recently leapt back into contention in the 2024 presidential race. When this Olivia Nuzzi cover (7,600 words, 25 mins) came out in New York magazine at Christmas, Ron DeSantis was considered twice as likely to secure next year’s Republican nomination.
Now, after a series of new polls, betting markets have him and Trump neck-and-neck. Yet Trump is barely leaving his golf courses, his children have checked out, and "the people who remain at his side, well, let’s just say Trump 2024 is not sending its best".
He had wanted to be in the movie business. It’s important to never forget this about him. He watches Sunset Boulevard, “one of the greatest of all time,” again and again and again. A silent-picture star sidelined by the talkies, driven to madness, in denial over her faded celebrity. When he was a businessman, he showed it to guests aboard his 727. When he was president, he held screenings of it for White House staff at Camp David.
He once showed it to his press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who later described how “the president, who could never sit still for anything without talking on the phone, sending a tweet, or flipping through TV channels, sat enthralled.” And he once showed it to Tim O’Brien, the biographer, who wrote that when Norma Desmond cried, “Those idiot producers. Those imbeciles! Haven’t they got any eyes? Have they forgotten what a star looks like? I’ll show them. I’ll be up there again, so help me!,” Trump leaned over O’Brien’s shoulder and whispered, “Is this an incredible scene or what? Just incredible.”
A washed-up star locked away in a mansion from the 1920s, afraid of the world outside, afraid it will remind him that time has passed … Well, he does not like the way it sounds for Trump. He still talks that way, in the third person. “This was the same thing in 2016. They said first, ‘Oh, Trump is just doing it for fun,’ and then they learned that wasn’t true,” he told me. “And then they said, ‘Well, he won’t win.’ And they learned that wasn’t true.”
3 — "It is not the people who master the technology, but the technology that masters the people."
, who is fast becoming an essential essayist on here, has a piece out on TikTok (4,300 words, 14 mins) and the cognitive decline of the digitally distracted West.Read for the fascinating insights into Wang Huning, the Chinese state theorist who, like de Tocqueville and Sayyid Qutb before him, visited America as a younger man and was struck by what he saw. (The 900-word interlude on Nick Lard seems slightly less essential.) Wang wrote the line above thirty years ago, long before the addictions of the internet proved his point.
Individually, [TikTok] videos are harmless, but the algorithm doesn’t intend to show you just one. When it receives the signal that it’s got your attention, it doubles down on whatever it did to get it. This allows it to feed your obsessions, showing you hypnotic content again and again, reinforcing its imprint on your brain.
This content can include promotion of self-harm and eating disorders, and uncritical encouragement of sex-reassignment surgery. There’s evidence that watching such content can cause mass psychogenic illness: researchers recently identified a new phenomenon where otherwise healthy young girls who watched clips of Tourette’s sufferers developed Tourette’s-like tics. . .
In the long term the only way to prevent digital dementia is to raise awareness of the neurological ruin wrought by apps like TikTok, exposing their ugliness so they fall out of fashion like cigarettes. If the weakness of liberalism is its openness, then this is also its strength; word can travel far in democracies.
We’ll surely sound like alarmists; TikTok destroys so gradually that it seems harmless. But if the app is a time-bomb that’ll wreck a whole generation years from now, then we can’t wait till its effects are apparent before acting, for then it will be too late.
Bonus links
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." Here are 4,000 words I didn’t put down once I started reading them, on how Amazon, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and Google have all degraded their products in pursuit of profit. The other day I asked ChatGPT and Google the same minor question (I was cooking). Google’s showed me a series of random articles I would have needed to scour for an answer. ChatGPT wrote out a response in seconds. It isn’t yet useful for anything much more complex than that – it lies too much, quotes too little, and doesn’t know enough. But that will change.
Why won’t the government let scientists ensure that the sea is safe?
"Since the early 1990s, the U.S. cancer-mortality rate has fallen by a third." (Fund medical science!)
"Miller’s view, it seems, is that academic freedom really only means as much freedom as your most sensitive students can stand."
"Company matters far more at a dinner party than food."
Book deck
If you were one of the boys loafing through 1981, I can see how you might think the golden age of journalism has long passed. In Notes from a Small Island (1995), Bill Bryson captured the old order on the eve of the Murdoch revolution:
When I started at The Times in 1981, just after the famous year-long shutdown, overmanning and slack output were prodigious to say the least. On the Company News desk where I worked as a sub-editor, the five-man team would wander in about two thirty and spend most of the afternoon reading the evening papers and drinking tea while waiting for the reporters to surmount the daily challenge of finding their way back to their desks after a three-hour lunch involving several bottles of jolly decent Chateauneuf du Pape; compose their expenses; complete hunched and whispered phone calls to their brokers with regard to a little tip they’d picked up over the créme brûlée; and finally produce a page or so of copy before retiring parched to the Blue Lion across the road.
At about half past five, we would engage in a little light subbing for an hour or so, then slip our arms into our coats and go home. It seemed very agreeably unlike work. At the end of the first month, one of my colleagues showed me how to record imaginary expenditures on an expense account sheet and take it up to the third floor, where it could be exchanged at a little window for about £100 in cash – more money, literally, than I had ever held before.
We got six weeks’ holiday, three weeks’ paternity leave and a month’s sabbatical every four years. What a wonderful world Fleet Street then was and how thrilled I was to be part of it. Alas, nothing that good can ever last. A few months later, Rupert Murdoch took over The Times and within days the building was full of mysterious tanned Australians in white short-sleeved shirts, who lurked in the background with clipboards and looked like they were measuring people for coffins.
There is a story, which I suspect may actually be true, that one of these functionaries wandered into a room on the fourth floor full of people who hadn’t done anything in years and, when they proved unable to account convincingly for themselves, sacked them at a stroke, except for one fortunate fellow who had popped out to the betting shop. When he returned, it was to an empty room and he spent the next two years sitting alone wondering vaguely what had become of his colleagues.
Thank you for reading. Your next periodic One Great Read will be with you on Sunday 12 February. This email is still nascent, and I won’t be turning on paid subscriptions for some time yet, but I’m trying to gauge whether any readers would find this email in its current form worth subscribing to (for $5/£4 per month).
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