1. The Mega Man theory of personality
In the video game Mega Man, when you beat a boss, you gain their power. Beat the fire boss and you can shoot fire in the next level. That sort of thing.
When I was a senior in high school, I was cast as Mark Twain in a school play. To play the part, I read Twain, I read about Twain, and when I drove places, I read the signs and billboards out loud in my attempt at his accent. The next semester, my English teacher pointed out that I was writing with more humor, and taking more jabs at the school administration in my papers than I had before. “I think this Twain thing really rubbed off on you,” she said.
To some degree, this is influence. The experiences you have shape you in ways you can’t always clock. If you go into a creative field, then whatever you make is shaped by the ideas and styles you take in. With journalism, there’s the additional need to research a topic you write about until you can comfortably talk to experts and participants in the field and explain their activities to non-experts.
I’m a neurotic researcher and avid collector who has spent most of my professional life as a generalist—that is, not having a specific beat, but picking up whatever seems interesting or needs coverage. Factor these together, and you get a pretty good explanation of my mental landscape and my physical surroundings.
My head is a collection of facts learned in the course of duty and my apartment is a collage of artifacts that feed my obsessions. Ask about the shelf full of Polaroid cameras and I can tell you about the company’s history, which I studied while working on a story about how discontinued technology can be repaired, decades after the parts are no longer manufactured. Point out the Harry Partch/John Cage split album in my record collection, and I’ll tell you about the letters between the two that I found while researching a performance of a John Cage piece.
This goes beyond items and into ideas. I spend so much time with the research, I keep thinking about it after the story is done. Sometimes this gives me a new perspective on a story that I wish I would’ve come to while I was on assignment. Other times, it leads me to a fun new hobby. And occasionally, it changes how I live. The ability I gain isn’t just an influence or a piece of knowledge—it’s a way of seeing the world.
2. Abandoning Expectations
Look, this isn’t going to be a navel-gazing section about my own writing. But I need to mention it to get to the main idea.
For the last two years, most of my professional life has been focused on my book, which I’ll surely soon encourage you to pre-order. There’s a part of the book that deals with convenience and information—particularly how the media and the audience reacted to new ways to get news easily, and what that did to our understanding of the world. One challenge I faced writing this section was moving beyond chronicling the missteps.
But one of those missteps has stuck with me—the way so many news publishers have tried to stay relevant by jamming their way into as many conversations on as many platforms as possible. It’s a quantity strategy.
I’m thinking of it now because, as you’ve noticed, my writing here has been sporadic as I’ve had my head down working on the book. Bursts of regular posts happen between deadlines and edits.
I made an assumption in that last paragraph. I wrote “as you’ve noticed.” Have you noticed? Did you even think about it until I mentioned it? When you got this newsletter, did you think, “I haven’t heard from Gabe in a while” or did you assume that you just missed my last dispatch? Did you think of it at all?
Probably the safest assumption is the last one. That’s the one I hope for. Because, as I’ve been thinking about the expectations of convenient technology, I’ve been realizing how unhelpful and artificial they are.
This isn’t a newsy newsletter. If it doesn’t arrive, it’s nowhere near the disruption to your habits that it would be if, thirty years ago, you didn’t get the morning paper or your favorite drive-time radio station was off the air. It’s not even like tuning in to see a sitcom you casually follow and finding out it’s a rerun or is pre-empted. You don’t go to your inbox and search for this. It comes when it comes.
The problem is that I think of this as a problem, and you probably don’t think of it much at all.
If you have expectations for me, it’s probably for the substance of the newsletter, and not how many you get. When it comes to the downsides of easy information, I’ve come to think that maybe one solution is for writers like me to not give in to the pressures to constantly publish and for readers to not expect a cadence for anything that doesn’t need to have a cadence.
If I want to go a bit further and project a portion of my post-book personality, then I might say this strategy makes receiving an individual newsletter slightly more pleasant.
Here’s what I mean: I subscribe to a lot of magazines. In the U.S., I knew when weekly magazines would arrive because they always arrived on the same day of the week. Monthly magazines were a pleasant surprise because I didn’t know when they would show up. I might have figured this out if I thought about it, but I didn’t think about it. Biweekly, quarterly, trimesterly, and other oddly intervaled periodicals were more of a treat. I still don’t know when The New York Review of Books publishes. Now that I live abroad, I have no idea when a magazine will get to me. They come from printers in neighboring countries and they get here when they get here. I look at the tables of contents and then decide what priority to give a particular article or issue in my general stack of reading.
In the end, I read more of what arrives because it all arrives like letters.
Do I still have media I expect? Yes. I expect my news apps will be updated when I look at them in the morning. There are three or four podcasts that I’ve timed to particular regular activities that I rely on. But for the most part, with magazines or newsletters, I’m just happy whenever one shows up. That’s who I am. Or at least, it’s who I am now. For now.
