And the smartest white guys of our generation probably saw the writing on the wall and went into tech or finance (or podcasting or HVAC repair), and the more resourceful and more committed went at it alone, and only the suckers were left to court the gatekeepers in the arts or journalism or academia. You and me Sam (and many people we know), we... See more

To generalize about this, a lot of men feel like they have to be the 'center of the world,' or to be the 'best ever,' to want to do anything, and if they weren't wanted in publishing — and literature, in general, became very female-coded — then they drifted off to something else.

There's this magical idea among the Substack literati, who all appear to be deranged graphomaniacs themselves, that a True Artist will always produce work regardless of material circumstances. But do you really think Philip Roth or John Updike or Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith would have published dozens of novels between them if they couldn't make... See more