Once again: all y’all in the greater Boston area, something surpassing cool to do next Tuesday, October 29. Ta-Nehisi will be talking with New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg at 7 p.m. The event description isn’t up on the MIT calendar yet, but it’ll read something like this:
Hendrik Hertzberg has been one of the most influential opinion writers in and around Washington for decades. Most of his career has been spent at the home of the monocle and the top hat (The New Yorker), but he’s also had two stints as editor of The New Republic, during which he led the publication to three National Magazine Awards.
Hertzberg returned to The New Yorker for good (so far) in 1992, and is now senior editor and staff writer (mostly of the Comment section in Talk of the Town). He’s won yet one more National Magazine Award — in 2006, for his opinion writing. In between writing gigs, he’s also worked as a speechwriter for President Carter and has done a pair of tours as a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has three books to his credit, including the 2009 reissue of his 1976 prefiguring of data journalism and visualization, One Million.
The other thing to know about Hertzberg is that he is one of those writers on whose work other writers take notes. Ta-Nehisi Coates and he will talk about how writing opinion can and/or should be informed by the practices and habits of journalism — and much more, including, no doubt, something about what to make of the current predicaments of American politics.
I don’t think I’m breaking any confidences to tell you that Ta-Nehisi basically reveres Hertzberg — for the reason hinted at above. Hertzberg works his writing. Don’t be fooled by the light touch of which he is capable: that comes from the kind of effort John Kenneth Galbraith had in mind when he said (I paraphrase from memory) “the treasured note of spontaneity critics find in my writing comes in between the seventh and eighth draft.”
Ta-Nehisi and I talk a lot about that: how to write with honesty, passion, and perhaps above all a love of beauty in words that isn’t just about aesthetic — it’s how you infuse your argument with power and meaning both. I’ve never met Hertzberg, but Ta-Nehisi tells me that it’s that kind of thing that he studies in the work. So those of us who love the craft, who want to get better at it, should have a lot to chew on Tuesday night. And, of course, Hendrik Hertzberg has a bit to say about the bitter comedy that is contemporary American politics, so there’s that — should be good for this crowd.
A couple of housekeeping notes. I’ll be moderating the event, so it’ll be good to put faces to names/handles of any Balloon-Juicers in the crowd. Another thing: last time I promoted one of these in this space we had Chris Hayes and Ta-Nehisi together in a hall waaaaay too small for the crowd, and too many got turned away. We’re in the biggest lecture hall in MIT’s Stata Center this time, (r00m 123) three times bigger than that first venue, so don’t be deterred.
I’ll probably be posting a reminder or two a little later, but for now, consider yourself invited.
Images: Paul Cezanne, The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’Événement,” 1866
Thomas Eakins, The Writing Master, 1882
Linnaeus
Sounds really, really interesting. Wish I could be there – I think I need to do more writing than I do and that’s perhaps one reason why things on the job haven’t been going as well as I would like.
BGinCHI
Tom, I don’t know how you ever get any TV watching done with all these events going on.
Yatsuno
Again, sounds nifty. Again, wrong side of the continent. Sigh. I might look into that transfer to Andover a bit harder.
Gin and Tonic
Good scheduling, as that’s a travel day for the World Series (if this comment doesn’t get moderated.)
Ripley
I’m reminded of the old Spy Magazine column, ‘Log-Rolling In Our Time.’ Beats working I suppose.
Drexciya
Ta-Nehisi is one of America’s only prominent racial commentators right now, so forgive me if I find it remarkable that one of the few posts I’ve recently seen mentioning him has absolutely nothing to do with one of his most prominent focuses. It doesn’t even link one of his articles. Seriously, I have a longstanding problem with the total lack of POC writers linked on this blog and racial issues discussed, and it’s amazing that one of the few chances you have to correct this was done to push some kind of speaking event at an upper end college that most of this blog won’t or can’t go to. Why did you feel this was worthy of front page attention?
That said, Ta-Nehisi – no matter how frustrating I often find him – is shockingly unpretentious (especially in public speaking venues/on television) and is capable of both insight and incisiveness in both mediums. The most recent speaking event he linked is a good demonstration of that. I recommend the whole thing. He pushes notions that I wish would get more attention and discussion. But alas.
debbie
Boy, having loved Talk of the Town forever, I’d love to be able to listen to that dialogue. Will there be a transcript or something similar?
SFAW
Can’t they move it to 10-250? That’ll cut down on the riff-raff.
PaulW
Yay for Mr. Coates! I shall post this to the TNC Horde pages post-haste.
SFAW
A bit OT, but quasi-related to Drexciya’s point: does ABL no longer post here?
I realize I may be the last in the world to find out – well, except for some Japanese officer hiding out in a cave on some deserted island, thinking WWII is still going on – but I realized I haven’t seen her FP’ing in a long time. Light dawns on Marblehead, as the Cantabs might say.
Drexciya
@SFAW:
I wish, but nope. I have things to say about that. I won’t say them right now.
SFAW
@Drexciya:
My apologies, and it’s my own fault for asking in a negative (Objection! Form?), but I can’t tell if you mean you wish she did, or you wish she didn’t. Honestly, sorry for the poor question formation. So let me try it the right way:
Does ABL still post here?
Drexciya
She does not. I wish she did. But she doesn’t. She is, however, on Twitter and she’s as great there as she was anywhere else.
ETA: She’s the perfect example of the kind of social justice connected/literate blogger this place needs. Her absence removes an important window into various progressive politics from this blog.
SFAW
@Drexciya:
OK. Thanks for bearing with my denseness.
schrodinger's cat
@Drexciya: Do you hector and lecture everyone IRL too?
Drexciya
I don’t hector and lecture anyone here. But I appreciate your attention.
Anne Laurie
Tom, as I recall that Galbraith quote, it was “the treasured note of spontaneity even my meanest critics concede me comes in between the seventh and eighth draft.”
@SFAW:
To my knowledge, Cole’s never pulled a front-pager’s access, but several people no longer post here because they decided their time was better used elsewhere. Since Imani (ABL) has a lot of projects right now — including the TWiB podcasts that are linked here every weekday — I’ve been assuming she’s just been very, very busy.
SFAW
@schrodinger’s cat:
Hectoring? You gotta pretty low bar for that one. And the “lecturing” seemed relatively mild, too.
sparrow
@Drexciya: People write about what they want to write about. I’m not sure what you’re really getting at regarding missing commentary on BJ, but if you want people to talk about whatever it is, why don’t you start a blog? Plenty of people pimp theirs here. I do miss ABL though.
SFAW
@Anne Laurie:
AL –
Thanks for even more of the filling-in.
And, significantly OT, but, if you get the Globe print edition, you should check out the letters in response to Jennifer Graham’s “Blasphemyyyyyy!” op-ed from yesterday. The last one made me think of this place.
Drexciya
@sparrow:
Balloon Juice is a liberal blog that’s connected to and populated by Democrats. Despite Democratic political victories being facilitated by people of color and despite the relative urgency of the issues POC’s have to face, most of the writers here are white, most of the topics here are disconnected from their struggles and most of the writers linked are similarly white. One of the things I’ve frequently requested is that, absent any additions to their front page that add the diversity required to properly represent the range of Democratic politics, we get a little more efforts from our many, many, white FPers to try and link to the POC activists and writers who grapple with the issues they don’t.
I don’t think this request is anywhere close to unreasonable.
Gin & Tonic
Test.
Tom Levenson
@Drexciya: I think you may suffer from outrage overload. I’d say more, but I’m enjoying the ballgame right now. Perhaps I’ll just say that trying to promote an event in which one of the most prominent POC writers today is going to be interrogating his craft with one of the writers he particularly admires is…ok by me. Sorry you find it a problem.
kc
@Drexciya:
I salute your trolling skills. That was masterful.
Drexciya
“Outrage?”
No.
Let me simplify: if you can make a front page post about a speaking event that, again, most of is will not or cannot go to, then you can also link Ta-Nehisi’s series about the Ghetto being public policy and provide a pretext to discuss it and think through it at length. Why haven’t you?
Tom Levenson
@Drexciya: Perhaps because I trust the folks at this blog (a) know who TNC is, read his blog, and or can find it if necessary. If you need more help, I’ll be happy to provide it.
kc
@Anne Laurie:
I thought she departed for a paying gig. I know she’s been at TWIB for a while. I wish she would do some posts here, if she has time.
johio
@Tom Levenson: for those of us not in NE, any chance this will be available via web?
Drexciya
@Tom Levenson:
What a weird non sequitur. Doesn’t that go for any left leaning person linked on this blog and utilized to jumpstart political discussions? If so, what makes TNC’s posts less worthy of discussion than theirs? And if he’s not less worthy, why not give him the same kind of attention? This isn’t complicated.
Tom Levenson
@johio: Yup. We’re taping it and will post somewhere; I’ll let y’all know when we do.
@Drexciya: It isn’t complicated: I’m promoting event in which two guys talk to each other. If you really feel that I should have linkned HH’s and TNC’s blogs…well, I suppose that would make it one step easier for the net-impaired to find these guys. I’ll be posting on t his event at least once more…and to ease your mouse fingers, I’ll make sure that you can go from my text to their sites with one twitch of your index finger. I hope that will satisfy your strange compulsion to say that a post featuring some upcomign stuff from a POC isn’t enough about a POC.
And with that, I’ll return to my usual practice: do not feed trolls.
Drexciya
@Tom Levenson:
In what way does being obtuse about what I’m saying serve your ends or this discussion? I’m quite sure you’re aware that’s not even close to being an accurate interpretation of what I’ve said.
johio
@Tom Levenson: excellent, thanks.
kc
@kc:
Oh, I see she’s a tweeting machine! I may to have to surrender and get a Twitter account so I can follow my favorite bloggers who no longer blog.
Anne Laurie
@kc: You don’t have to get a Twitter account to follow people on Twitter — but you won’t be able to interact with them if you don’t.
Anne Laurie
@Drexciya: Just out of curiosity, was it Allan Brauer who introduced you to this blog?
kc
@Anne Laurie:
I thought having an account might make it easier to follow a particular discussion?
I’m afraid if I started interacting with people on Twitter, I’d get hooked . . .
currants
On the calendar! Really looking forward to it–thanks, Tom.
Drexciya
@Anne Laurie:
Nope. I’ve been lurking here off and on since I was a teenager.
Anne Laurie
@Drexciya: Thanks.
Anne Laurie
@kc:
Yeah, as a dyslexic ADHDer, Twitter is not a venue for me. But I can still follow a few people, and if you pick the right tweet-stream to monitor, you’ll get links to all sorts of fascinating feeds!
CTVoter
Late comment.
I could drive from western Connecticut to Boston on any Tuesday to sit and listen to this. Doable distance, roundtrip. Except for Tuesdays in fall/spring semesters. Like this Tuesday.
And it kind of burns.
aimai
@Drexciya:
1) It is false that “most of us can not and will not go to this.” You don’t know what the readership of this blog is.
2) In a blog that is read internationally the function of a notice like this is not simply to let people know about a lecture that they can’t attend but to let people know about a lecture and the interaction because they might be interested in it.
3) You don’t fucking know anything about Ta Nehisi or how he wants to think about his work, or what part of his work he is publishing or promoting in what venues. You don’t speak for him or for his readership and he wouldn’t thank you for trying to limit his exposure to a wide audience while you pretend to create space for what you think of as better exposure to a different audience for different work.
Your attitude about TNC and his white readers is like your attitude towards Michelle Obama and her many white female fans–you insist that we lack empathy, sympathy, and even interest in people we express empathy, sympathy, and interest for because you want to have an unearned position as a “bridge” or a “translator” between important POC/Writers/political figures and the rest of us. Here’s a clue: they don’t need you to express themselves to people in their community, and people outside of it. That’s the real source of your grievance.
I identify with Michelle Obama as a mother–our daughters are the same age, as a woman (we are basically the same age), as an educated woman, as a Democrat and as a voter. How do I know that I identify with her in a way that she would find reasonable, respectable, and perhaps even meaningful? Because I attended some of her political speeches where she asked me to do just that, and then vote for her god damned husband. Which I was happy to do because we share the same political goals–possibly even because of our empathy for our shared situation as women, mothers, liberals. Of course I’m more to the left than she would ever be and more anti capitalist than she is but them’s the breaks. Our race doesn’t determine our politics as much as you think it does.
Drexciya
@aimai:
This is a day old thread and I didn’t see your post until a few minutes ago. I indicated elsewhere that I’d like to respond to you more fully elsewhere, but if I can’t, let me just respond to this.
No.
I don’t understand how you can read my posts and reach that conclusion. I hate what I have to do here, I hate these discussions, I hate the ways these discussions go, I hate what stops them from going in other places and my primary preference for this and nearly any other blog is lurking. I don’t want to be a “bridge.” If I thought I could go away tomorrow and see a more proactive effort from white-centric blogs to highlight and understand various forms of social justice discourse, I would gladly do that. But, again, because I lurk, I see what happens when these discussions are allowed to persist without any kind of challenge. I see what happens when unconscious expressions of various forms of class/sexuality/racial/gender blindness get normalized, and I see how that normalization is rendered invisible and innocuous. I don’t think I’m crazy or paranoid. I don’t think it’s untrue that this and nearly other liberal blog gears to and links to white people, for the sake of white people. Do you? And if not, why portray my concerns as though they’re overstepping and silly?
(as I said, I’d like to respond to the rest, but if this persists, it’ll bleed over to two or three threads and I can’t really deal with that)
Drexciya
I’m sorry. I said I would respond to this elsewhere, but I’m not going to let this stand:
Do you see how you completely erased how her blackness complicates and causes differentiations in how she experiences each of those things? Do you think a black mother with black daughters is somehow insulated from the body-shaming, hypersexualization, black female stereotypes, lower pay/prestige/opportunity and teaching them how to navigate through a racist and patriarchal society while surviving? Do you see how it means something completely different for a black woman to successfully get an education (at Princeton and Harvard of all places) than it does for a white woman? Do you realize that she’s a Democrat because she’s in a society where most black people can only reasonably get their interests heeded if they vote for one party? Do you realize that her blackness means that her vote is open to question in ways yours will never be? Of course you do. So, again, I don’t know why you’re going to play dumb about why I’d object to a white woman universalizing a black woman’s experiences.
When I see a black woman, I see my mother, my siblings, my aunts and my grandparents. I see other black women. When you simplify her womanhood and her gendered struggles, you negate how her gender informs her blackness and vice versa. You create and accept a construct that’s intended to appeal to your own struggles, history and concerns and you elide appreciation for how race deepens the misogyny that you think you can experience to degrees that are worthy of comparison. You’re not relating to her if you’re refusing to acknowledge the differences that make relation impossible for you.
And I know that you know that the Obama’s are under a pretext and context of forced deracialization. I know you know that this country is racist and wouldn’t accept it if she did affirm her black womanhood (precisely BECAUSE blackness is toxic). And I know you know that an integral component of Obama’s aversion to sincere and deep racial discussions and racialized commentary is because how every time he does, the whole of society responds with a shocking level of vitriol. I’m sure his wife knows it to. Accepting her comment in a vacuum ignores how their political survival is premised on their imposed racialization not being the source of attention.
I’m glad it made you feel good that she did and had to do that, but that doesn’t make you her peer, that doesn’t mean that the superficial similarities you can conjure are enough for parity and it absolutely doesn’t mean that your “relating” to a caricature of her is capable of capturing the fullness of experiences you’ll never have. It’s beyond presumptuous to think it does. And yes, I’m absolutely suspicious of white people doing this and rightfully so. Your race may not significantly inform your political opinions (and that’s kind of an absurd suggestion in itself) but your race absolutely informs your gendered experiences in this country. It’s totally problematic when your kinship is premised on using your privilege to impose on and smooth out the places where you can’t use “womanhood” as a catch-all to replace black femininity. Your “identification” is based on a self-serving lie.