🌲 On taste and paying attention to who you're influenced by

The emperor has no clothes; on letting (cultural) works stand naked before us when we evaluate their quality.

I’ve been seeing a lot of chatter about elite-coded things, lately. Debates about why LLMs can’t write ‘great’ literature that remind me, viscerally, of years worth of writer’s community debates about what constitutes ‘genre’ vs. ‘literary’ fiction. Discussions of how elites need to be honest about highbrow culture that make me roll my eyes a bit because no, actually, Mozart is not ‘objectively’ ‘better’ than Taylor Swift. Frankly disquieting reflections from literary critics about how things work behind the scenes, which is to say of course the game is rigged.

This is not a new phenomenon, of course; I was a child when I first came across the idiom the emperor has no clothes. But imposter syndrome is hard to root out, and I was in my 30s when I realized that the “how to have family meals” lady is not amazingly better than me at family meals.

The author,

Jenny Rosenstrach

, has been involved in New York publishing circles her whole life, and it shows, because surely only in the incredibly tiny microcosm of “people who have dinner parties for people who are involved in the New York magazine publishing world” would find meatloaf with ketchup for a family with school-aged children to be “brilliant.” Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews and all the tastemakers or whatever we want to call them would have been absolutely amazed at the stuff my mom pulled off when I was growing up in my blue collar Baltimore suburb!

I know

Sasha Chapin

say that you should find what you’re good at by identifying what everybody else seems weirdly bad at, but I am not a phenomenal cook, and I’m not a world-class housewife. I do fine, and yeah I am pretty good at problem-solving and critical thinking, but I would never write a book on hostess skills; it’s not my superpower as much as I try to muddle along.

Dinner: A Love Story was written by someone who is, by contrast, at the absolute pinnacle of the food magazine hostessing world. It sells itself as the quintessential guidebook to putting quality home-cooked meals on the table for a family of four — but was hilariously useless to me as a cookbook, right from the moment when she said you shouldn’t even bother trying until the children are all older than five. Children do not need to be five to join the adults for dinner, and an air fryer + instant pot combo makes for much yummier (and faster!) meals than American staples of meatloaf or chicken cutlets before even getting into one-pot or one-pan meals — but I don’t want to get too deep into that.

There is no objective “best food.” I’ve eaten at Michelin starred restaurants and exceptionally fancy steak places, and honestly my favorite steak is still the Texas Roadhouse kebab — medium-well with seasoned rice and a sweet potato. That is a matter of my personal taste. Just as I will never truly ‘get’ what people see in the Mona Lisa, I would much rather look at the stuff Midjourney generates for me (seriously, if you haven’t been to my website lately go look, the preview images for these articles are so pretty!) than 90% of the stuff in whatever art museum is arguing about what pieces should have gender-restricted access. Just because cultural trendsetters say something is better doesn’t mean that it is actually better in any way that matters to the vast majority of normal people.

History is written by the writers, as the shift of serious journalism toward Substack has been making increasingly clear.

Anyway, leaving aside the recipes and the nice stories about how marriage and kids change things for people, Dinner: A Love Story was a genuinely wholesome look into what life (must be?) like for the American cultural tastemakers, the sorts of people who think that a glass of wine (or three) after a difficult day is a symbol of refinement¹ when they’d call it alcoholism if it were a beer.

I’m sure the book helped a lot of people, I’m glad it exists. I read huge swaths of it out loud to my son at bedtime and it was really wonderful connecting with him over recipes and stories about family dinners. None of the advice was bad and if you enjoy pork ragu or chicken cutlets whatever, the recipes are very clear. Jenny Rosenstrach is undoubtedly a nice lady, and I hold her no particular ill will. But any of a thousand instagram foodies and mommy bloggers have advice that is more targeted to my personal family dinners — which involve two children under five, and they eat steak and potatoes, curried mahi-mahi, and whatever else with minimal fuss — than what Dinner: A Love Story contained. I’m partial to Tieghan Gerard and Amy Palanjian and my coworker Romi² myself, but that’s not the point. I’m confident it was Jenny’s personal connections, related to her status as someone who came of age as part in the New York literary scene, not any particular brilliance, that led to Dinner: A Love Story taking off.

The emperor has no clothes. Greatness is only occasionally inherent to the work; it is often bestowed³. People sometimes say things like ‘great literature has profound moral and psychological truths’ but this is as far as I am concerned table stakes for fiction; almost everything other than the absolute basest erotica⁴ has an underlying theme that ties into a character arc or a moral point the author is making. It’s almost impossible for humans to tell stories without touching on a psychological truth!

And on the occasions where a particular work takes the world by storm, and rises to immense commercial success despite being low-brow or having prose that is ‘too simple’ or whatever, even when a work is incredibly influential, elite critics are fully comfortable sneering at it. People may quibble about blockbusters like Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon novels or the Twilight books, but my favorite example of this is The Alexander Romance, about which Scott Alexander once wrote:

The Romance stayed near the top of the best-seller lists for over a thousand years. Some people claim (without citing sources) that it was the #2 most-read book of antiquity and the Middle Ages, after only the Bible. The Koran endorses it, the Talmud embellishes it, a Mongol Khan gave it rave reviews. While historians and critics tend to use phrases like “contains nothing of historic or literary value”, this was the greatest page-turner of the ancient and medieval worlds.

How am I supposed to take literary critics seriously after reading that?

I've never aspired to be contrarian — but it's always been very important to me to be intellectually honest, and hypocrisy is one of the greatest sins in my personal ethos. Truth isn’t my terminal value (what is truth?) but crucially, neither is money or fame. I gave up on aspirations to get my fiction a stamp of approval by the handful of people whose personal tastes control what is published and pushed to science fiction and fantasy fans when I sat thru a workshop hosted by a guy who runs one of the major scifi magazines and I realized that a) more people were paying to read the stuff that I wrote than the stuff he published and b) almost all the ‘rules of writing’ were just stuff he liked or didn’t like. This is fine, of course — there’s clearly a market for people who trust him as a gatekeeper! — but my tastes generally don’t align with that market; the Hugos have always been a bit of an anti-recommendation for me, with the exception of Ann Leckie and Ursula Vernon, whose works I do quite enjoy.

Someone I respect enormously once called me ‘the most reluctant PKM influencer he’d ever met’ and it’s true. I am in some ways quite reluctant to go down the path of people like Tiago Forte or Nick Milo, not because I don’t respect them (I find both of their note-taking systems useful food for thought) but because I am not, fundamentally, an entrepreneurial soul. I don’t want to break into the circles of the New York elite anymore, although I’m glad I got to ‘peek behind the curtain’ when I was a panelist at Worldcon.

My brother is an entrepreneur. He can sell almost anybody almost anything, and has the self-confidence to fit in anywhere. I love him and respect him, but it's been a long, long time since I wanted to grow up and be like him⁵. It’s endlessly frustrating that ‘how much money someone makes hustling their ideas’ and ‘how many followers someone has’ have become a proxy for how seriously one should take someone — particularly given how influenced humans tend to be by how badly someone seems to need the money⁶. I don't want to make my living begging people or manipulating them into giving me money. I like my job, and it pays well enough for me to have a good life and go on lovely international trips and have the emotional bandwith to be present for my kids when my workday ends. But in this crazy world, that makes people online take me less seriously than if I were a starving artist literally whoring myself⁷ while repackaging insights for maximum clicks because #marketing. Substack status, in the form of fancy colored check marks, is tied to the percentage of revenue Substack earns from authors — not how many minds are changed or lives improved.

I'm not beholden as a writer to anything other than my own sense of decency and pride, so I'm automatically among the people with less influence.

Jubal Early voice: Does that seem right to you?

I’m not bitter — I made my choices with eyes wide open, and being famous seems stressful — but in terms of what is driving our culture, I wish more people were paying attention to brilliant people like Matt Lakeman than whoever figured out the newest way to optimize social media algorithms on whichever platform is on the rise today, or whoever happened to be in just the right bar in New York City at just the right time to impress just the right guy when he was in just the right mood to throw all the resources of a powerful literary agency behind him⁸.

I wish more people paid attention to which writers lived lives worth emulating⁹, and which ones lived lives of immense suffering, when deciding whose advice to take. Following trends set by tastemakers is fine, if that’s the sort of thing that makes sense for the life you want to lead — but I do not think anybody, no matter their credentials or cachet, has objectively better advice than

Adam Mastroianni

’s grandmother, star of his viral article “Why aren’t smart people happier?” when she said: “Be good.”

1. Truthfully wine is a good way to encapsulate my emotions here. It is absolutely trivial to tell the difference between literal vinegar and decent wine, much more difficult to objectively identify any difference between good wine and great wine, and kind of ridiculous to claim that wine is inherently better than beer just because the Romans cultivated grapes and the Germans made their alcohol from grains.

2. See what I did there? Honestly I don’t mind that people boost the stuff their friends do, I am not objecting to New York elite culture being incestuous — I object to the idea that it’s objectively better or whatever. Shakespeare is Lindy, but is it better than Burn Notice? Eh.

3. Sometimes it’s both, of course. Taylor Swift and the guys from AJR are in possession of both great talent and committed parents who offered them advantages like, for example, being raised in New York.

4. And sometimes even that! Lady Chatterleys’s lover is glorified smut, but there were court cases debating its literary merit because some of the guys at Penguin wanted to publish it and back in the 60s, UK obcenity laws allowed elites to testify in defense of the literary merit of an ‘allegedly’ obscene work.

5. tho I'm endlessly grateful he let me play his Nintendo games. Duck Hunt was so fun, and I'll never forget the hours I spent with Wario3 on his Gameboy.

6. I think we’re generally wired to help people who seem to need it more. Stories about needing to pay for veterinary care for a beloved pet are incredibly common on fantasy author Patreons, and of course there’s this anecdote about how this lady’s friend said she ‘didn’t need success in her chosen field because she had a rich husband’ — so the (former) friend didn’t want to bother to do her a (marketing-related) favor. Regardless of how pervasive this phenomenon is — certainly guys like Scott Alexander and Brandon Sanderson have plenty of money and people still subscribe to their stuff! — it exists, and I worry this has some poor effects/creates bad incentives.

7. This isn’t a potshot at Aella. I was actually thinking of Sophia Giovannitti, whose book Working Girl I recently started reading because I thought I might learn something interesting about people and sex and marketing and art. I gave up on it at around the 20% mark, right around the moment I decided to write this article. She reminds me of people I am friends with in some ways, but as with my brother, they are not people I am particularly interested in emulating. She is, like Jenny, emblematic of a way of life that does not resonate with me at all. I’m reading An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson now instead.

8. It doesn’t always work out this way, but did you know that Jim Butcher, author of the incredibly popular Dresden Files, got his ‘big break’ when he met Laurel K. Hamilton at a convention?

9. No one is perfect, of course, but the number of famous moral philosophers whose personal lives are a trainwreck cannot be overstated. Kate Norlock at least was a happy lady who spoke of her husband with genuine affection the last time I saw her in person.