Queens Alumni Publishing Panel

Words of wisdom from published Queens alumni

It’s always inspiring and encouraging, at the Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend, the latest of which I attended in mid-September, to get the real scoop from successful graduates on the feats and foibles of their publication journeys. This year, we heard from an alumni publishing panel that covered the gamut: publicist Carrie Neill, poet Khalisa Rae, thriller writer Danielle Girard, and publisher SteveMcCondichie.

Their advice on submitting your work:

• Keep query letters short and sweet, and make sure they have a hook to grab the attention of an agent, editor, or publisher. Whether it’s something in the story, something about your own background, or a special connection you have with your submission target, toss something out that will get them to take that next step and actually read your pages.
• An effective approach that submitting authors usually overlook is to call out published works that are similar to yours. (A quick look at Publishers Marketplace will show you how pervasive this is within the industry.) One good way Carrie offered up for thinking about this was to ask, If books were touring concert bands, what “book band” would your book open for?
• Khalisa called on personal experience to advise writers to look closely at any publisher you’re considering working with, and in particular, to identify and reach out to other authors who have worked with that publisher. In our desperation to see our work in print, we overlook the fact that some publishers just won’t be right for us, and finding that out ahead of time can save a lot of time, effort, and emotional turmoil that will, in the end, only make our desperation worse.

Their advice for first-time authors:

"The Art of the Novel" Panel, Litquake, San Francisco, 10/13/19

• Take your time; Be patient—to which many of you will say, “Bah! If I hear that advice again, I’m going to kill myself!” (Okay, maybe I’m projecting a little there, but anyway…) The reason you hear this advice so much is it is something that has served so many writers so well. In fact, a few weeks ago, I heard the same advice from Marci Vogel, author of Death and Other Holidays, at a Litquake panel titled “The Art of the Novel.” Marci had had an offer to publish this manuscript, but with strings attached that she felt did not honor her vision for the work. An unpublished author at the time, she declined the offer and moved on. Eight years later, Death and Other Holidays was a debut work of fiction winning the 2018 Miami Book Fair / de Groot Prize. Patience can be painful, but it is most assuredly a virtue.
• Define success for yourself—that is, give your personal vision for success some serious thought with eyes wide open, because doing so could dramatically change what you’re doing with your writing. Do you want to make lots of money? You should probably scrap that 900-page Jane Austen–style novel you’re working on. Do you just want to see your words in print? Maybe consider self-publishing. Of course, those are simplistic examples, but you get the idea.
• Be scrappy—as in, hang in there, be tough, or as Fred Leebron advises all of us, It’s a game of attrition… Don’t attrish. This sounds like just another way of saying be patient, but while that is more about being patient with your work—and yourself—as you’re developing something, and then being true to that something once it’s done, this is about staying tough once you’re in submission mode, and then continuing to do so if you’re fortunate enough to enter publication mode. As good as it is to hear from successful grads at PD Weekend, you also hear, in side conversations and at the bar, plenty of horror stories as well: stories of agents who commit and then bale, of editors who demand extensive rework and reject anyway, and on and on. There’s a reason Jonathan Saffron Foer, when asked what advice he would give writers starting out, once said, “I’d say, if there’s anything else in the world you can do to earn a living that isn’t writing, do that instead.” It’s a brutal game, and only the scrappy survive.
• Knowing publishing is a good tool to have in the toolbox. Learning what you can about the publishing game, whether it be from attending panels like this one, reading the industry insider articles in Poets& Writers, or just talking to people in the industry, can help your sanity by demystifying some of the crap that goes on if you are, once again, fortunate enough to enter publication mode. 

All that said—and these panels always seem to end on a note like this—you are the creative person in the equation; your work is what’s important to you, and you should always stay focused on writing the best book (or story, or poem) you can write. That’s why you’re in it, and when the industry decides to take that closer look at you, they’ll recognize and appreciate that.

How to Launch a Book – Some Thoughts

One book publicist’s take on the book launch

The most important element of the Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend, the latest of which I attended in mid-September, is the access one is afforded to agents, editors, and published authors. In this year’s edition, a book publicist and a panel of published Queens graduates offered thoughts and advice for aspiring authors.

In a seminar titled “How to Launch a Book,” Carrie Neill, an Assistant Director of Publicity at Penguin Random House and a Queens graduate, provided an insider’s view of the process leading to publication.

Carrie first helped us understand the difference, in the publishing world, between marketing and publicity. In short, marketing is reader-facing and publicity is industry-facing. Marketers promote your book by placing ads and posting—and encouraging others to post—on social media. For you, the author, marketing is doing all these things for yourself and appearing in public whenever and wherever you can. A publicist like Carrie, on the other hand, is the person with the industry contacts who arranges for those personal appearances and promotes your book—and, more importantly, you—with booksellers, industry reviewers, and the mainstream media.

Carrie stressed that the author always has a huge role in publicity because the author is the central element of any publicity campaign. She therefore recommends that you think deeply about your personal story and provide as much of it as you can to the publicist so they can build a connection between you and the very important people who will first accept, then fall in love with and promote your book. To get at these details, publishers and publicists ask authors to complete a detailed author questionnaire, and Carrie advises you to take the process of filling it out very seriously. (See below for links to some samples.) Memoirist and poet Sandra Beasley describes the author questionnaire as an “incredibly helpful as way of organizing one’s thoughts in preparing for publication.” She goes on:

I know so many folks who, after the jumping the hoops to editorial acceptance, are ambushed by the additional hoops it takes to sell the book. The author’s questionnaire is meant to help itemize your contacts, expand your market awareness, and rehears answers to likely questions.

Even if you’re self-publishing without retaining a publicist, grabbing and filling out an author’s questionnaire could be a good exercise in preparation for driving your own publicity.

Another method Carrie shared for driving publicity is to do additional writing related to the book. For example. a novelist could write and publish an essay connecting his or her personal experience with a central event or theme in the novel. The somewhat idealized example Carrie gave was, “I wrote a book about a character who lost someone—then I lost someone.” Presumably, it you’re working with a publicist, he or she could help you get the essay published, which would help drive awareness and give you something to point or link to as you prepare for the launch.

Other actions authors can take to either support publicity efforts or drive their own are developing a relationship with local bookstores and looking into regional book fairs and trade shows. A publicist can make good use of those existing bookseller relationships, and fairs and trade shows are a standard method that is still available for promoting a launch. See below for a few links to book fair and trade show listings. Enjoy!

Sample author questionnaires

• Sandra Beasley blog
• Independent Book Publishers Association

Book fair and trade show listings

• Independent Book Publishers Association
• Submittable
• 10times

A Platform to Stand On III: The Recipe

The elements of an effective publishing platform for a writer, Part III

In this final post in my series on Danielle Girard’s Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend seminar on author platforms, we’ll cover what was perhaps the most useful piece of advice Danielle shared, which was the idea of a brand recipe one can build to help drive how we might construct and execute an author platform. The idea is to sit down and ask yourself who you are, and then create a bullet list of what makes you tick—that is, what are the most important and compelling aspects of your life? Danielle gave us her example, but I don’t remember it, so I’ll do one for myself in real time.

What makes me tick?

• Progressive politics
• Fiction writing
• Reading – fiction
• Reading – news and reportage
• Family
• Playing and watching basketball
• Cycling and watching professional cycling
• Silicon Valley and California at large
• The tech industry and social networking
• Journalism and news media

Now one might scan that list and say, “Great, there’s ten things there that pretty much add up to everything under the sun!” But that’s not true. There are some big items that would undoubtedly appear on many people’s lists that don’t appear on mine: music, movies, and faith, just to name a few. I like music and movies, and I’m interested in (and have written in this blog about) some aspects of religious faith, but none of these things are essential to who I am. They don’t drive my day-to-day activities like all these things do.

These are the ingredients in your brand recipe, and the next step is to portion them out. You do this by asking, what percentage of my web, social media, and newsletter content should pertain to each of these? So here’s how I’ll portion them out, off the top of my head:

• Progressive politics – 15%
• Fiction writing – 15%
• Reading – fiction – 15%
• Reading – news and reportage – 5%
• Family – 10%
• Playing and watching basketball – 5%
• Cycling and watching professional cycling – 5%
• Silicon Valley and California at large – 10%
• The tech industry and social networking – 10%
• Journalism and news media – 10%

As I unveil and then manage my platform from day to day, I can use this recipe to guide how I want to reveal myself to readers. Again, as mentioned above, none of this is directly aimed at selling. The idea is to connect through a consistent but not obnoxious amount of engagement, and to let readers know who you are so they can relate to you in ways beyond the effects of your published words.

Resources

Danielle was kind enough to share a number of resources that can help provide even more insight into the concept of a publishing platform:

• Publishing … and Other Forms of Insanity
• shewrites.com
• WeGrowMedia (Dan Blank)

So get out there and build (or continue to build) your brand—and have fun with it!

A Platform to Stand On II: Elements

The elements of an effective publishing platform for a writer, Part II

In this post, Part II of my series on Danielle Girard’s Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend seminar on author platforms, let’s talk about the elements of an author platform. The key elements of a good author platform—and these necessarily vary from person to person—can be the: 

• Author website
• Blog
• Social media
• Email list

The objective of the author website is to introduce yourself to readers and, more practically, to give strategically placed hyperlinks a good place to land. For a great example, look at Danielle’s site, and for a less-great example, look at mine. Links to the site should appear in your email signature, social media profiles, and on your submission cover letters, at the very least. Which means, of course, you’ll want to always have confidence, and even pride, in what you post there. The website is also where readers go for the latest and greatest about you, such as book launches, author appearances, and news. If you’re like Danielle and you’ve got a lot going on, you’ll need to have the site updated frequently; if you’re more like me, you can leave it static—but not too static.

Since you’re reading a blog at this very moment, I probably don’t need to explain what that is. But there are very different approaches to the blog, which Danielle discussed at some length. She refers to her blog as a “web journal,” and she uses it to report on recent events, to engage readers with very short bursts of inspiration, or to simply stay connected. Danielle advises that the keys with a blog are frequency—you should post twice a week, minimum—and brevity—your posts should be 500 words in length, maximum. And, despite the fact that those two maxims work so nicely together (we’re more able to post frequently if we keep our posts short), I manage to egregiously violate both of them. Ugh. Oh well, we all need to do better.

Social media is the big bugaboo, of course, because of the incontrovertible fact that a dopamine-driven, technology-fueled phenomenon invariably becomes extremely time-consuming, and even mood-altering. At minimum, Danielle says, one should be on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and like blogs, posts should be kept short and should engage in one of the ways listed in Part I. (Which is actually pretty easy for writers: Who doesn’t want to educate, inspire, enlighten, or entertain, after all?) One problem discussed during the Q&A was the era we’re living in and the pounding drumbeat of vitriolic politics we have to deal with every day, which, for many of us, pervades our social media presence. Danielle has chosen to separate her politics from her brand, but she freely acknowledges that this is impossible for some people. (Just scroll the TOC of this blog and you’ll see where I’ve settled, at least for now.) Bottom line is that, as with everything around one’s platform, the answer is as unique as the individual. Anything can work as long as you’re true to yourself.

The email list, Danielle explained, is how the writer offers herself up to her most loyal readers for a deeper, though less frequent, level of engagement. While organizations and publications will distribute email newsletters weekly, or even daily, the author will do better to keep them intermittent, infrequent, and associated with an impending event or newsworthy development. Newsletter subscribers are the ones most likely to buy every book, know every character, and post ratings and reviews to Amazon, Goodreads, or their own blogs. As such, they are more invested in the writer’s success, and you want to reward that investment with inside news, and even special offers. (Obviously, if you’re a very busy—which is to say, very famous—author, your approach, or that of your publicists, will be very different. But if that’s you, you’re probably not reading this blog in the first place.)

Next up, in Part III, we'll introduce the very helpful concept of a brand recipe for authors.

A Platform to Stand On I: Engagement

The elements of an effective publishing platform for a writer, Part I

Continuing with my posts recounting craft tips from the Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend that I attended in mid-September, let’s talk about platforms. I’m a crusty old curmudgeon, so even though I’ve been around social networking probably longer than any of you, I’m still like, “Platforms? Really?” But yeah, it’s a thing, and you need to know about it if you want to get published these days.

This is the first of three posts on the topic, derived from a seminar on author platforms delivered at PD Weekend. The presenter (and, full disclosure, close personal friend of mine) Danielle Girard, has launched a platform that effectively uses web, social media, and ecommerce to drive sales of her fourteen highly successful thrillers. In this post, we’ll provide a definition of an author platform and talk a little about the platform’s primary objective, engagement. In follow-on posts, we’ll cover the elements of the platform and something Danielle called the brand recipe.

Platform Defined

First and foremost—and mercifully—Danielle gave us her definition of a platform: It’s essentially your brand, delivered to your readers through a steady flow of communications such as social media posts, e-mail newsletters, and website updates. The key term publicists and social media mavens use is engagement, and the idea, Danielle says, is to be consistent without being annoying.

Engagement

Effective engagement attempts to do one or more of four things:

• Educate
• Inspire
• Enlighten
• Entertain

Danielle was keen to point out that selling is not one of the direct objectives of author engagement. The idea is to connect with readers, not to separate them from their money. (That comes, if all is done well, over time.)

And, of course, there are certainly people—too many people, I would say—who enrage to engage. If that’s who you are, you’re of course free to do what you will, and if you can do it while still playing nice, more power to you. (More on that in Part II.)

The Art of the Pageplay II

What novelists and story writers can learn from film techniques, Part II

As promised, here is the second post on the Fred Leebron seminar titled, “Narrative Techniques from Film,” from the QueensMFA Professional Development Weekend, which I attended in mid-September. (See The Art of the Pageplay I, which covers the films “Pulp Fiction” and “Vertigo,” for Part I.)

The third film scene Fred covered was from “Hidden Figures:” the pivotal, wrenching bathroom speech delivered by the mathematician Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) when she is confronted by her director at NASA, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) about intermittent absences during the day.

The advice here: As a fiction writer, you have the option to allow your characters to say what they would never allow themselves to say, so do it. And when you do, employ dramatic scene construction, something like a lone African-American woman rushing soaking wet into the middle of a roomful of white men in identical white shirts and black ties, and tonal variation in the dialog, or in this case, monolog, which begins as a panicked confession, then quickly rises to a soulful condemnation of the institutional injustices heaped on women and people of color—of which, of course, Johnson is both—during the 1960s.

The visual power of a scene like this certainly cannot be reproduced in text, but the essential elements can be emulated.

Similarly, we can learn from techniques employed in a haunting scene in the film “Cabaret,” in which innocent and devoted Germans, led by a particularly earnest young man in a Hitler Youth uniform, burst spontaneously into song on a beautiful day at an outdoor café.

The song, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” was written to emulate the patriotic “fatherland” anthems of the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s, and is thus laden with a sense of dread that lies in wicked contrast to the pearly white skin, pressed uniform, and blonde hair of the lead singer and many of the extras who join in.

These unspeakably high stakes are the key to the scene, which reaches its apex in a foreboding chorus of unspeakable tragedy to come. Fred’s message here, that “any good scene reaches beyond itself,” can be buttressed further by an aftermath: in this case, the characters of Brian Roberts (Michael York) and Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem) departing the café with Brian asking Max, “Still think you can control them?”

In calling out the utility of film techniques in prose writing, Fred is not alone: This is something Benjamin Percy—among others, I’m sure—did consistently and to great effect in his workshops for years. So take it to heart, and have fun with it.

The Art of the Pageplay I

What novelists and story writers can learn from film techniques, Part I

Read the book, or wait for the movie? An age-old question, to be sure, with an obvious answer: Always do both, and it doesn’t matter what order, because the book will always be better.

(Okay, maybe I’m a little biased, but anyway…)

As promised, here is the first of several posts recounting craft tips from the Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend, which I attended in mid-September. Fred Leebron, the martini-drinking spiritual captain of the Queens program, delivered a seminar he called “Narrative Techniques from Film,” during this year’s weekend, and it was a good one. Bringing the vividness and immediacy of film techniques to your writing practice can be both incredibly powerful and a lot of fun, which is a good way of generating badly needed energy when you’re losing your pep.

Fred showed clips from familiar movies and then talked through the narrative techniques that can be applied to prose writing, particularly fiction writing. In this post, we’ll cover two of those examples, and save two more for a follow-on post.

His first example was the opening scene of the Quentin Tarantino film “Pulp Fiction,” during which the characters of Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and his girlfriend Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) sit in a diner discussing human nature and plotting a crime. 

The action within a fixed space—in this case, a booth in a coffee shop—drives the frenetic tension between the characters by containing it, squeezing it, in a sense. And as the tension grows, the camera angle shifts, first to contrast these criminals with the cherubic vision of the waitress, then to show us the characters’ eyes and contorted faces as they look at each other, all of it reinforcing their strange bond.

All of this can be reproduced in text, as can idiosyncratic dialog. “Syntax causes emotion,” Fred told us, and the syntax of the characters’ lines as they reach the climax of the scene drives not just emotion, but confusion, the ideal combination in a prelude to violence:

Pumpkin: “Bars, liquor stores, gas stations, you get your head blown off sticking up one of them. Restaurants, on the other hand, you catch ‘em with their pants down. They’re not expecting to get robbed. Not as expecting, anyway.”
Honey Bunny: “I bet you could cut down on the hero factor in a place like this.”
Pumpkin: “Correct. Same as banks, these places are insured. Manager. He don’t give a fuck. He’s just trying to get you out the door before you start plugging the diners. Waitresses, fucking forget it. No way they’re taking a bullet for the register. Bus boys, some wetback, getting paid a dollar-fifty an hour, really give a fuck you’re stealing from the owner? Customers sitting there with food in their mouths, they don’t know what’s going on. One minute, they’re having a Denver omelet, next minute, someone’s sticking a gun in their face.”

Create tension by containing the characters, create contrast by shifting the camera angles, drive emotion through syntax—all techniques a writer can employ in text as well as on screen.

From here, we moved on to the Hitchcock classic, “Vertigo,” and the bell tower scene where Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) chases the mysterious Madeleine (Kim Novak) up the bell tower stairs. The scene is, of course, famous for the “Dali counterzoom,” which “stretches” the bell tower visually to inject the reality of Scottie’s vertigo into the viewer. 

While this effect is all but impossible to emulate in print, other aspects of the scene are not, and in fact, are highly suitable to text.

The strength of Scottie’s vertigo in the scene, and the reason Hitchcock felt the need to show it in such a stark fashion, is that it renders Scottie helpless to stop Madeleine from charging up the stairs and plunging to her death. A character incapacitated in this way is the height of drama.

As the scene rolls, and tragedy unfolds, Scottie’s horror—and the horror of what has actually transpired—is corroborated through shifts in point-of-view and the sudden presence of additional characters: a pair of nuns running up the walk, then a priest and groundskeepers scaling a ladder to Madeleine’s body, then the final shift in point-of-view, where the priest appears on one side of the bell tower as Scottie emerges on the other, escaping the scene undetected. Sensory detail within the characters and in the wider scene, and shifts in point of view to make all of it more vivid, are techniques that translate nicely to text.

The next post in the series continues the recap of Fred's seminar on film techniques, taking us through scenes from the Oscar-winning hits "Hidden Figures" and "Cabaret."

Work Party

Good times at the Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend

I sit in my writing room looking out the window at a light rain falling on Silicon Valley—

Whoops, I’ve just committed one of the many sins of writing I was taught (but apparently never quite learned) during my years in the MFA in Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte. This sin was labeled “The Weather Report,” and stressed in many a seminar and workshop by Pinckney Benedict, one of the more charismatic instructors in the program, and it goes something like this: Starting a piece with a broad-swath description of the “warm sun,” the “cool rain,” the “whistling wind,” or any other aspect of the natural environment—a.k.a. “the weather”—is cliché. Never, ever do it. Get into the action of the story, and do it fast. Never mind the fact that great writers have used The Weather Report with great success, or the fact that as I wrote that, I actually was sitting in my writing room, and I actually was looking out at the first rainy day of the fall here in Silicon Valley. Because using The Weather Report immediately pegs me as a loafer among modern authors, one who doesn’t have enough confidence in my story to jump right in and start telling it.

So, there you have your mini–writing lesson for the day.

All this is on my mind this morning as I reflect on the fifth or sixth biennial Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend, which I attended a couple weeks ago. The gathering allows graduates and some current students to participate in seminars, workshops, and readings, and to meet with influential editors and agents, and, of course, Queens faculty. I’ve found it to be worth the time and money, but for those who were unable to attend this year, this is the first in a series of blog posts where I’ll share what I thought were useful lessons I learned this time around (as I have done in the past).

But this post isn’t about writing lessons—other than the “Weather Report” lesson above, for which you are very welcome. This post is about the intangibles of an MFA program, and the important people who came into my life during my years at Queens. I entered Queens in 2006 at the age of 46, with ten years of college and two degrees under my belt. During those first two college stints, in my teens and twenties, then again in my mid-thirties, I made no lasting friendships. I held fast to the people close to me: my large family, my best friend / college roommate / best man (all one dude), and my wife. Having little understanding of who I was, let alone the confidence to project myself out into the world, I focused on work and career and social outings that often felt more obligation than celebration. Being a natural introvert who is drained rather than energized by social interaction, and a Virgo with a high bar for closeness, deep friendships were often fleeting or just too demanding for me.

Then I went to Queens, where I met the four people pictured with me here. The primary draw for my trip to Charlotte last week, in fact, was not Professional Development Weekend itself, but a too-long-awaited reunion with these friends and fellow writers. As expected, our rambling, heavily punctuated conversations lasted well into the wee hours without notice, until someone slid their wine glass aside and glanced at a phone clock reading 1:22 a.m. Alone, we’re typical writers, comfortable as ever with a page and a keyboard, but less so with actual people actually looking us in the eye. But together, we move as a five-person dynamo, charging into every situation with the chutzpah of a mob boss, not necessarily dominating the scene, but projecting something intangible that often draws people to us. And then there are even more connections, and more opportunities for all of us to shine as individuals, all because we shine so brightly as a group.

Surprisingly, this relationship with these late-in-life college pals has enhanced my friendships here at home, too. Having the repeated experience now of sitting comfortably for hours and hours discussing, emoting, invoking, exploring, or just plain blurting shit out, has changed me. And it’s carried into all the situations with all the friends I’ve gained along the way: no urgency to speak, or to know, or to be something more than I am, just a simple desire to be there for as long as I can manage it. So, that was weird. What started out as a blog post on writing craft suddenly turned into a declaration of friendship. Whatever. I’m cool with that.

And now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, you can stay tuned for more from Professional Development Weekend, consisting mostly of tips on craft and promotion.

Language of the Times III

The Death—and possible rebirth—of discourse

I’ve written here about language before—typically screeds lambasting the cooptation of perfectly good words and phrases like faith. But I’m switching gears this time, writing about an crafty verbal stratagem that might just save American political discourse. My Aunt Monessa Overby, who I’ve written about before, was born on the same date I was, 27 years before me. It’s a unique connection that has kept us close over the years. On the phone the other day, she shared this advice: “What I’m trying to do,” she said, “is avoid saying ‘I am a Democrat.’ Instead, when asked, I say, ‘I tend to vote for Democrats.’” She went on to tell me that she had, in fact, voted for at least one Republican: Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now, I’ve never voted for a declared Republican, but there have been Republicans who, if they had decided to run, would have gotten considerable attention from me. The point being, we express our political affiliation in this country as though we’re describing some in-bread, inextricable part of our identity. “I am a Republican,” we say. Or, “I am a Democrat.” But in reality, neither is true, ever, and, in fact, neither ever could be true. And that is simply because the Republican and Democratic parties have both evolved over the years (Republicans: party of Lincoln. Democrats: Home for decades to vile southern racists.) And, in fact, they’ll continue to do so. (I doubt my aunt could ever conceive of voting for anyone in today’s Republican Party.)

But how does this save discourse? Well, I shifted things a little in that conversation with Monessa. I said, “Think what a different impression you’d make if you used that phrasing when starting a conversation—like, ‘How do you tend to vote?’ instead of ‘Republican or Democrat?’” She hadn’t thought of that, but it resonated with her, and I now put it to you: We all—particularly us late boomers—have those people in our lives who we know have different, and sometimes opposing, political views, so we either avoid political discourse with them at all costs, or find ourselves in debates that are either useless or emotionally scarring, and typically both. Political polarization gets personal sometimes, unfortunately.

So, for those friends, and even acquaintances, of opposing political persuasions, try this new way of asking, and even more than that, try this new way of thinking, about political affiliation. Because we don’t vote for a particular political party because of flowery, often equivocating sentences in campaign speeches and party platform documents: We do it for human reasons. We do it because we see underprivileged people in our communities and beyond, and we want to help them. We do it because a close relative or neighbor was killed in a war, and we want to know why, and we want their families to be cared for. We do it because we’ve seen both arrogant opulence and brave, completely unnecessary poverty. Any of these feelings, impulses, and attitudes might be shared by the person you’re talking to. And I think we can all assume—particularly in this polarized age—that this approach has a better chance than starting with, “Republican or Democrat?”

To David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez: Our Deepest Apologies and Regrets

Why Brett Kavanaugh is the worst thing that has happened to America since Mitch McConnell

Mitch McConnell is undoubtedly the worst thing that has happened to the United States of America in the 21^st Century—until now. Wait, you ask, what about the Bulbous Orange Baby? To which I say, Sorry, but without McConnell, the Idiot-in-Chief is nothing. He is a blob of human waste that hasn’t had a salient thought in his entire painful existence. With McConnell stroking his shaft, however, he’s the Messiah. He is the purveyor of policies (he doesn’t understand a single one of them) that McConnell enshrines into law. He is the champion of constituents (he doesn’t give a flying fuck about a single one of them) in McConnell’s coal-producing southern state. And most importantly, he’s the nominator of judges (he’s never heard of a single goddamn one of them before) who are summarily “vetted” and approved by McConnell’s ill-reputed house of Senatorial prostitution. In short, the Drumpführer is the puppet’s puppet, McConnell is the puppet, and the Kochs, the Adelsons, and the Mercers are the puppeteers.

But now, McConnell has outdone, and, in a sense, replaced himself. He is no longer the most dangerous man in America. That title now falls to his latest creation, the pasty-faced, beer-slamming, sexual predator now known as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. We’ll call him Wah-Wah!

 The unmitigated American apocalypse that is Wah-Wah! is all laid out in painful detail in a pair of unrelated articles in this week’s New Yorker.

In the weekly Comment (“Will the Supreme Court use a New York City Regulation to Strike Down Gun Laws?”), Amy Davidson Sorkin describes the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. New York, which the U.S. Supreme Court—now with Wah-Wah! on board—is about to hear. The case challenges a New York City gun regulation that prohibits the transportation of firearms outside of a home for any purpose other than a visit to one of the seven NYPD-licensed gun ranges within the city’s limits. The regulation means gun owners cannot take their guns out of the city or, if they have multiple residences, they cannot move their guns from one house to another. Even someone who favors stronger gun laws might consider this law restrictive enough that striking it down doesn’t sound like a big deal. But that’s not how the Supreme Court operates. As Davidson Sorkin explains, the case will very likely build on recent precedent set in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010). Heller essentially emasculated the “Well Regulated Militia” clause of the Second Amendment, and McDonald ruled that that standard applied to all gun control laws enacted by the states. Enter Wah-Wah!, whose views on these matters couldn’t be clearer. As Davidson Sorkin explains:

As an appeals-court judge, [Wah-Wah!] wrote, in a 2011 dissent, that the District of Columbia should not be allowed to ban semi-automatic assault rifles, largely because they were “in common use.” He added that asking people to register their guns is unconstitutional.

So, game-set-match, Wah-Wah! is just the dude the NRA has been looking for to, as Slate put it in a recent piece, “make every state’s gun laws look like Texas’.”

But with Wah-Wah!, the bad news gets worse, and Louis Menand gives a vivid illustration of why in his piece, “The Supreme Court Case that Enshrined White Supremacy in Law,” a review of several recent books on the landmark 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, which provided the legal basis for institutionalized and publicly sanctioned racism in the U.S. In the piece, Menand describes an America in which a succession of post–Civil War Supreme Court majorities, sometimes with detached ambivalence and at other times twisting itself up in knots, perpetuated racist practices like segregation, voter suppression, and redlining, while tacitly approving more beastly practices like lynching, all the while using Plessy as its legal foundation. The legacy of Plessy couldn’t be clearer:

• There were 130,334 African-Americans registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896, the year Plessy was decided. In 1904, eight years later, there were only 1,342. In Virginia that year, the estimated black turnout in the Presidential election was zero.
• In a 1927 Supreme Court case that ruled against a Chinese family in Mississippi whose daughter had been expelled from school on racial grounds, the unanimous opinion was delivered by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former U.S. President, and among the Justices who heard the case—and voted with the majority—were the American legal giants Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis.
• Institutionalized, legally sanctioned racism lasted for a full century after Plessy: It wasn’t until 1995 that Mississippi became the last state to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery.

Menand’s account of how these things can pan out over long decades of legal precedent, combined with Davidson Sorkin’s explanation of what’s at stake in the New York case, all adds up to this: With Wah-Wah! on board, we’re looking ahead to decades of living in cities overrun by successive generations of increasingly deadly and barbaric weaponry, all fueled by unfettered capitalism, social unrest, and ignorance, none of which seem to be in short supply these days.

So, in a utopian progressive future, when a President Kamala Harris and a Senate Majority Leader Corey Booker work with Speaker Nancy Pelosi to reduce the number of Supreme Court Justices from nine to seven, to banish Neal Gorsuch and Wah-Wah! to obscurity, and to start the process of returning sanity and reason to American jurisprudence, do not be surprised, do not be aghast, do not suddenly start clinging to comforting tradition. There’s no time for that anymore.

Just be thankful.

I’ve Fixed Facebook. You’re Welcome.

An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg 

Dear Mark,

I’m not a social media expert, but I play one on the internet. This is why I’m able to give you the following advice that will solve all the problems of your company—advice which is, I assure you, at least as good as any of the advice you’re getting on the inside.

And don’t give me that “Problems? What problems?” bunk.

You’re not only being held responsible for genocide, and for the bulbous orange baby now occupying the White House, you’re also being blamed for all kinds of discrimination. The New York Times, writing about one such example, points out:

Facebook has been criticized in recent years over revelations that its technology allowed landlords to discriminate on the basis of race, and employers to discriminate on the basis of age. Now a group of job seekers is accusing Facebook of helping employers to exclude female candidates from recruiting campaigns. 

Yeah, you got problems, dude. Here are three steps to solve them:

1. Go back to being the geeks you truly are 

Mark, your company is a tech company. And why is it a tech company? Because you’re a geek, Mark. What’s more, you have all the earmarks of a lovable geek. You’ve got the benign awkwardness, a wife you met in college who is her own form of geek, and the cool tech you brought into the world. In fact, the only times you stop being lovable is when you try to be something more than just a geek.

I’ve been in Silicon Valley since before it even was Silicon Valley, and I can tell you, Mark, we love guys like you. We’ve got 80-year-olds running around this valley who are just like you, except they’re wearing pocket protectors. And we love them, just like we love you.

So why does everyone else hate you? Because you’ve forgotten that, first and foremost, you’re just a geek. You’re not a publisher, you’re not a social engineer, you’re not a diplomat, or a lawyer, or a judge, or even a neighborhood watch volunteer. And you’re sure as hell not a politician. (And thank heaven for that, am I right?) No, you’re none of those things. You know why? Yeah, you know, repeat after me: because you’re a geek.

So, all these solutions you’ve come up with—the citizenship requirement for political ads, the 10,000 people you’re going to hire to manually deal with all this crap, or that crazy war room you’re building to safeguard elections—are never going to work. Because a tech company peopled with geeks needs to come up with solutions that are 100% tech solutions. Anything that relies on human intervention of any kind just will not scale. Dude, you’ve got 2 billion users! That’s a haystack the size of which humanity has never seen before, and the needles you’re looking for are the tiniest, shiniest, and sharpest of all.

And, in fact, you know this, because near the close of your misguided September 12 blog post, you admitted the following:

“The last point I’ll make is that we’re all in this together. The definition of success is that we stop cyberattacks and coordinated information operations before they can cause harm. While I’d always rather Facebook identified abuse first, that won’t always be possible.” 

To which I’ll say, nah, man, don’t drag me or my tax dollars into your shit. Instead…

2. Leave the other crap to the people who are paid to do it 

I’ll just say you made a huge mistake, Mark, both on the day you decided to refer to yourself in court as a publisher, and over the period of time you began acting like one by taking responsibility for the content on your platform. The only way an enterprise of the size and scale of Facebook is going to survive in the long run is to completely divorce itself from the content shared on the platform. Again, it’s a simple matter of scale. (Remember, 2 billion users!)

As much as I abhor Alex Jones, the law and society at large, not Facebook, should have been tasked with doing something about his violent incitements and other abhorrent behavior. And as much as I despise Donald Trump and the Russians who used your platform to help get him elected, it’s the job of government and, again, society at large, not Facebook, to address that very serious national security threat. Instead, you’ve got a bunch of idiot pundits and Congress-monkeys pointing the finger at you guys every time some butt-head posts something offensive, polarizing, discriminatory, or even mildly unpleasant.

And now you’ve even got viral Facebook stars and even your own employees jumping all over your shit. It’s like an amoeba, dude! Every solution you try just squeezes between your fingers! I’ll put it this way: I’m sure Samidh Chakrabarti is a great guy, but what the hell are you doing with a Head of Civic Engagement in the first place? You’re a geek! Your company is a tech company! Get out of the moderation business, man! I’ll say it again: 2 billion users!

One more thing…

3. Quit being so goddamn greedy

All this madness probably started well before your IPO gave you an out-of-the-gate market cap of $104 billion (or, after the immediate drop because of the “fiasco,” about $50 billion), but it was certainly IPO day that put the whole thing on steroids. You were interviewed by Evan Osnos for his New Yorker piece fittingly titled, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy,” but you were probably a little shocked when you read the final piece. Yes, Mark, Osnos did some incredibly thorough reporting and laid it all out for us. A “Growth Team,” Mark? Seriously? Fifty million users weren’t enough? I understand that your perfectly valid response to that could be, “Screw you, bub. We’re up to 2 billion.” To which I say, see above.

But seriously, all I’m saying is, maybe picture yourself with personal wealth in an amount slightly lower but every bit as obscene as $67 billion. Maybe $5 billion, or $7 billion. You can still live in your mansion, still own all the adjacent properties, still have a healthy philanthropic presence, still put your kids through the best schools. But you’ll be able to forget about your shithead shareholders. They’ll be turning on you soon enough anyway. Put that IPO squarely in the rearview mirror, let your user base dwindle down to a nicely sustainable 200 to 500 million, let some competition come in, and go out there and compete the way you and your fellow geeks like to compete: on cool tech, on features, on UX, on practical jokes, even—on anything, that is, but that cancerous, corrosive, congealing pathogen known as attention.

Because the thing is, Mark—and this is the last thing I’ll say, I promise—lovable geeks aren’t greedy, and they never have been. Those 80-year-olds with the pocket protectors, they’re sitting there stymied by the fact that their Cupertino ranch houses are now worth millions. They’re making digital movies of their grandkids’ kindergarten graduations and distributing them to their families—on DVDs.

One day, that could be you.

You’re welcome.

Language of the Times II

The Co-Opting of the term Faith

In a nation where religious affiliation is on the wane, now is a good time to look closely at the term faith. In politics, in particular, an increasingly desperate Republican party that has for years girded its loins with the mantle of superior “faith” is now completely losing whatever sense of prudence, decency, or ethics it might have had—if any. And as we watch these Republicans rightfully relinquish their grip on power, we realize that, at some point along the decades-long arc of their rise and fall, the term faith was co-opted. A perfectly useful term that had always been dependent on a definitive modifier (Christian faith, Muslim faith, Jewish faith, etc.) was seized by white male Republicans who branded themselves men of faith, without giving us the faintest idea what that actually meant. “We’re just better than those godless Democrats,” the phrase said. “Just shut up and follow us.” And of course, millions bought into the ruse and did just that, to disastrous effect.

This despite the fact that these supposed “men of faith” were not using the term faith to express their embrace of Christian teachings: of sheltering the homeless, feeding the hungry, and clothing the naked, of “thou shall not kill,” “thou shall not steal,” and “honor thy father and mother.” They were not using the term to be inclusive, they were using it to be exclusive—to declare themselves saviors, to apply the salve of justice onto the wounds of shame and fear their followers were suffering: the shame of incurable racism and xenophobia, and the fear of impending poverty slowly descending on their families and communities. And this has always been both the true crime and the genius of the Republican rise: these “men of faith” were never saviors, but were in fact, with their policies of austerity for the deserving poor and prosperity for the undeserving rich, the bringers of shame, and the bringers of poverty.

Which is why this co-opting of the term faith has been so insidious and so evil. It has not only manipulated the religious among us by making them feel special and exclusive, it has diminished the faith we are all at liberty to feel, each and every day, as participants in the American experiment. Because ours is a prosperous nation, founded on and governed by the rule of law, and given to fits of great compassion and ceaseless innovation. There are imperfections, certainly, as there are and will always be in any large human undertaking, but the vast majority of us, as citizens, can have faith, when we rise and go out into the world, in the people around us, in the safety of our streets, in the integrity of our customs and enterprises. Binding the term faith up in a religious context, and particularly, in a right-wing Republican conservative Christian context, in fact, binds all of us by denying us one of the best terms available for our national identify: our relationship to our communities, our system of government, and the public servants we all trust and rely on each and every day. Because, in America, the faith we have in our teachers, first responders, school boards, town and city councils, trash collectors, road workers, postal carriers, and cops on the beat, and, most importantly, the faith we have in each other, is much more important to our social fabric than faith in any unseen deity in the sky.

Greed’s New Playing Field

On Facebook, Russian Meddling, and the Corrupting Power of Profit 

In the wake of the massive social media meddling and manipulation that impacted the 2016 U.S. presidential election, all fingers are now pointing at Facebook, and for good reason. It was a year and a half ago that U.S. intelligence agencies determined that the Russians had used Facebook and Twitter to meddle in the election. Executives from the tech companies went to Congress to express contrition while assuming no accountability, which was fine until we learned that Cambridge Analytica—whose founder, Robert Mercer, a reportedly brilliant computer scientist and staunch far-right-wing Republican, is the closest thing we have to a real-life Dr. Evil—had obtained and used data on 50 million Facebook users in its own nefarious election influence campaign. Eventually, Facebook’s chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, resigned in disgrace, and now we face the horrifying possibility that Mark Zuckerberg himself, the last person anyone wants to see sitting before a Congressional committee, might indeed subject himself to such a grilling.

So, the world wrings its collective hands over the power and influence of social media platforms, but the fact is, we’ve known for decades that something like this would happen.

Long before the emergence of the worldwide web 25 years ago, researchers identified two key characteristics of what we then called computer-mediated communication—essentially, large-scale communication over devices like computers and smartphones—which were that this type of communication is asynchronous and anonymous. Together, these attributes result in human interplay that is radically different from the face-to-face conversations and phone calls that were the pre-internet norm. Freed from quizzical or stunned expressions, harrumphing or sighs over the phone line, or out-and-out verbal interruptions, and, in fact, freed from ever coming into contact or interacting again with one’s antagonist, participants in social media from the very beginning jettisoned basic tenets of human self-regulation: status, diplomacy, empathy, compassion.

In short, much of social media quickly became anti-social, and the flame wars of 1980s-era Usenet evolved into the bots, imposters, and trolls of modern Facebook.

That’s the temperament story, which explains the human capacity for nefarious deeds on social media. What it doesn’t explain is how social media attained the global reach that allowed it to change the course of a national election in the world’s largest and most well-established democracy. For that, you have to follow the money.

Mark Zuckerberg

In the early days of Facebook, there was reportedly a split between founders Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Severin on the subject of advertising. Severin, who had provided the initial seed money for the site, was in favor of selling ads from the get-go, while Zuckerberg clung to the idea of an online destination free of the stain of conspicuous profit-making. Severin created a media kit that he floated around potential customers and investors in New York while Zuckerberg managed his small team of nerds in Palo Alto. Lots of intrigue, conflict, and resolution later, Facebook now openly promotes its unique ability to deliver targeted ads, and an entire industry has arisen, largely supplanting the newspaper, magazine, and television advertising of the past, and now a company that had revenues of $78 million in 2010 has grown to over $40 billion in revenues today. All that money comes from owning the attention of 2 billion users globally, and all that attention leads to lots of new tech to gain even more attention, and with it, more revenue.

Internet Research Agency Headquarters

So, while nefarious behavior was always a built-in feature (or bug) of the social media paradigm, the scale and global reach of Facebook, and the temptation that gave to devious, creative, and well-organized perpetrators like the Russian Internet Research Agency, all flowed forth from an impulse that is all too American: that of unbridled greed.