✨ Hate Read Season 2 is brought to you by the legendary champion of indie media herself, Ruth Ann Harnisch, of the Harnisch Foundation. ✨

When I was a kid, I would watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 and laugh at all the references I didn’t understand. My favorite joke was when one of the robot puppets just rattled off the names of a bunch of B-movie actors and has-been celebrities for a full minute, uninterrupted. I didn’t recognize any of them, but somehow that didn’t matter. There was so much I didn’t know! This was a delightful thought.

My adult life has involved repeated exposure to another kind of reference, which tends to provoke the exact opposite reaction in me. Any “piece” in our media world that has any sort of first-person element is bound to be littered with them, each one glittering with smug self-evidence. The LIRR. The Yellow Line. Chambers Street. The mutant mega-rats in Washington Square. The guy you met who is so Flatbush/Park Slope cusp. Or is it Flatbush/Brooklyn Heights? Should I feel bad for not knowing this? Kinfolk, the once and future bar. Greenpoint — is that one? Maybe I should make flashcards. Outer boroughs. “Boroughs” in general. Hell’s Kitchen, Alphabet City, the Bowery — which is maybe a neighborhood, not a live music venue chain? I don’t know, and I refuse to look it up.

Every time I come across one of these involuted little name drops, unsupported by any sort of explanation, as if “Bushwick” and “Dumbo” each got its own unit in every fourth-grade geography class all around the world, the words flash into my mind: HOLY SHIT!! IS THAT A MOTHERFUCKING NEW YORK REFERENCE??? Yes, people write about where they live, and lots of anglosphere writers live in New York; more news at 10. But New York Writer Types write about New York with a special braindead automatism.

Maybe they feel sheepish about trying to describe a city so encrusted with discourse that it sometimes seems you’d have to invent a whole new language to say a single thing about it that isn’t a cliché. Mostly they just seem to assume that New York is the default setting for all cultural happenings of consequence — all culture ever — and either they are writing solely for the people they run into at New York media parties because they are the only people in the universe who matter or who might one day offer them a book deal, or they assume the rest of us rubes and hicks from District 12 breathlessly lap up every drop of lore from the Capitol.

Look: I have been to New York. And I’m not a total ignoramus. I know from maps on the walls of pizza places in other cities that much of it is an island. I know the West Village is where Bob Dylan hung out. I once saw a great show called “International Cringefest” somewhere off off off Broadway, I think. NYU is somewhere; I’ve been there and liked it fine. I have a fuzzy sense that there is a specific, formerly dingy part of Manhattan where The Strokes, the most pathetic rock band of all time besides the Grateful Dead, once impressed a lot of people for some reason. I have no problem with the reality of New York, at least in the abstract. It is just that writers dealing with any other place must use language carefully to convey a sense of how it feels to be there. When it comes to New York, apparently jargon should be more than enough to get the point across.

What other public transit system can you bring up without at least specifying which city you’re talking about? If I wrote a (god forbid) braided essay where I talked about getting on the MARTA, or the SEPTA, or the PRT, or the T — the one that was the subject of a whole song, about a man who got on the train and never returned, after whom the Transit Authority then named their ticket system — any editor would tell me to either explain or cut. And they’d have a point. Just say “the subway”! Or, not to get controversial, actually describe the subway. Give us a crumb of sensory detail. The unexplained, unexpanded geographic reference does not just add zero texture or specificity to your writing. It is functionally dead language, a drag on your sentences. It is also a middle finger to your reader.

Would you be annoyed to read a Žižek sentence, one where he does the thing that’s like of course, one cannot help but think of the late Althusser here? Does that sound friendly, does that invite you in, does it paint a picture in your head? That’s what your New York references sound like to the majority of readers. There is an invisible “of course” appended to each of them — Borough Park, of course, the Upper West Side, of course, the Downtown Scene, Yonkers, wherever the Thiel-funded fash kids live, of course, of course, of course.

I understand it is obnoxious to flaunt your ignorance, especially in this day and age. It brings me no joy to do it — not like the feeling of reading a fantasy novel, or of savoring all the Mystery Science Theater references that wash over me, converging into one forceful impression of supreme knowingness so delightful that I don’t want to look anything up to spoil it. I am advertising my own ignorance to remind you that it is your job as a writer to make more of the world available to your reader, to expand their sense of possibility. Okay, maybe my motive is not really that selfless. I am just yapping. You know how it is with people from the Blackstone Valley Corridor, the Centerville-Youngstown border, Atherton Meadows, who commute all the way to Eagles Mere to work with all those Dighton types.

—Wendell “Skip” Abernathy

ICYMI…

• I hate elastic waist pants

• I hate the Victor Wembanyama technocracy

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