Great Reads for October
Ahoy,
I’ve been thinking a lot about journalism and writing and have reached a bit of a crisis of faith. I kind of want to quit journalism, to abandon my mission of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. I don’t believe it has a future.
Hear me out.
I got my masters in journalism in 2001, back when the New York Times tech section appeared on the back of the sports section every Thursday. Back then tech was a separate thing, something that had no bearing on anything else. In 2001 we watched movies on cable and if you were lucky you had a TiVo. In 2001 music came on CDs although MP3s and MP3 players were slowly crawling out of the sea. In 2001 the closest thing you got to streaming was a DVD mailed to your house weekly.
I’ve watched the industry grow and change and I’ve watched tech encompass everything, from our social lives to our doctors visits to our educational system. Tech journalism, on the other hand, has fallen into the worst of all possible ditches. Brian Lam, the creator of Wirecutter, connected affiliate links to standard gadget reviews and, in turn, created an entire industry around fooling bots into thinking your review was of higher value, thereby encouraging more clicks and more purchases. Further, journalists became big tech’s lapdogs. FAANG doesn’t talk to you unless you play ball and startups took leaves from that playbook, creating an environment where CEOs scam with impunity unless they are very rarely caught.
I’m a technoutopianist. I believe technology will fix everything. What that means in practice is the belief that the arc of history bends toward freedom but it’s our machines and minds that do the bending.
I could start a news organization that’s focused on that and I still might. But at this stage in the game it almost seems useless. New audiences don’t read. New audiences trust YouTubers with all the ethics of conmen. The games and gadget industry is fixed and broken and the money associated with it, money that should be going to pay salaries for real writers covering the industry dispassionately and not for hacks reblogging something from the Daily Beast. I know that price journalists pay and the trade-offs they must make. And maybe I’m done with that game.
I had a fun convo on Twitter yesterday. The recommendation, honestly, was to quit simply because there was so little value in the space right now. I might stay to fight on. We’ll see. Anyway, at least we still have books.
Best,
JB
My friend Ryan Holiday opened a bookshop in Bastrop. Please buy books from him.
Ok. Onto the books.
By Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson writes detailed histories about things you probably didn’t think to care about. His charming style is honestly deeply engrossing and you can read even his thickest tomes with a smile on your face. One Summer: America 1927 is about a summer that essentially changed the world. It was the summer of baseball, manned flight, and crime and the whole tale revolves around the race to be the first man to cross the Atlantic in a plane, the home run kings that were changing the shape of baseball, and the men and women who made the news in an era of ticker tapes and morning and evening papers. It’s not as funny as some of his other books, but it’s a good read.
By Richard J. Evans
After a visit to Auschwitz this year with the older kids, I wanted to explore the motivations behind the atrocities of World War II. Evans’ book explores Germany herself and focuses on the real people associated with the war, from the shopkeeps who were forced to shut down in order to save resources for the German war machine to the monsters who worked tirelessly to kill millions. Evans uses numbers to show the banality of destruction and evil associated with the Third Reich and this book shows the slow destructions of one of the worst ideas ever to roar across the face of the Earth.
By Szczepan Twardoch
This book is a fascinating study of 1930s Poland and the rise of Nazism in Central Europe. Focusing on a group of Jews, including boxer Jakub Szapiro, the story shows you a side of Warsaw you’ve never seen, a time of lavish living, luxury, and mafia ties. It’s a great read.
As always, I welcome recommendations. Just email me at john@biggs.cc.