This is great, so much fun to read.

One thought it prompted, and I feel like maybe Henry Begler and I talked about this a bit, is that this very essay by Naomi Kanakia is of a kind of genre that seems native, at least in our era, to blogging and Substack. Like there’s something in the voice and the pacing of it that makes it very hard to imagine one of the major magazines publishing it. It’s too loose, too conversational, too explanatory in an unembarrassed way.

I can certainly imagine it as a chapter in a book, since there tends to be so much less editorial intervention in most books. But the New Yorker, or Harper’s, or The Atlantic, or whomever would take something like this and make Naomi go through eighteen revisions to tighten it up, give it more of an arc, make sure there was proper foreshadowing and signposting throughout, and make the conveyance of information less overt, etc.

The result would be good, but not actually any better than this version, just different, better in some ways and worse in others. It would be more easy to process for their median reader, which of course is one of the points Naomi’s making about the benefits of genre, but it would lose a certain intimacy.

I don’t think all of the laments that too many people on Substack need an editor are phony, but they don’t always acknowledge the cost of running everything through that gauntlet, which is that someone like Naomi can produce 6 pieces on Substack in the same amount of time it would take her to do one for The New Yorker, and most of the time the New Yorker one wouldn’t be any better than any of the six Substack ones, though maybe once in a blue moon it would be truly epic.