Debate me!

Elizabeth Gilbert, the death of criticism, the gig economy, and he who must not be named

1. The first serious argument I ever got into with my now-spouse happened on a rainy June evening, just a few months after we started dating. We were walking out of the movie Ratatouille. I had liked the movie, but I had objected to the character of Anton Ego, the dour, humorless, overly exacting food critic. Spoiler alert from an eighteen-year-old movie I guess: Ego redeems himself, and finds happiness, only after he’s fired from his job as a critic and invests in Remy the rat’s restaurant. The critic, the movie asserts, is necessarily at odds with the process of creation. Whereas I saw the critic’s job as an extension of the creative act. Jamie disagreed. Neither of us remember exactly what he said—this was eighteen years ago—only that my retort was to call him a Republican. That made him really mad.

I wanted to be a critic; I thought it was a noble calling. I was working at the time as a book reviews editor and writing some pieces on a freelance basis, and I dreamed of that white whale: the staff job. The staff job meant safety and institutional power, yes, but it also meant freedom to build a critical home. When a staff writer with a regular readership writes a book review, it’s not just a book review; it’s a piece of an ongoing conversation that builds across time. And yes, some critics are cranks. Some can be glib. I myself have a small hit list of critics whom I despise. But the great ones? I’m talking about Pauline Kael and Ellen Willis and Jerry Saltz and Susan Sontag and George Orwell and Joan Acocella and Edward Said and Peter Schjeldahl and and…. Criticism isn’t antithetical to creation: Edgar Allan Poe was a critic; so were T.S. Eliot and Walt Whitman. On the contrary, criticism is necessary to it; good, engaged, deeply felt criticism takes that piece of art and fixes it to the firmament. A critic pins a song or a film or a book onto the still wet spiderweb of culture, and tells us not only what it means to consume art and food and media, but what it means to be alive, here, now, in this place and time.

How I loved it! To be a part of the conversation, to not merely consume but to honor the whole of culture by attending to it. I loved it so much that I spent hours reading books to craft long essays to the tune of $200 a pop. I don’t think most people understand this: how little critics got paid, even in those days, which in retrospect was the dusk of a golden era. By the time I stopped even trying to pitch book reviews, the going rate was closer to a hundred dollars or even fifty. A lot of magazines did not want to pay at all; writers were coaxed into writing for the “exposure.”

would never write for exposure

2. A few weeks ago, like everyone else in the sentient world, I read the excerpt in The Cut from Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir. I read it with a mixture of glee—here comes the trainwreck!—and a sort of careening exhaustion. My first thoughts were about self-help and the trouble of false epiphany, which dovetails with a lot of the thinking I’ve been doing about gurus, influencers, and the menacing way the gig economy and social media have smooshed together. Spoiler alert for a nineteen-year-old book, I guess, but even if you’ve never read Eat, Pray, Love, you probably know that at the end of the book, Gilbert falls in love, and her frustration and loneliness and feelings of great angst are resolved. The book launched a thousand (million) women’s ships of self-discovery, and I wondered what it might mean to them, and to the idea of self-help, that the mother of the genre was now loudly clearing her throat to announce well, actually, she was not fixed at all.

I thought about writing about it, but the truth is, I am too checked out on Gilbert to have an informed opinion about her work. I haven’t read the memoir. I didn’t hate EPL but I didn’t love it, either; it sent me on no journeys of self-discovery (except for the nagging realization that no one would buy a book partially set in an Indian ashram from someone who is Indian). I do quite love her TED talk on genius, but it hasn’t inspired me to read any of her books since EPL, or follow her non-book work. Writing about her, I believed, would require a deep dive, an investment of time and energy that I just didn’t have. If I was employed full-time as a culture writer for a magazine or newspaper, I would have certainly done it. What’s more, I wouldn’t be in the position of scrambling at the last minute to cram a bunch of research, because I would have received an early galley of the memoir and had time to engage with it, think about it, do the required surround reading in advance, maybe even interview a few people—and had the whole thing ready to go when the Cut excerpt dropped and the discourse exploded.

A couple of days later, a friend sent me the link to Jia Tolentino’s review of the book in The New Yorker. It’s not really a review so much as it is a critical assessment of Gilbert as a whole—exactly the kind of piece I’d had in mind. And though Tolentino’s take wasn’t the one I would have written, I enjoyed it. Her assessment was thoughtful, holistic, and made a strong pitch for a way to see Gilbert as a writer and a cultural phenomenon that I don’t think you have to agree with to appreciate. It was a piece that itself was rife to be riffed on, but where once it might have launched a cascade of critical essays—each linking to each other, referencing each other, building, as it were, a cultural conversation reckoning with the phenomenon that is Elizabeth Gilbert—the conversation just kind of…collapsed. Sure, there were a lot of takes on Notes and Threads and Bluesky and whatever else has come to lap up the dregs of what was once Twitter, but these were cannibalistic. By form and design, the hot take is designed to reduce, where a conversation is meant to expand.

Over the weekend, I met a friend for dinner, at a new Italian restaurant that I had read a review of somewhere (Grub Street? Eater?) then put on my map and forgot about until it was time to find a restaurant in that neighborhood—because I, too, consume criticism differently now. Come to think of it, maybe what I’d read about this restaurant wasn’t a review at all but a blurb in one of those endless, increasingly popular roundup packages, which don’t require the food writer to spend enormous amounts of time and money visiting the restaurant on multiple occasions (or maybe even at all; plenty of pubs recycle publicity copy for these lists). Over dinner—which was delicious, and made me wonder if anyone’s written a good critical essay about the reinvention of Italian-American food since Torrisi upended everything in 2011—we got to talking about Substack. My friend has been at this newsletter game much longer than me, and I relied on her advice when I started this one. She complimented my work here and, much to my embarrassment, I found myself tearing up. The truth is, this newsletter hasn’t been growing the way I’d hoped it would. Contrary to everything I’d heard about the magical Substack algorithm, new readers haven’t been finding me in droves, or even a trickle. Part of this is possibly due to Substack itself changing the way it promotes and spreads newsletters. There have been rumblings, even, about active suppression of small free newsletters like this one in favor of the big accounts with high paywalls (did you know Gilbert herself is on here? You probably do—she has over 200k subscribers!). I don’t know if this is true, and if it is, I hardly blame the platform itself. We’ve all been at this long enough to understand how the game works. Either you get in during the “free money” era of a VC-backed venture, or you suffer when it comes time to pay the shareholders. Still, there’s a particular embarrassment to doing the thing you rejected doing a decade ago—writing for exposure—and finding that exposure, you’re not getting.

My friend talked about another friend of hers who wrote an essay on Gilbert that went viral. I haven’t read the piece, so I can’t tell you if it’s any good. I can tell you that my friend enjoyed it. But overall we shared a doomed feeling that this platform was losing its delightful quirkiness as everyone chased clicks, with the result being fewer interesting critical takes, and more recycled, bloated hot takes. Which also, frankly, makes sense. If criticism is unprofitable—and even the best essayists on here tend to leave their critical essays free, putting things like advice columns behind the paywall instead—then it will fall solely into the hands of fans and haters.

I went home after dinner and opened Instagram. Immediately I saw a clip from a podcast I’d never heard of. In the clip, the hosts rail against Elizabeth Gilbert for not acknowledging her vast wealth and the way it enabled her destructive behavior. Several commenters politely pointed out that, in fact, she not only acknowledges the way sudden fame and wealth fed her addiction, she wrote an entire chapter about it. The podcasters, in turn, responded to each comment with the same copy-paste retort that their podcast take was only about The Cut excerpt, not the memoir as a whole. The podcasters, you see, had not actually read the memoir. This seemed as stupid to me as if someone had read the first chapter of a novel and criticized it for leaving the plot unresolved. It was also stupid because Gilbert in fact does acknowledge her wealth and privilege in the chapter excerpted in The Cut, so even by the podcasters’ own terrible logic, they had failed at their job. It did not seem to occur to them that Gilbert comes off as a hot mess in the excerpt because she wants you to perceive her that way. She is a writer! This is craft!

I did not click through off the reel to listen to the whole podcast, so for all I know I am unfairly criticizing a piece of work off a clip that is unfairly criticizing a piece of work off a clip. Turtles all the way down.

4. In my mind, there is a direct link between all of this and the dire circumstances we have all fallen into this past week. I hesitate to name it, I hesitate to name him, because of what has happened to those who have. Firings, death threats, bomb threats, rape threats. The promise of war. On the one hand, this might be the advantage of having a small, inconsequential account: maybe it is up to us at the bottom to speak clearly and honestly about the thing. On the other, I have no institution to protect me. I’m firmly on the side of the first hand when I start writing this, but then Susie Bright’s newsletter hits my inbox, and I pause. Bright, an actual free speech warrior, has spent the last week fighting off death and rape threats from trolls and bots on Substack.

The cut-rate Chthonic Deities— that’s what I call the trolls now— drew a red circle around my name, to the effect that I should be aggressively doxxed, “fired,” raped and killed, (naturally), and imprisoned at the very least.

—All for the crime of “showing disrespect” to their heroes, in my writing. That’s the phrase they use: Disrespect.

And so, I decide, I’m not writing about it. I’m not writing about the man who made a career of insulting and degrading the students that took him at his word that what he wanted was “debate.” On college campuses that invited him to insult and degrade their students, to say vile things about black people and gay people and Jewish people and Muslim people and women. To push us back into a place where we must defend our humanity every time we walk into a grocery store or bank.

I’m not writing about it! I’m not writing about how, as criticism has declined, debate has risen to take its place—debate being the verbal form of the hot take: reductive, shouty, uncaring of context or meaning or truth. Where conversation has ceded to talking points and yelling. I’m not writing about how the decline of magazines and the rise of “news” shows like Crossfire and Real Time and Hannity paved the way between Then and Now, when the few people still doing the deep reading and thinking are invited onto television shows and podcasts only to be shouted at by Debate Me! bros. How clips of clips of clips are what succeed not only in the marketplace of ideas but in the actual marketplace, where the rest of us are told we cannot thrive unless we lean into it. The attention economy, except no one has any attention left to give.

The Crossfire effect

5. My ruminating on criticism began not with Gilbert, but with a spate of essays over the summer in response to some of our last remaining critics being laid off or taking buyouts. In mid-August came the news that the Associated Press was killing its book reviews. Many small and medium-sized newspapers syndicate the AP reviews, so the move has wide ramifications, although possibly not deep ones for the average reader, because the main reason cited was low readership. The second reason, of course, was money.

Then Kelefa Sanneh, one of the few staff critics of any genre left in the country, published a piece in The New Yorker about how music critics are no longer mean. (The same could be said of all arts critics, really: we have few, if any, Anton Egos left.) Sanneh’s essay prompted a wave of essays and blogs—a conversation, because an essay isn’t a last word; it’s an invitation. Quite honestly, most of the responses were striking me as kind of dull and inside baseball, maybe because the writers who care about music criticism know they’re only talking to each other at this point, until I read Jude Doyle’s. Doyle is one of my favorite cultural writers, though admittedly I forgot about him for a little while; he’s not on staff anywhere, and without the aggregatory powers of Twitter—which I deleted once it became X—I didn’t know he’d started a newsletter on Ghost. (My husband, who, let me state for the record, is definitely not a Republican, not even about critics, forwarded me his post.) In any case, Doyle takes a long, interesting look at Sanneh’s arguments, and it’s worth reading the whole piece in full if this convo about music criticism interests you, but if it doesn’t, I urge you to at least read the second half. Here Doyle recounts an experience he had while working at a glossy women’s magazine, when he was assigned to write about Taylor Swift’s then-newly released album Reputation and the controversy surrounding her claim that she hadn’t given consent to Kanye West for his (admittedly nasty) concurrently released song about her—a claim that was instantly disproven by Kanye’s own wife’s video of the call in which Swift clearly gives her consent:

Well: The Internet found Swift’s actions to be deeply racist, which — since she had cast a Black man as a scary, threatening, sexually inappropriate misogynist over something to which she had in fact given clear verbal consent — is understandable. The fact that Taylor Swift had an avid fan base among online Nazis and white supremacists came up as further evidence against her. It absolutely did not help that Reputation was the album on which this particular white girl decided to try rapping. The controversy has faded considerably in past years, mostly due to the fact that, well, Kanye West is a Nazi now, and no-one feels like defending him. At the time, though, it was huge; a woman who’d built her brand on truth-telling being caught in a lie, in a way that cast doubt on her entire public persona. Many observers confidently predicted that her career was over.

I didn’t want to write a piece slamming Swift — I’d already done that a lot, and it was starting to feel mean-spirited, especially now that everyone else was piling on. So I wrote a piece about the predictable life cycle of a pop star, and how we build women up only to tear them down, and how depressing all that is. I won’t claim it was a brilliant piece, but it was a sympathetic one, enough so that the reaction on social media was mostly outrage that I would dare to defend her.

Then Taylor Swift’s team called my workplace. They, too, were outraged — but for an entirely different reason. I had done two things in that piece that could not, under any circumstances, be forgiven: I had mentioned the Nazi fan base, which Team Taylor did not want mentioned. I had used the word “lie” to describe Swift’s actions in re: the tape, and the words “lie” and “Taylor Swift” should never be uttered together. This was a big fuck-up for my bosses, very very big, and it was so big that Taylor was willing to withhold future interview access unless somebody went in and “corrected” (that is to say: censored) the published article.

I had totally memory-holed that whole controversy—maybe you did, too?—even though, reading Doyle’s piece, I instantly recall my strong feeling of relief that Swift-mania was coming to an end (jokes on me!), as well as the underlying reason why I have had, for years since, a nagging feeling of unease re Swift, as if someone had surgically removed the memory but the ghost of it remained. Which is to say, the censorship campaign worked. Doyle writes that his piece was not only pulled down, it’s now been replaced by “a timeline of Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce. ”

How long will it take before we forget that Charlie Kirk was a racist transphobic homophobe who called for violence against elected Democratic officials? How long until we swallow the line that he was a God-fearing angel of reason with only the merest nagging of unease? (It should be noted that Doyle can only write about the Swift incident now because he’s writing outside the institution, and so I swing back: we have to name these people.) How long before Jimmy Kimmel’s “indefinite leave” and the firing or suspension of 31 (and counting) higher ed faculty, staff, and students for “commentary alleged as insufficiently respectful towards Kirk”—some had merely reposted Kirk’s own words verbatim—are fully memory-holed, and when this very Wikipedia page I’m quoting is replaced with one attributing all the Internet’s favorite fake Gandhi and Morgan Freeman quotes to Kirk’s sainted mouth?

The Onion always getting it

And what will happen to the “the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, “who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life?” Will they retreat further away from anything resembling criticism? And then who will pin this moment to the spider’s web? Who will marshal the context and history, launch the conversation? Who will make sense of the books that come out of this, the dances and plays, the food born of kitchens cowering in fear of ICE raids? Who will tell us what we’ve been through, and how we might recover from it?

Maybe I’m overreaching here. Maybe I’m drawing the wrong through-lines. Do you think so? If so, I look forward to your essay.