Search Results for: New Yorker

The Unreliable Reader

Aditya Chinchure / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Wei Tchou | Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (2,983 words)

“I write this while experiencing a strain of psychosis known as Cotard’s delusion, in which the patient believes that they are dead,” the novelist Esmé Weijun Wang writes at the beginning of “Perdition Days,” an essay from her new book, The Collected Schizophrenias. (Read an excerpt on Longreads.) “What the writer’s confused state means is not beside the point, because it is the point,” she continues. “I am in here, somewhere: cogito ergo sum.” The passage moves swiftly, from first person agency (“I am writing”) to distanced third person (“the patient,” “the writer”) to the famous Descartes assertion, in Latin, “I think, therefore I am.” As a reader, it’s astonishing and a little unnerving to consider the immediacy of the prose, your intimacy with a speaker searching to find the correct vantage from which to narrate the strangely drawn, difficult-to-map districts of her mind.

That same authorial compulsion to navigate and survey pervades the book, which is notable for its subject matter alone: a first-person investigation of “the schizophrenias,” as Wang describes the four overlapping classifications of the mental disorder listed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition, often shortened to DSM-5. (Wang was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, in 2013.) Wang approaches the work of writing about her mental illness as if she were reporting from a foreign place, returning to it diligently, pursuing dark corners as if to case the joint. She publishes email correspondences between herself and her physician, written in a period of psychosis. She considers her desire for motherhood through the lens of her time as a counselor at Camp Wish, a bipolar youth camp. She recalls scenes from her three involuntary hospitalizations, describing the trauma of those stays, as well as the slippery interviews on which those hospitalizations were based. Read more…

How Does a Person Lose Track of Their Diary?

All artwork by Sophie Johnson

Sophie Lucido Johnson| Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,226 words)

 

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‘There’s Virtually No Conversation In Chicago … About the Aftershocks of the Violence.’

Residents, activists, and friends and family members of victims of gun violence march down Michigan Avenue carrying nearly 800 wooden crosses bearing the names of people murdered in the city in 2016 on December 31, 2016 in Chicago. (Scott Olson / Getty)

Hope Reese | Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (3,002 words)

 

In recent years Chicago has had more homicides than any other city in America. From 1990-2010, roughly 14,000 people were killed there — more than the combined number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, giving a horrifying legitimacy to the city’s infamous nickname Chiraq. It’s not clear, exactly, why this is so — the rest of the country is experiencing a period of historically low crime. In fact, Chicago contributed nearly half of the country’s overall uptick in homicides in 2016.

Veteran reporter Alex Kotlowitz, author of the bestseller There Are No Children Here and producer of the award-winning documentary The Interrupters, has been chronicling the effects of violence on the city’s neighborhoods for decades. Kotlowitz, whose recent book, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago, presents the cumulative effects of violence on the city through 14 vignettes. “For reasons I don’t fully understand, we just seem to be in the place where we have this extraordinarily tragic [violence],” he tells me. “Anybody who tells you they found the answer is just lying to you. Because nobody really knows.”

The book documents the complicated relationships between victims and perpetrators, the nature of the killing — how it is often cyclical and retributive — the way that violence scars communities, and his awe at surviors’ resiliency. Read more…

‘Craft Is My Belief System. My Obligation To Writing Is Religious.’

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Lily Meyer | Longreads | March 2019 | 9 minutes (2,302 words)

 

Nathan Englander has been writing fiction about Jews in America for nearly as long as I’ve been a Jew in America. I stole my mother’s copy of his debut collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, as a nine-year-old, and was both enthralled and baffled by his stories of Orthodox identity and longing.

Since then, Englander has written a play, another story collection, and three novels, the most recent of which, kaddish.com, opens with a secular Jew named Larry who refuses to say daily Kaddish for his dead father. Saying Kaddish is, according to Jewish law, the eldest son’s duty, but Larry can’t bring himself to return to the synagogue he has left behind. Instead, he finds a solution on the then-new Internet: he’ll pay a rabbinical student in Jerusalem to take on his filial duty. Years later, Larry returns to Orthodox Judaism, reinventing himself as a yeshiva teacher named Reb Shuli. He’s happily married, and comfortable in his reclaimed community. The sole stain on his Jewish life is his failure to say Kaddish for his father. His guilt swells into an obsession, and soon, he’s off to Israel to track down the proprietor of kaddish.com and get back the birthright he e-signed away.

Englander tells Shuli’s story in the language Shuli knows best: The Yiddish-inflected, Hebrew-sprinkled English of religious American Jews. He writes with humor, pathos, and irrepressible life. I thought often of Grace Paley as I read kaddish.com, and of the Coen brothers’ movie A Serious Man, which, as it turns out, Englander loves. We spoke on the phone about the Coen brothers, Philip Roth’s secular funeral, and other questions of Jewish-American identity. Like my nine-year-old self, I was enthralled. Read more…

Namwali Serpell on Doing the Responsible Thing — Writing an Irresponsible Novel

Peg Skorpinski / Hogarth

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | March 2019 | 18 minutes (4,830 words)

Namwali Serpell’s first novel, The Old Drift, tells the story of several families living in Zambia, encompassing over a century of their interwoven lives. The novel takes its title from a region located near Victoria Falls (otherwise known as Mosi-o-Tunya, which translates to “The Smoke That Thunders”), which is also where the novel begins. Along the way, The Old Drift touches on many moments in history, from the Second World War to Zambia’s foray into space exploration.

But Serpell isn’t content to simply tell the story of a nation through several generations of its residents. Instead, her narrative extends into the near future, and each of its sections is paired with a short passage written by a strange collective voice — one which doesn’t seem to be human. It’s a bold narrative choice, but it’s one that pays off brilliantly at novel’s end.

Serpell’s bibliography covers a broad range of styles and territories, from the theoretical to the metafictional. Her first book, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, explored the works of writers like Tom McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Ian McEwan. She’s contributed the introduction to Penguin Classics’ edition of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novel Devil on the Cross. And her short story “Company,” published in the “Cover Stories” issue of McSweeney’s, reimagines a Samuel Beckett narrative along Afrofuturist lines — a process that Serpell described in one interview as “a Janelle Monaé cover of a Philip Glass song.” Read more…

Twitter Won’t Miss You: A Digital Detox Reading List (and Roadmap)

Follow the crowds to a world with less screen time. (Photo by davity dave via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories. 

Have you ever needed a break, but just not known from what? Everything seems fine…ish. Your job is OK, your friendships are all right, your health is decent, nothing dramatic to report. And yet, you’re stressed. Dissatisfied. Bored. Sometimes you even feel exhausted and overwhelmed. Maybe you should distract yourself by looking at Instagram. Maybe you should find someone with whom to argue on Twitter. Maybe you should see what your ex is up to on Snapchat.

Or maybe you should get the hell off social media for awhile.

At least, that’s the prescription issued by an increasingly vocal crowd of psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, writers, philosophers, performers, and general opinion-havers. The common term is “digital detox,” whereby an individual commits to a cessation of specific actions on one’s Internet-enabled devices for a finite period of time. One can go on this adventure with friends, family, or a likeminded group of strangers from, you guessed it, the internet.

I’ve been an enthusiastic and sometimes addicted social media user since approximately 2003. But after beginning my research for this column, I went on a digital detox of my own. It is small and manageable, and nothing so impressive as author Cal Newport’s suggested 30-day detox from all nonessential online functions. But it has improved my life already in measurable ways. Here are some writers whose approaches to their own vacations from the Matrix helped me shape mine.

1. “Unplugged: What I Learned By Logging Off and Reading 12 Books in a Week.” (Lois Beckett, The Guardian, December 2018)

Beckett nabbed what must’ve been the plum journalistic gig of the year: head to a tiny cabin in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and read. Books. Made of paper. “This was a perfect assignment,” she writes. “For journalists on many beats — including mine, which includes the far right and gun policy — it had been a year of escalating violence during which conspiracy theories had moved into the mainstream.” And off she went, blissfully unencumbered by wifi. She brought a stack critically acclaimed books purchased at different independent bookshops and a plan was to read 30 books in a week, a number that sounds patently insane to me. She read 12. I’m still impressed — and envious.

The ensuing story is littered with gentle shade, which I always appreciate, and she’s a damn good writer: “I was not going to finish all 30 books at any cost, skimming to the right section of the right chapter in order to say one smart thing — in the U.S., we call this skill a ‘liberal arts education’ — but instead wanted the books’ authors and their protagonists to collide and argue with each other, to give me some different understanding of what had happened in 2018.”

2. “#Unplug: Baratunde Thurston Left The Internet For 25 Days, And You Should, Too.” (Baratunde R. Thurston, Fast Company, June 2013)

I adore my longtime friend Baratunde, though perhaps not as much as my mother, who has met the man twice and still has a copy of his 2013 Fast Company cover story somewhere in her house. He’s a great human.

And now that we’ve established my utter lack of objectivity, let’s hear from his 2013 self: “I’m an author, consultant, speechifier, and cross-platform opiner on the digital life. My friends say I’m the most connected man in the world. And in 2012, I lived like a man running for president of the United States, planet Earth, and the Internet all at once.” That very accurate description is exactly why it was so interesting that Baratunde Rafiq Thurston, of all freaking people, did a digital detox.

At the time, I remember worrying that he might burn out or possibly just suddenly up and die due to lack of sleep, so it was clearly a good move. I can’t imagine replicating what he did (no email?!), but since he was self-employed with a personal assistant and has an incredible amount of willpower, he was able to pull it off. His nine-point digital detox preparation checklist is incredibly helpful, and I intend to use it the next time I do one. My favorite line? “She transmitted this data by writing down the names on a piece of paper.” And yes, he was happier and healthier by the end of the experience. To this day, he goes on regular social media vacations, and I believe he’d tell you his life is better for it.

3. “Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend On It.” (Cal Newport, New York Times, November 2016)

“I’m a millennial computer scientist who also writes books and runs a blog,” Newport writes. “Demographically speaking I should be a heavy social media user, but that is not the case. I’ve never had a social media account.” Newport lays out in plain, accessible language the notion that social media distracts from good work because it is designed to be addictive. It’s a notion with which I agree, based in no small part on my own lived experience; I have no doubt my writing output has suffered as I’ve devoted more and more time to social media. As Newport writes, “It diverts your time and attention away from producing work that matters and toward convincing the world that you matter.”

4. “Cal Newport on Why We’ll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes.” (Clay Skipper, GQ, January 2019)

Fast forward two and a half years. Newport, by now an in-demand speaker and author of two books — the latest is Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World — expands on his November 2016 Op-Ed. Newport is a reluctant self-help guru who would undoubtedly reject that label. In this interview (as in the one I heard with him on fellow PoB (Pal of Baratunde) Lewis Howes’s podcast “The School of Greatness”), Newport stresses that he doesn’t typically offer a program or prescription. However, his recommendation for a 30-day digital detox seems simple in concept and necessarily jarring to execute: one dispenses with all digital products that are unnecessary to one’s career and personal health. Check your work email and log into your bank app to ensure a direct deposit has gone through, but let Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts lie fallow for 30 days. Skipper is an able interviewer and Newport is a clear, experienced, and intelligent interviewee.

5. I Quit Social Media for 65 Weeks. This Is What I Learned. (Kareem Yasin, Healthline, February 2018)

Yasin interviews David Mohammadi, who left social media for over a year and loved the experience. A newly minted New Yorker, he abandoned the online pseudo-friendship industrial complex because he was worried he’d obsess over what was happening back in San Francisco. And he had good reason to suspect he’d be homesick — he’d tried the East Coast thing once, been endlessly captivated by his Bay Area friends’ Facebook updates, and ended up moving back to San Francisco. Years later, a more mature Mohammadi quit his job and decided to start a new career in New York with a clear mind unclouded by social media-induced FOMO. You likely won’t be surprised to hear his take: “The first week was hard. The second week was nice. And as I got closer to the end date, I just was like: ‘Wow. It feels great to be so present, and not just on my phone.’” But the benefits didn’t just extend to mental health — he made more money, too! Yasin writes, “Working as a boutique manager, [Mohammadi] noticed how his coworkers would constantly check their phones. Those two-minute breaks from the real world robbed them of opportunities to get more commissions — opportunities that would be theirs if they would just look up and notice the customers.”

* * *

Like you, probably, I have a personal Instagram account. Except it isn’t personal, really — with 14,200 followers, it is ostensibly a way to cultivate and grow an online brand based on me, myself, and I. I write essays and books; I do comedy shows; I lecture on mental health awareness at colleges; I pop up as a talking head in various capacities in various venues. Like you, probably, I want to be seen as an attractive person, so sometimes I use filters or put on more makeup than is absolutely necessary for a selfie. Like you, probably, I want to be seen as a capable person worthy of being hired, so I do my best to seem witty and fun but chill, man. Given that I want to write more for television and that a lot of my work falls under the category of “entertainment,” I have followed the conventional thinking in my industry, which boils down to “Always be selling (yourself).”

This thinking extends to my “personal” Twitter account (77,400 followers), despite my many qualms about the ethics of its overseers with regard to threats and harassment. It extended to my Facebook fan page, until I quit Facebook altogether because I don’t care what my least-favorite racist relative ate for breakfast — if I want to know what’s up with a boring person from high school, I’ll make private inquiries. When the current Russian government really loves something, I have to ask myself if I need that something in my life. (Note: I am aware that Facebook owns Instagram, and that I’m a hypocrite sometimes.)

Then there’s the Instagram account for my podcast (679 followers) and the Twitter account for my podcast (457 followers) and the Instagram account for my progressive lady-coat art project (26,200 followers). I don’t use Snapchat, because once I joined for 24 hours and my drunk friend sent me a dick pic framed by monogrammed his-and-hers towels in the master bathroom he shares with his girlfriend; I’m a Scorpio, and pseudoscience and common sense immediately told me the power of the Snap was too great for my personal constitution to handle. I also recently joined a few dating apps. And that led to more swiping, more clicking, more texting, more aggravation of writing-induced carpal tunnel issues. When an ex-NFL star asked me on what I’m sure would have been a super safe and not-gross date to his house at 3 a.m., I decided that Tinder was also too much for me.

At this point, and considering my sore wrists, the signals seemed to say, “SARA. TAKE SOME TIME OFF THE SOCIAL MEDIA.” I had 104,000 followers across social media, some of whom were double or triple followers and some of whom were robots, and while I loved each of them like my very own imaginary baby, Mommy needed a vacay.

First, I enabled the Screen Time function on my phone and discovered that I use it, on average, over seven hours a day. This horrifying fact led me to design the parameters of my moderate digital detox: I’d continue to use my email for work and social reasons. I would continue to use Twitter, but only to share my work or the work of a friend or charity. I would post a note announcing that I was taking an Instagram break until April 9, the day the second season of my podcast debuts, to give both a heads up to any former professional athletes that I wouldn’t be interacting with them there and to announce the premiere date. I would text when I felt like it, but leave my phone facing down when I wasn’t using it. I would remove Instagram from my phone, just as I’d done with Twitter months prior. At night and during my daily meditation practice, I would put the phone on airplane mode.

Following those simple rules, and only occasionally breaking them, I managed to reduce my phone time by 10 percent in the first week. I resumed the regular at-home yoga practice I’d attempted a month prior. I finished the outline of an hour-long TV drama pilot. I went on actual face-to-face dates with humans during daylight and appropriate evening hours. I visited with two friends. I got the “annual” physical I’d put off for two years. And I wrote this column.

While I intend to resume using Instagram on April 9, I will do as Cal Newport recommends: use social media like a professional, for specific purposes, and do not stray from said purposes. Twitter and Instagram will remain places for me to share my work and the work of friends and charities I admire. Sometimes, I will use these places to discover great writing, music, and more. Moving forward, I want to reduce my screen time by 10 percent each week until I average under four hours per day on my phone — and then I’ll try to reduce it even more.

I’m pleased with my progress. It may seem meager, but it’s a start. And I feel better already. So if you’ve considered quitting social media but have some qualms, do what I did: start small. Pop your head above the churning surface of our wild, untrammeled internet, and take a look around. Stay awhile. Your eyes will grow accustomed to real sunlight soon enough, and it’ll be easier to breathe. It’s pretty nice up here.

* * *

Sara Benincasa is a stand-up comedian, actress, college speaker on mental health awareness, and the author of Real Artists Have Day JobsDC TripGreat, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. She also wrote a very silly joke book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad. Recent roles include “Corporate” on Comedy Central, “Bill Nye Saves The World” on Netflix, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TVLand and critically-acclaimed short film “The Focus Group,” which she also wrote. She also hosts the podcast “Where Ya From?”

Editor: Michelle Weber

The Makeover Scene Gets a Makeover

Natalie Seery / Netflix, Allyson Riggs / Hulu, Richard Shotwell / Invision / AP

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,283 words)

There’s a thing my psychiatrist likes to say in response to anyone who hints at the idea that they might one day be cured of whatever it is that makes them who they are: Weave your parachute every day; don’t wait until you need to jump out of the plane. It’s a paraphrased quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn, widely recognized as the father of mindfulness in the clinical sphere (this involves the secular meditation you get in a hospital as opposed to a yoga studio, though it is originally adapted from Buddhism). The program he developed in the ’70s, mindfulness-based stress reduction, is used for everything from pain and depression to what I have, which is severe anxiety. It’s kind of hard to explain what the program looks like practically, but basically, it’s rooted in meditation that cultivates awareness of your thoughts and your body, which ultimately allows you to choose your actions more deliberately. To an extent. Mindfulness doesn’t exactly alter how you think — a lot of shitty thoughts are just kind of automatic — and it doesn’t modify your fundamental personality. But it gives you a modicum of choice.

I’ve been doing this for five years and I will have to keep doing it until I’m dead. I’m not jazzed about it either. The point — and the point of that parachute quote — is that this is an ongoing, lifelong thing. It does not take three hours, it does not take a week. Those units of time may sound arbitrary but they refer to three recent examples of self-actualization presented as a switch, as something you can virtually just decide. Most notably, Shrill, the Hulu series adapted from Lindy West’s Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, in which Aidy Bryant plays a fat pushover who in six 30-minute episodes learns to stand up for herself. But also After Life, Ricky Gervais’s Netflix series — also made up of six 30-minute episodes — in which a grieving widower with no filter learns how to be happy again. And Queer Eye, the reboot that just returned to Netflix for a third season, which follows eight people learning how to love themselves … inside of a week. Read more…

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People take a selfie in the Montrose neighborhood on August 25, 2018, in Houston, Texas. (Loren Elliott/Getty Images)

Bryan Washington | A short story from the collection Lot | Riverhead Books | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,120 words)

 
1.

It started how you’d think, with this whiteboy throwing up in an alley. I’d pulled a job at a taqueria dumping pig guts out back. The cooks gave me grunt work, the way they do when you’re starting out, like when my father had Javi and me pinching the shells off shrimp back in the restaurant as kids. It didn’t matter that I’d been fixing mole in Ma’s kitchen for years; I was short on money.

My managers looked like gauchos. Porno mustaches, bloated frames. They read my name and they saw my face and they pointed to the dishes. One of them told me I looked like a pinche negrito, y probablemente ni siquiera hablaba español, and I wanted to snatch his ears off but then I’d be out of a check.

So I should’ve left the whiteboy outside alone. I had enough on my plate.

But I stayed. Watched him heave. When he finished I came back with a glass of water.

He took me home. Dude had these little hairs climbing his belly. His eyes got wide at how furry my legs are. When we finished he gulped at the air in the room, he asked for my name as we were sliding down the futon, and when he couldn’t pronounce it the whiteboy gave me a new one. Read more…

How the Shock Jock Became the Outrage Jock

Ben Hider / Invision / AP, Jeff Chiu / AP, Charles Dharapak / AP

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,111 words)

In the past, the bow tie seemed to hold him together, kind of. Tucker Carlson had always been as red-faced and obstreperous as so many other conservative pundits, but he had never been known to be “cunty” or “faggot”-level offensive. Still, it wasn’t much of a shock earlier this week when progressive watchdog Media Matters unearthed him spouting slurs like that — a couple of racist remarks rounded out the misogyny and homophobia — during a series of appearances on Bubba the Love Sponge Clem’s radio show between 2006 and 2011. From Monday to Tuesday, after the first recordings surfaced, Tucker Carlson Tonight hemorrhaged almost half its advertisers.

That bow tie had been a flourish of propriety: a strip of cloth separating him from a loudmouth like Howard Stern, the “shock jock” who looks and acts like a dollar store rock star, grabbing his crotch for whoever will listen. But he dropped it the year he appeared on that radio show. It was Stern who hired Bubba the Love Sponge Clem (yes, that’s his legal name) in the mid-2000s to host a show on his second satellite radio channel, and it was on that show that Carlson crossed the line. That was where the shock jock and the political commentator proved that they were one and the same — the former played off conservatism, the latter played it up, but both relied on its foundation. “Well, you’re talking about God and illegals,” Carlson told Clem. “I thought we were just going to be talking about blow jobs.”

But what’s the difference, really? Blow jobs were once used for shock value. Now it’s “illegals.” The punch line being that neither one of them is transgressive in the end.

* * *

No one used the words shock jock for Joe Pyne, the host of It’s Your Nickel (that’s a reference to pay phones, kids, and I’m including myself here) who pioneered in-your-face talk radio in the ’50s and went on to create TV’s The Joe Pyne Show, which sometimes devolved into actual physical altercations between him and guest. No one really knew what to make of him. His unconventional style — dressed-up to dress down “pinkos” and “women’s libbers” and riff on, rather than read, reports — was neither news nor entertainment. It seemed to be best described (well, The New York Times and Time both did anyway) as an “electronic peepshow.” The personality-free press of the time considered Walter Cronkite the most trusted man in America and Johnny Carson the funniest, but Pyne, with his syndicated show on more than 200 radio outlets, was the most Machiavellian. “When it comes to manipulating media,” Icons of Talk author Donna Halper told Smithsonian Magazine, “he was the father of them all.”

Pyne briefly descended from his soapbox in the mid-’60s — for a week’s “vacation” — after bringing a gun to his show during the Watts riots, suggesting the world wasn’t quite yet ready for his kind of conservative appeal. It took until the mid-’80s, when the FCC was no longer so hard-assed and political correctness was all the rage, for Howard Stern to turn the shock jock into a thing. The idea was that PC America was muting real America, and personalities like his were there to liberate our ids … usually on the way to work. “They were pushing the limits of what you could hear on the public airwaves,” TALKERS Magazine publisher Michael Harrison told Thrillist of mavericks like Pyne and Don Imus, who set the stage for Stern. “That was the key to the whole thing: that it was on the ‘sacred public airwaves.’”

Full disclosure: I have always hated Howard Stern. His banality offends me: “The closest I came to making love to a black woman was I masturbated to a picture of Aunt Jemima on a pancake box” — that’s the kind of joke he makes. It’s the sort of quip that leaves a dumb bro stuck in 1992 in stitches. To be offensive your words have to have power, and his … don’t. He swears a lot and cajoles his guests into talking about fucking and snorting and it’s all very Free Speech, Motherfuckers! He can be sexist and racist and classist, because, hey! He’s sexist about men too! He’s racist to everyone! He drags every class!

Sorry, I just fell asleep.

The rebellion is a pose, because at the heart of Stern and all the other shock jocks is conservatism — 2.1 kids, strong moral fiber. They can joke about fucking and inhaling, because they ostensibly aren’t doing either. So what positions itself against PC America, in fact, at its core, feeds into it — the conservatism is the rebellion. Knowing that, you can see how Don Imus calling the members of Rutgers’ women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos” can happen as late as 2007 on his radio show Imus in the Morning (he was fired by CBS and NBC, then hired by ABC). As David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker 10 years before Imus’s offense, personalities like Stern and Mancow Muller and Opie and Anthony appeal to the “audience that feels put upon by a new set of rules — sexual harassment guidelines, the taboo against certain kinds of speech — and wants release, if only in the privacy of the drive to work.”

The audience meaning white heterosexual men. The shock jock industry itself is predominantly white men (Stern’s foil, Robin Quivers, is a black woman, but she has never been the star attraction). Which is not to say that women can’t be as “offensive,” it’s just that the people in charge of hiring them would prefer them to be barefoot and pregnant. There are shockingly few exceptions. Wendy Williams, who rode the wave of ’90s hip-hop and shamelessly confronted celebrities like Whitney Houston with tabloid gossip (she also had a bad habit of trying to out rappers) was christened by New York magazine in 2005 as the “shock jockette.” She was “the black Howard Stern” right down to the middle-class moralism. Other than Williams, the female media personalities who cause offense — Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham — tend toward conservative commentary, presumably because the men on the top floor think they will be less likely to break a nail in those environs. “The complaints of Western feminists look like petty self-absorption when you line them up against human rights abuses in Third World military dictatorships,” is a thing Ingraham came up with — a misogynistic comment cloaked in doublespeak.

This genre of radio personality was dubbed by my colleague Ethan Chiel as the “outrage jock,” the political version of a culture and entertainment-aligned predecessor, who arose in the late 1980s after the FCC regulations on political talk became less clear. This is where a bow tie comes in handy. The outrage jocks market themselves as transgressive, but instead of fighting conservative America, they uphold it, a stance they brand subversive in a sea of progressive liberal media. Rush Limbaugh, who has the most popular talk radio show in America — 15.5 million listeners, according to Talk Magazine — was dubbed by National Review as the “Leader of the Opposition” back in the ’90s. “Rush took radio at a time when the norm was basically NPR. He comes into that church and blows it up,” radio host John Ziegler told The Washington Post in 2015. “Our presidential politics have become a kind of church. The media says, ‘You’re not allowed to say this, or this, or that, because we’re in church.’ People are sick of that.”

So: Stern 2.0, except instead of shouting about pussy, Limbaugh — not to mention Glenn Beck and Michael Savage — shouts about policy. You may remember him calling women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke a “slut” in 2012 for advocating for contraceptive insurance coverage. “She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception,” said the man who has been married four times. “She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.”

Limbaugh needs a brushup on his sex work nomenclature, among other things. But if you want to talk about pimp: Janet Jackson’s nipple ultimately killed the shock jock. In case you aren’t old, it happened during a performance of “Rock Your Body” at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show in 2004, when Justin Timberlake tore off the right cup of Jackson’s bustier, exposing her breast. (Per Jackson, the red bra underneath the rubber was supposed to stay behind, but came away accidentally.) In response, more than 500,000 complaints, all of them from people presumably with nipples of their own, were reportedly lodged with the FCC. President Bush responded two years later by signing the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which raised the penalty for broadcasting “indecency” tenfold. With that, Howard Stern fucked off to satellite radio and the rest of the shock jocks kind of followed suit. Tucker Carlson was what was left behind.

* * *

“Does she have a good body? No. Does she have a fat ass? Absolutely.” Tucker Carlson did not say that. That was Donald Trump in 2013 talking to Howard Stern about a pregnant Kim Kardashian in a radio show appearance that reemerged during his election campaign. On the same show, across almost two decades, the future president also agreed that his daughter was “a piece of ass” and dismissed flat-chested women and women over 35 (thank God). For all his work to divide the nation, Trump had a big hand in bringing shock and outrage jocks together, dissolving any sort of wall (!) between them. “If the political class is appalled by the notion that anything from the morass of ’90s shock-jock radio could become part of a presidential race,” wrote Virginia Heffernan in Politico in 2016, “it may be just as surprising to Stern’s fans, who proudly embraced the outsider-ness of a guy who couldn’t seem further from inside-the-Beltway political chatter.” TALKERS’s Harrison has called Trump “the first shock-politician.”

By the time Trump entered politics, shock jocks were no longer defining the culture and conservative commentators were filling the vacuum. They entered the mainstream on networks like Fox and the intellectual dark web via Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin. “The shock jocks weren’t defeated,” wrote Dan Jackson at Thrillist. “They went viral.” This is where Tucker Carlson fits in. He called his resurfaced xenophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic comments from Bubba the Love Sponge’s show (he described women as “extremely primitive,” supported child rapist Warren Jeffs, and compared the behavior of Muslims to animals) “naughty,” then equated contrition with betrayal. “We’ve always apologized when we’re wrong and will continue to do that,” he said on Tucker Carlson Tonight Monday. “That’s what decent people do; they apologize. But we will never bow to the mob.”

Almost 70 years after the first shock jock hit the air, Carlson was toeing the same party line as his predecessors. “They claim that they’re just entertainers and yet they deliver this toxic mix of pseudo journalism, misinformation, hate-filled speech, jokes,” Rory O’Connor, author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio, told The Guardian in 2009. “It’s all bound together so when it’s convenient for them to be entertainers they say, hey, it’s all just a joke. But when it’s not, they say they’re giving you information that you need.” Carlson’s comments were only shocking because they veered so sharply away from Beltway politics; with his regressive approach no longer couched in policy, they revealed him for the person he is. And even though advertisers have pulled out of his program, the notion that he could disappear like Stern is one from another time — conservatism is the status quo and there’s always room for it now, particularly when it masquerades as information rather than entertainment.

After Megyn Kelly left Fox, Tucker Carlson took her spot, and if Carlson were removed, a new version of him would sprout in his place. This whack-a-mole quality to outrage jocks extends, more troublingly, to their politics — if they are not outraged about one thing, they will immediately find another. They are as adaptive as comedians like Stern, use facts as props to play journalists like Cronkite, and influence voting and policy just as seriously. As Jon Stewart scolded Carlson and his cohost in 2004 on the CNN show Crossfire: “You’re doing theater, when you should be doing debate.” And without the FCC to shut them down for good, or at least out them as entertainers, the only hope is that their audience will realize that the most transgressive thing to do is to stop listening.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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White House Communications Director and Deputy Chief of Staff Bill Shine, who resigned as co-president of Fox News in 2017. (Ron Sachs-Pool/Getty Images)

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