I suppose it’s not the worst thing for society to experience a renaissance of the oral tradition via the current state of podcast discourse; at least in this century, we get transcripts to skim should we happen to miss the buzzy debate at ye olde Forum. I’m talking, of course, about yesterday’s podcast episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” where Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates attempted to talk it out re: their opposing Charlie Kirk op-eds.

(One crazy thing, first off, is that when I googled “The Ezra Klein Show” because tbh I thought it had a cooler name than that, the Google profile classified it as a “government podcast” which is crazy? but also like probably not even ranking in the top 10 list of concerns to have at the moment.)

Anyway, spoiler alert, I didn’t find the conversation to be particularly illuminating, though this part made me chuckle (Klein in bold, TNC in regular font):

Much as I like to make fun of him, I don’t doubt Klein’s genuine interest in solving the question of how we’re supposed to coexist with people who get off on dehumanizing others—how much intolerance should one tolerate, essentially—but I just think this kind of match-up is a bit pointless. You’re basically asking a member of a dominant (racial) class to spar with a member of the minority on an issue that is much, much higher stakes for the latter. (As TNC notes dryly at some point, “Maybe it would help if you define the “we.”)

This is essentially why, I think, both liberals and conservatives cringe at that particular tenor of “wokeness” that often comes with people from minority groups asserting their rights and identity; like of course it reads as hysterical and unreasonable when it’s not your perceived survival status on the line. So while I get the point that Klein was trying to make in his original op-ed, which was that someone wanting to show up on college campuses and start uncomfortable conversations is theoretically cool and what democracy is all about, I think a person can only interpret what Kirk was doing as “conversation” only if you’re a very specific kind of person belonging to a specific group for whom such speech is not personally threatening; for everyone else, “conversation,” or even being a “practitioner of persuasion” is a horrific euphemism for something else. As such, a conversation about that kind of “conversation” is moot!

On the other hand, ol’ E.K. is not the only Abundance co-bro having a rough week…

Putting this link here because then maybe we won’t have to talk about podcaster bros for a while… if you’ve ever had to wonder Who is Joshua Citarella and Why is Joshua Citarella, a handy dandy New Yorker profile is here 4 u. (tl;dr — 2010s art school grad who made post-internet art and now is trying to harness the YouTube rabbithole for leftist purposes) The kicker made me roll my eyes, probably because that is the kind of metaphor I would congratulate myself on writing.

And if you’ve ever wondered, wait, so what’s the deal with CULTURED magazine? I had a column with them my first year of freelancing, and I also didn’t really know, but Charlotte Klein tried to get to the bottom of it with a NY mag feature that has quite the range of the quotes included. This one got at the general feeling of what magazine journalism as a whole has felt like lately:

“It’s kind of a bummer when you know that the text you’re writing is so that there’s something to run next to an ad,” they added. “But hey, they throw a good party.”

Lighter fare (ha): Eater’s Jaya Saxena published a retrospective on foodie culture in America, which situates the explosion of foodie-ness on the internet, of course, for how it democratized knowledge (i.e. recipes) and experience (i.e. witnessing a good cheese pull) around food.

I’ve been reading the foodie bible Invitation to a Banquet by Fuchsia Dunlop in little chunks before bed for too many months, and I highly recommend it if you liked Saxena’s piece. It’s technically a history of Chinese food (with such luscious prose—will probably wax poetic on it more whenever I finally finish the book), but it’s struck me in two ways.

One, it’s fascinating learning about foodie culture in history—one of Dunlop’s points about the breadth of Chinese cuisine and its taste for “strange” delicacies is that it comes from less of a survivalist measure and more so from a long-held appreciation for, let’s call it foodie-ism, amongst the Chinese elite in history, who sought novelty (especially in texture) much in the way all the best matcha branders of our time do right now. The second broad point Dunlop makes is the importance of the inherent regionalism necessary to maintain a vivid, thriving tradition of eating and cooking; I recently read a chapter about the dozens and dozens of Chinese methods of cooking that exist, and how some techniques literally have the same name but mean different things depending on where you are in the country. To understand Chinese food, but also one can imagine, food in general, requires a deep layer of geographic context, which of course is then antithetical as a principle to the state of modern food culture—which is not so much “globalized” as it is simply “digitized.” Whether to our benefit or detriment is not for this newsletter writer who subsists on her mortadella fridge sandwiches to say.