I feel impatient, though, when I encounter yet another essay that pines after the past. Yes, if only we could return to that world — where newspapers raked in ad revenue; where rent was cheap in lower Manhattan; where there were thousands of journalism jobs across the country — then maybe American criticism could be great again. But we can’t revive

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What happened to journalism in the 21st century is, in many ways, the story of the conflict between two utopian values: Information wants to be free and Writers should be paid .

There’s a lot of money in the production and dissemination of content. It’s just not going to the creators . (Or, in the case of TV shows, it’s not going to the actors.) Numerous decisions—by companies like Google, which penalized publishers in the 2000s for instituting paywalls; by the people behind websites like The Pirate Bay, Sci-Hub, Anna’s... See more

Writing my Asterisk essay led me to conclude that, when it comes to conversations about artistic stagnation and mediocrity, perhaps the most important thing to think about is the money. Who has it? Who’s making money? Who isn’t? Who’s financially backing unprofitable work? What kind of work is valued by the market? What kind of work isn’t?

Graham writes about programming as a creative practice, something akin to a craft. He compares hacking to painting in a way that ennobles both, arguing that they have equivalent intellectual status and symmetric concerns. (In one passage, he writes: ‘Great software...requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you... See more

It’s hard. I don’t know how to resolve the conflict between Information wants to be free and Writers deserve to be paid . But it’s worth noting that the internet of yesteryear, where almost every article was free to read, was also the internet that drastically reduced the value of highly researched, carefully argued writing. That internet helped... See more