You don't have to answer this publicly, if you don't want to, but what brought you around to writing for The Awl? I'm not asking to be a dick, since I loved what you wrote about JS and I like so much of what The Awl does anyway, but it seems like a departure from your previous stance on the site?
Ooh, this is a good one, which is why I will answer it publicly. You are not being a dick — it is an excellent question since I don’t often spell things out on my blog.
When I wrote that post a few months back, there was, as you may remember, a little bit of a backlash from Awl friends and fans. Choire left a comment on one of those threads — a comment which I remember really not appreciating — and after an evening of being berated by Gawker Editors Past and Present, I’m pretty sure I let him have it. But! Then Choire actually e-mailed me, removing the public-pissing-contest element — that won my respect because, if he were so inclined, the piling on could’ve continued a lot longer than it did. But he chose to engage me privately and we had a brief reasonable exchange about the entire thing.
And then I really didn’t read The Awl for months. I wasn’t joking about that. Posts about Tom Scocca’s “Shadow Editors” on Mark Greif’s n+1 essay — and the fallout from that disagreement — flooded my dashboard for a few days, and so I read both pieces and detected some truth and bullshit on both sides. Disagreement is one of the most valuable, vital parts of conversation and I find myself driven to think and write about perspectives with which I do not agree. Specifically I like dissecting arguments (obvs) and considering why they do/don’t work. Anyway. It should come as no shock that in the Scocca/n+1 thing, I disagreed with everyone. But I also think my mode of criticism was evolving and I was sort of re-learning how to talk about things that pissed me off without getting angry (more on that in a sec).
Also, BMichael, who is a huge fan of The Awl, would occasionally send me some links to posts he thought were especially well written or insightful. He made me read the Shadow Editors (Scocca, again) on Eating Animals and it was brilliant. All the problems/points of disagreement I saw in Scocca’s Greif piece were no longer present; his arguments were elegant and (almost!) entirely free of ad hom attacks. I was impressed. For the first time in months I navigated to the Awl’s main page, and then I read Abe Sauer’s follow-up piece on Cintra Wilson, whose NY Times article on JC Penney was (part of) what started the entire “feud” (BMichael’s word). Abe’s approach to actually verifying Wilson’s claims (obese mannequins!) was straightforward, and he debunked most of them without sentiment or rancor. To date it is one of my favorite Awl (and Abe) posts. I linked to that post here and publicly wondered if my moratorium was over. Choire and I got back in loose touch on the e-mail and would occasionally discuss something he or I had written. By the time I worked on my End of the 00s submission, all of the bad feelings had long since eroded (for me; it’s a little presumptuous to speak for Choire).
But this brings up another question, which is one that I’ve asked myself a few times in the intervening months: would I write that post again? I think all of the substance of what I said was solid, I would stand behind all of the points I made…but the mode of expression? No. That initial entry is too whipped up, and actively combative in a way that undermines its legitimacy. As people responded and criticized, I had time to think about what really bothered me* and articulated that in a simpler way. And so began a long, continuing lesson of how to disagree without getting Worked Up on The Internet. It’s not easy.
Also, I got a lot of harsh, largely unmerited, criticism because — and this is a new perspective — the Awl was then a really, really young site and was/is a risky venture and so the underlying attitude was, unbeknownst to me, “hey! They’re just starting out.why you gotta be like that, lady?”** But no one actually said that. Instead, the collective response was one of just enough engagement to let me know that no one planned on seriously engaging me. Like, “maybe you just don’t get irony?” or “your religious beliefs are probably why you are so stupid and humorless,” etc., which were lazy arguments entirely unworthy of the people making them. And it was that tone of disengagement and bias that I had sensed in the Awl posts I had criticized.
So! This is a really long-winded answer to your question but: I can’t say whether or not The Awl has changed, or my perspective has, but the things that drove me crazy aren’t really as prevalent (btw, the Denby/Inglourious Basterds thing was such an unfortunate mischaracterization because that review did raise an interesting point, even if you hate the guy! Damn, I’ve been dying to say that); there are still posts I don’t love or identify or agree with but I appreciate that the site is doing a number of things, short- and long-form, and doing them really uncommonly well.
*Links provided for the sake of a coherent narrative and for that reason only.
**Not something anyone has told me; I’ve intuited this over time.
Regina Cannot Explain It All
