Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
An example of the way people have taken advantage of attention spans, clickbait, and confirmation bias to get a catchy/controversial idea across. This feels like a popular and powerful propaganda formula.
Highlights
id874067244
Savage has to make his definitions of both “literary fiction” and a “white male writer” far narrower than the obvious meanings of those terms.
id874067250
not interested in white men who write “genre.” (There goes half the bestseller list! And under this definition, even Cormac McCarthy wouldn’t be considered “literary,” since he used elements of sci-fi, horror, and Western fiction in most of his work.) Similarly, Savage doesn’t care for historical fiction (“utterly terrible period pieces”) or autofiction
id874067255
wants to see are white men writing “the kind of novel we think about as the literary novel, the Updike or DeLillo,” otherwise known as the “Big Splashy Everything Novel.”
id874067260
“white male writer,” he really means a “straight white American millennial man,” meaning one “under the age of 43,” who writes such books and expresses “middle-to-upper-middle-class” concerns.
id874067268
he doesn’t actually make the provocative claim that his title does (that “white male writers” as a whole are “vanishing.”) Instead, he claims that a very specific kind of white male writer (young, American, heterosexual, bourgeois) who writes a very specific kind of book (novels that are not set in the past, or part of a “genre,” or “autofiction”) is getting somewhat less attention from a very specific set of listmakers (the NYT, The Atlantic).
id874067275
2021, an internal audit at Penguin Random House found that titles “skew heavily white,” and a statistical analysis of more than 7,000 novels from the bestseller lists found the same thing.
id874067366
Savage also complains about a dearth of white masculinity in the New Yorker, but in 100 years of publication, the magazine has had only one female editor in chief (Tina Brown, from 1992 to 1998, or 6 percent of the publication’s history.) And at The Atlantic, which Savage also denounces for not paying enough attention to white novelists, there has never been a female editor in chief despite the magazine existing since 1857
id874067386
What we can say is that White Male Writers are no longer the predominant kind of writers in the American literary landscape, the way they used to be. This, I think, is what people like Savage and Aguilar are really upset about
✏️ As with all things in culture.. it’s not about this one slice vanishing, it’s about a better reallocation of attention to better include other voices. They’re no longer the predominant voice, or at least, they have to share space more than before. The privilege is less (but I doubt equal yet). When you re-allocate, it’s easy to confuse it with being robbed or demoted.. instead of thinking about it as righting a past wrong and making things equal where once it was inequal. 🔗 View Highlight