State of culture, vice, amateur writers

8 or 9 things worth sharing this week + book notes

1. The state of the culture 2024 by

   Ted Gioia

   This has been making the rounds and with good reason. It’s a lament of clickbait culture, but he simplifies it amazingly well, showing the strong evolution of art, to entertainment to distraction to addiction.

2. Pitchfork ended and now Vice is ending. All the founders are old now and lost their cultural relevance and have even probably left Brooklyn for Jersey City. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

3. I wrote earlier this week about literary rivalry, inspired by that Emily Gould essay and the movie “American Fiction” (which I liked!)

4. Here’s a great essay by Andrew Jazprose Hill on Stagger Lee and Erasure the book by Percival Everett that “American Fiction” is based on.

5. This podcast with Sarah Hepola, a former editor at Salon, discusses the Gould essay from the perspective of the rise and fall of personal memoir stories, plus all the stuff in that essay about psychosis and drugs, things I feel very unqualified to discuss. That said, the podcast ep was good!

6. I started watching the Sopranos? For the first time?

7. Remember that thing about the Michigan governor potentially being kidnapped? This podcast is breaking it down, tapping into a lot of unheard audio from the FBI informants. It’s a convoluted story with a lot of interesting people/characters. Worth the listen.

8. A surprising and unexpected truth about amateur writers — by me at Medium.

9. Here’s an excerpt from a new book by Megan Nolan, whose books I saw for the first time at the Union Square Barnes & Noble last week, and was immediately intrigued and wrote her titles down in my “Books 2024” list, which is random titles I hope to read one day. And h/t to

   David Gutowski
   for including this link in his newsletter.

Favorite Tweet this week

Book Notes

Still kind of the same reading — Mostly been going through XX by Rian Hughes, but it’s a bit of a slog. But I did order The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith and The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman (business!).

The library held The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut for me, but then I forgot about it and then they sent me another email letting me know they canceled it.

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Last Things

“Everybody should read fiction… I don’t think serious fiction is written for a few people. I think we live in a stupid culture that won’t educate its people to read these things. It would be a much more interesting place if it would. And it’s not just that mechanics and plumbers don’t read literary fiction, it’s that doctors and lawyers don’t read literary fiction. It has nothing to do with class, it has to do with an anti-intellectual culture that doesn’t trust art.” — Percival Everett

Keep going-

Josh Spilker