The Great Books Are for Everyone

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Lowry Pressly. Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month). Lowry Pressly is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and a JD from Yale Law School. He is the author of The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life, which was named by The New Yorker as one of the best new books of 2024. I invited Lowry to join me in Austin, and we sat down to have a conversation about data, surveillance, and the role of privacy in a flourishing human life. Below are highlights from our conversation. For the full dialogue, check out the video at the top of the page. A CONVERSATION WITH LOWRY PRESSLY Jared: When most people think about privacy, it’s purely in terms of apps and websites and tech companies. We even have this nomenclature of privacy settings—how private a person you are is almost measurable by how many of those features you turn on. Is that too narrow an understanding? Lowry: Without a doubt. The idea of privacy as something important to human beings as such doesn’t emerge in the public consciousness until the middle of the nineteenth century, as a reaction primarily to the photograph camera and the first mass media. The danger today is thinking of privacy through the lens of privacy settings. One, it gives us the wrong idea of what privacy is—deciding the audiences for your information is better described as confidentiality or secrecy. Two, and this is the dangerous one: the camera and the newspaper weren’t part of an economic system whose profit motive was tied to the diminution of privacy. When we use the technologies of the data economy to think about privacy, we take for granted that what Mark Zuckerberg calls privacy settings track the reality of what privacy is—and not the reality of his business model. “Not long ago, within my lifetime, it would have been an unbelievable dystopia to portray a world in which video surveillance is more or less everywhere and each person voluntarily carries an individual tracking device.” Jared: So let’s go back to the camera. Did we invent privacy as a right in response to it, or did it just make salient something we’d ignored? Lowry: A bit of yes and a bit of no. The word goes back to the 1500s—the privy council, private correspondence. But it isn’t used to describe an interest human beings have just by virtue of being human until the mid-nineteenth century. The big moral panic has to do with cameras: 1888 was George Eastman’s Kodak, which made candid shots possible for the first time. And note the language of candid—it normally means freely expressing oneself, and now we naturally use it for photographs. One of the first legal cases to try to vindicate a right to privacy was a woman whose picture was taken on stage by a paying member of the audience. The judge said this was a moral violation of privacy—sadly, we have no law to cover it. That’s later taken up in the famous 1890 Warren and Brandeis article. What worried people weren’t illicit exposures but candid ones—taking a moment out of the flux and flow of life as it’s lived and fixing it in a permanent form. There’s a continuum—being looked at, the person taking notes about you, the photograph. The question is, what moves us along it? Jared: Here’s a case I don’t have strong feelings about. Imagine I’m eating lunch in a park and discover someone at the next bench has been making a charcoal drawing of me. I don’t have as strong an aversion to that. The person sketching is providing an interpretation of your presence rather than just grabbing the moment. Whereas the more factual it becomes—12:01, took a bite; 12:02, picked his nose—the worse it feels. Lowry: The charcoal drawing says at least as much about the artist

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Ted Gioia. Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month). Ted needs no introduction here—The Honest Broker is his newsletter, after all. But I want to tell you a little bit about how Ted and I started this project. I received a message on Substack last year, and when I saw it was from Ted, I assumed it was fake. But it turns out it was real, and Ted asked me if I wanted to get lunch. After talking for a few hours about books, Substack, and new media, Ted asked if I wanted to launch a podcast on The Honest Broker. His only rule: I needed to find the most interesting people as guests. Well, this meant that eventually I had to interview Ted. We sat down to talk about media consolidation, building alternative institutions, and human creativity. Below is a transcript of part of our conversation. For the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.I know you’ll enjoy this. A CONVERSATION WITH TED GIOIA JARED: Ted Gioia, thank you for joining me. TED: Well, thank you for having me. This is something we’ve long awaited. JARED: I want to start off with a big question. I think it’s fair to say that we’re living in a time of it institutional collapse. We had these prestige institutions that we used to rely on: The New York Times, The New Yorker, academia. And people could rely on them to vet new writers, vet ideas, and movements, and they just did a lot of credibility building for us. It took a lot of the work out of our hands. I think we just don’t have that same trust in those institutions anymore, and people don’t rely on them in the same way anymore. And things are increasingly more decentralized. Now, part of me finds this really exciting because it means for people who operate outside of those systems—I think you and I would be two examples—it means there’s more opportunity. But it also raises the question of whether or not we need to start building new institutions. TED: Well, there’s been a great promise that the internet would open up everything to us. All of a sudden, if I’m a writer, a musician, a visual artist, a videographer, all of a sudden, I could reach my audience directly with the internet. And we thought this was going to lead to an enormous blossoming of culture where everyone had this freedom and a thousand flowers blossomed. But that hasn’t happened, really. And in fact, what you see is that the institutions have become more consolidated and stagnant over time. Let me give you a few figures. Right now, most of the movies made come out of four Hollywood studios. They control it. Most of the movie distribution into the home comes from just four streaming platforms. In fact, in many instances, it’s the same company doing the movie-making as the streaming. That was illegal until very recently. In 1948, the Supreme Court said that a movie studio could not own distribution. And that allowed a lot of freedom. After that, there was a real flourishing of indie movies in the United States and overseas. But now we’ve stagnated to the point where there are just four streaming platforms, four movie studios. In music, it’s even worse. There are just three companies that control most of the hit songs. If you look at publishing, five companies control 80% of the books out there. It’s just ridiculous. As these industries become more consolidated, they become more bureaucratic, they move more slowly, they’re more cautious. Yet we’re more dependent on them than ever before. Now, we’re lucky that we still have an opportunity with a counterculture—and I’ll talk about that later. But I think the first thing you see is that the institutions have killed themselves by this consolidation, swallowing up their competitors, and creating this monolithic culture that’s

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Henry Oliver. Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month). Henry Oliver is the literary critic behind The Common Reader, a newsletter helping you make the most of your reading. He’s also a Research Fellow and Emerging Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. I sat down with Henry to talk about literature, poetry, the relationship between reading and empathy, and how to develop your taste. Below is an extract of our conversation. For the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page. A CONVERSATION WITH HENRY OLIVER Jared: Henry Oliver, thank you for joining me. Henry: Thank you for having me. Jared: So I want to ask you about Philistines and how Philistines have taken over the culture. I think the phrase you used is ‘Philistine supremacy’? Henry: That's right. A lot of the time, when we talk about Philistines, we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts. And it's a kind of snob thing. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine. You're a Philistine. The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just so many examples like that—that sort of suggest that the elite tier has kind of given up on being elites in a way. I think part of it is we had what was called prestige TV, and people wanted to write about that and talk about that. “The elite tier has kind of given up on being elites.” Jared: Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and say, no, Succession’s really good. The writing is very interesting. The cinematography adds a new layer to its presentation. The storytelling's good. It gives you room to explore various themes in a way that a play doesn’t because of its runtime and multi-season arc. Tell me why that’s crazy. Henry: There are two questions here. Is Succession good? And is Succession the sort of thing that merits the cultural elite giving it the kind of attention that they have? And those are separate questions. Maybe Succession is good. I neither know nor care. I found it boring. I couldn't watch very much of it. Personally, I think the cinematography is hugely derivative. It's all full of the ordinary TV tropes we're all used to from a million other things. I didn't think the dialogue was that good. And I also felt the story was just dragging and dragging and dragging. But I'm happy to say, okay, a lot of people know TV better than me, and they think it was amazing. And like, I can just be wrong about that. But should we be talking about it in partnership with King Lear? Should we be devoting the kind of space and the kind of critical attention that we give to it, that we also give to the great works of fiction and drama? That’s obviously a no. Even the advocates can't really make a serious case for it. And, you know, King Lear is 400 years old at this point and is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the West. No one's printing out the Succession scripts and doing a close reading. Jared: What were the conditions that sort of led to this Philistine supremacy? What changed? Henry: One thing I should say is there's still a lot of excellence. And I'm not saying that everything's gone bad. I'm saying there's this new segment in the culture, right? I think part of it is that it's very hard to make money writing about Shakespeare, writing about new novels, writing about whatever the NYRB is putting out. It's very hard to get an audience for that. How many New York Review of Books can there b

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series—also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Naomi Kanakia. Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month). Naomi is a writer. She’s published four novels, and her next book, What’s So Great About the Great Books?, will be released in May by Princeton University Press. She also writes the wonderful Woman of Letters newsletter here on Substack, and she is working on a short story collection to be published by Random House. I had the pleasure of reading What’s So Great About the Great Books? last year, and here’s what I wrote for the blurb: If you've ever wanted to read the Great Books, or ever wondered why you should, this is the book for you. Personal, humorous, and intimate, What’s So Great About the Great Books? gives us a great gift: a grounded guide to the classics, and a new standard for introducing these books to modern readers. In our conversation, we covered a range of topics, including why she wanted to write about the Great Books, why she decided to read them in the first place, and her struggles (and occasional triumphs) in the publishing industry. Below are some highlights from our dialogue. For the full conversation, check out the video at the top of the page. Highlights from the Naomi Kanakia Interview Jared: Naomi Kanakia, thank you for joining me. Naomi: Thanks for having me. Jared: You’re writing a book about the classics, which will be published by Princeton University Press. Tell me a little bit about what made you want to dedicate a year or two of your life to writing a book about the classics? Naomi: When I first started wanting to seriously be a writer, I decided that I should read all these great books that people always talk about. I bought a book called The New Lifetime Reading Program, I typed out the list of books recommended by this volume, and I have now spent 15 years reading through many of these books. Then, four or five years ago, I started writing some essays online, and an editor from Princeton reached out to me and asked if I wanted to do a book. At the time, I was between agents and my career prospects seemed pretty dire, and I wanted to work. I really love books about reading classics. I really like the angry polemical books, like Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, but I do feel that there’s a lot of angry polemic in this space. I felt there was room for more measured opinions, because I do think there are serious critiques to be made of the concept of reading old books. I wanted to write a book that took those concerns seriously and also had a more conversational tone. Jared: What are some of those critiques that you have in mind that you want to respond to? Naomi: A lot of books about reading classics are defenses of the humanities, or the idea that you should think deeply and love nuance. And it’s like, nobody’s against those things. The real question is: why do you have to read Milton instead of reading a modern author? Are we really saying that these old books are the best books and no modern books are good? Really, it’s a defense of a specific canon of books, and I believe that list is good and that people should read those books. Generally, it’s easier to gravitate towards the contemporary, and you have to try a little bit harder to look at these older books. But there are two major concerns. One is that older books are more difficult and more inaccessible. The other major concern is that if you’re reading older books, there will be less diversity. Jared: And despite those criticisms, you’re making an argument that it’s worth reading these old books. Naomi: Yes. Jared: I assume for part of that project, you had to go back and reread a lot of books. Was that part of the research, or was it just drawing on what you’ve been doing for the last fifteen years? Na

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with C. Thi Nguyen. Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month). Nguyen is a former food writer who became a philosopher. He’s now an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, where he also teaches in the Division of Games. His first book, Games: Agency as Art, won the 2021 Book Prize from the American Philosophical Association. In January, Nguyen released The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. It’s an exploration of the philosophy of games and a critical examination of the detrimental effects of gamification and institutional metrics. (I wrote a review of The Score on my own Substack.) Jennifer Szalai described The Score in a review at The New York Times: “This may be the only book in existence that discusses the game of Twister, the ethics of Aristotle and the mechanics of bureaucracies.” Below are highlights from my interview. For the rest of our conversation, check out the video at the top of the page. Highlights from the C. Thi Nguyen Interview Jared: Thi, thank you for joining me. Thi: I’m happy to be here. Jared: I want to start off with a big broad question: why are games fun? Thi: There are so many answers to that. I’ve given much more complicated answers, but maybe the dumbest answer is one of the deepest. Games are actually designed to be fun. Not all games, but a lot of the games we find fun are not accidents. It’s an ultra-careful fine-tuning process. Designing for fun is so delicate. If you just tweak a few little bits in the incentive structure or tweak a few little rules, the fun will fall out of things. People think fun is mysterious — it’s not for game designers. There are micro-issues of exactly how you pace the timing and exactly how you pace the rules that seem to emerge. A lot of people are most impressed by the game designs that are elaborate and complicated, but what a lot of game designers are most impressed by is a five-rule party game that’s fun, because that’s the hardest thing to build. I think it’s important to acknowledge that these things are designed objects that have been subject to brutal design cycles. Jared: If I’m playing games, I have two very different preferences. One of them is that I really like cozy games, like Stardew Valley. But then my other love is roguelikes, which are so frustrating. I played Slay the Spire last night, and I never made it to the last level. It was an intentionally frustrating experience, and I went to bed happy. I think that’s weird. The challenge is why you want to keep playing, and it makes it more satisfying. Thi: Roguelikes are probably the center of my video game universe. But when you asked about fun, I immediately thought about laughter, the social part of fun. In game design circles, ‘fun’ is used a little more technically, where they are talking about ‘fun games.’ I have the same experience as you that most of what I love is intensely, gruelingly difficult and mostly involves failure and pushing your way intensely to get tiny moments of success. I have a theory about why that is deeply enjoyable for us. In games, unlike ordinary life, you can seek exactly the balance of difficulty, frustration, skill, and success that suits you. That’s unlike the world, which says ‘Now you must work on this thing at this difficulty.’ The choice structure is that you get to choose whether you’re playing Stardew Valley or Slay the Spire, and that ability to adapt the challenge environment to you makes it much more possible to find the deliciousness wherever it may lie for you. Jared: This is probably related to our mutual love of rock climbing. Thi: Rock climbing taught me a lot. Climbing is what taught me to pay attention to my body and the way my body moves, and part of it was e