Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 56

The Mellow Sounds and Romantic Mood of the French Subjunctive

@tanehisi Only a mood in English, but it is used with dreams, doubts, wants and possibilties. It's why ppl say "if I were" instead of "was."

— Erin (Q.) Hinson (@myriare) March 1, 2013

To help with understanding the subjunctive, my French instructor has started giving me these "Subjonctif ou Indicatif" quizzes. The subjunctive is the terror of French students. You can go through any of my French posts and find people generally lamenting their ability to master the subjunctive. Part of the problem is that the subjunctive mood very much seems like a "mood." In other words, as much as it carries literal information, it seems like the subjunctive also emotes. Likely other moods also emote information (hence the point in calling them moods)

As someone who began his career in poetry, and is constantly telling his kids that language must carry both emotional and literal information, I love the subjunctive. It's like this dark, mysterious, achingly beautiful stranger. Which is different from saying I've mastered or I totally understand it. Mastery isn't the point. This is language study and study--in and of itself--is rewarding.

Part of the problem is that we think of foreign language as something to be conquered, or completed . We grade people in foreign language classes. The net is filled with sites that make claims like "Speak Fluent In French In Three Months!!!!" Everyone--including me--wants to know how long it will take to be fluent. But yesterday my French instructor told me there is no fluency, even she isn't "fluent." This is a person who speaks beautiful, beautiful French. Her point isn't that there is no literal "fluency" but that this isn't the best way to think about language study.

So these "Subjonctif ou Indicatif" quizzes are really about "study." They are about learning how the language feels. This isn't to say there aren't rules--there are. But the rules aren't enough. You have to try to understand the intent of the speaker, and then pick a form that best matches that. This is really just the essence of writing. It's not just matching words to thoughts, but finding words and ordering them in such a way so that they carry the full range, the full body and all the color of thoughts. "Subjonctif ou Indicatif" is basically what I try to do every day. I am amazed, and depressed, that it took me this long to get into foreign language.

I Didn't Think About Being Ripped Off, I Thought About Whipping Ass

As I said in comments on Monday, I think Eva14 pretty much offers up the most trenchant critique of The Atlantic not paying for freelance work:

...the company has been in the news as posting growing profits as a result of its web set-up. I don't generally applaud corporations that expand their profitability by shifting from low-paid workers to unpaid workers, do you?

I don't know how much of a shift there's been, but that's beside the main point. The Atlantic is now profitable, and we have been very happy to tell other media outlets that this is the case. It strikes me as fair to then ask by what means that profit has been attained. I've said in comments that "work for free" content doesn't actually drive traffic. But clearly it does something, because otherwise we would not use it. The spectacle of a major magazine achieving its profitability, in any part, by not paying freelancers for work on the Internet should concern its readers.

Let us take this out of the theoretical. I am implicated in this. As I've said before, I've asked several people over the years to guest-blog here. The work that they put in generally took longer than the work Thayer was asked to put in. I never once offered to pay them. I just went through my e-mails to check, and it never even came up.

They were not all academics with institutional support, a frequent argument for not paying writers. Some of them were freelancers like my friend Brendan Koerner, or artists like my buddy Neil Drumming. Others were commenters here Breakerbaker or Andy Hall. And they worked for free, turning out excellent work. Yes, they were commentators, not shoe-leather reporters: "reporting" seems to have talismanic effect over the consciousness. But labor is labor. If you have a problem with Thayer not being offered monetary payment for his labor , then you should have a problem with every guest post you've ever seen on this blog.

And having discovered that you have a problem, you should think about how we might make things better. I would strongly urge you against the idea of nostalgia. It is not at all clear to me that the past was better. First, there are all kinds of ways I can make you work for free. I can sign you up to a contract for very little money (say ten cents a word) and then tell you I won't pay until the month after publication. I can then "forget" to send your check and make it so you won't be paid until you spend a great many hours effectively as a bill collector. You will then have to decide what is worth more to you--the three or four hundred dollars I owe you, or the time you will spend chasing me to get it. And this is to say nothing of reimbursing you for expenses.

What I just described is very real situation of magazines in the past. There were (and are) magazines that existed seemingly wholly by not paying writers. And it's not always the case that the writers regard those magazines as vampires. When I freelanced for The Washington Monthly, I was told by an editor that checks were not cut unless the writer specifically called for his or her money. The thinking was that the Monthly was fighting the good fight, and many of the people writing for them weren't actually doing it for the money. At the time, that was generally true. The Monthly was one of the few outlets doing really good reported opinion journalism. And it was always struggling to stay afloat. As it happened, I needed whatever checks I could get. But I never held their payment policies against them.

That was at a time when I was still completely a creature of print, and the Monthly was the only place that really allowed me to do what The Atlantic allows me to do now. When my friend Prince Jones was killed, it was the Monthly that gave me space to take a hard, reported look at the police department. It was the Monthly that gave me its cover to consider the decline of Louis Farrakhan as a political force. The New Republic would not have done that. No other magazine I pitched was at all interested in anything about Farrakhan, beyond his anti-Semitism. They just did not care.

Which is to say something more--they did not care about the political and cultural imagination of black people. They didn't care not because they were evil or scheming to keep black people out. They didn't care because they could not afford to care, or had decided they could afford not to. Magazine editors who agree to pay agree to invest in your thoughts and conception--both when those thoughts and conceptions are rooted in reporting and when they are not. When you bring them stories from a world they do not know, and when you are a writer in your 20s they do not know, there's very little upside in their investing in you or your ideas.

Theoretically, paying people to write is not just a moral good but a service to your publication. A budget forces editors to think hard about what they publish, since every article is an investment of resources. But in the crush of deadlines and work, there is great pressure to simply go back to the well of those you know can deliver. When I came into this business, those who could deliver were almost always white--or those who got the chance to show that they could.

The vast, vast majority of magazine editors then were white. Before I placed my Bill Cosby story here, it was rejected by a major magazine. The magazine editor told me that the top editor would only want the piece if it was "a big-picture, intellectual take by someone like Skip Gates."

This note was written by someone who was actually advocating on my behalf. The person was not filled with animus, or a desire to prevent me from writing for the publication. The editor's job was to convince the top editor to invest in me and my vision of Bill Cosby. The top editor was only willing to do that if the investment was made in someone the magazine knew--such as Henry Louis Gates. (You may also see in this why I don't want to be anyone HNIC. Ever. I don't ever want my name raised in any conversation like that.)

Two things helped me break through. The first, being vouched for by someone in a position of power who had a relationship with someone else in a position of power. I met that person when costs of investment were low: I worked for David Carr at a rate of $100 dollars a week and ten cents a word for anything I published. The first summer I worked for him, I made $1700. I did not consider myself underpaid. This was 1996. The New Republic had just told the world that black people had evolved to be stupid, and it seemed like every week they were saying something just as racist. I was at Howard University, surrounded by a community of brilliant black people, cut off from the Ivies. None of them had the contacts or the resources to reply. They just had to take it. I can't tell you how much that angered me. I was made in that moment. And when I got my first break in writing, I didn't think about being ripped off. I thought about whipping ass. I haven't changed.

The second thing was the destruction of the monopoly on publication by gate-keepers. When Yglesias wrote me, I didn't care a whit about payment. I cared about a world wherein writers wrote stories like this, and no black people were around to answer. Matt didn't have to ask himself whether I was worth investing in. He just had to like what I did. What we call "paying for work" in magazines is certainly that. But for those of us trying to break in, it also meant a system of soliciting sponsorship rooted in a finite budget. In order for me to fight with people, some white male had to believe enough to put up funds. Matt didn't have to put up any funds. And now everyone got to fight. Some of the writers I most admire--Jamelle Bouie, Adam Serwer, Gene Demby--advanced themselves, in part, by writing for free in the form of blogging. These people are warriors. And fifteen years ago--under the system that is so lustily praised--they would not have existed.

When I came to The Atlantic, I saw guest-posting as an opportunity, not just for black writers but for anyone who had something to say and had found themselves foiled by the sponsorship system. They too deserved to fight.

I am not saying that this is a perfect, or even ideal, system. On the contrary, an ideal system would be one in which people's labor was paid for--regardless of color, regardless of whether they are writing "commentary" or "reporting," regardless of whether they are established or not. It would be paid for because their ideas deserve to be heard.

What I am asking you to do is to avoid an appeal to a more noble past. I lived there. It wasn't noble. It was fucked up. Like right now is fucked up. When you ask me to show solidarity with writers who aren't being paid, you should also ask yourself what solidarity white magazine writers have shown over the years with struggling black writers who could not break in. You are appalled that Nate Thayer was once offered $125,000 to write for The Atlantic, and was then offered nothing. Fair enough Are you equally appalled that there were virtually no black writers who could have gotten the same deal?

I Didn't Think About Being Ripped Off, I Thought About Whipping Ass

As I said in comments on Monday, I think Eva14 pretty much offers up the most trenchant critique of The Atlantic not paying for freelance work:

...the company has been in the news as posting growing profits as a result of its web set-up. I don't generally applaud corporations that expand their profitability by shifting from low-paid workers to unpaid workers, do you?

I don't know how much of a shift there's been, but that's beside the main point. The Atlantic is now profitable, and we have been very happy to tell other media outlets that this is the case. It strikes me as fair to then ask by what means that profit has been attained. I've said in comments that "work for free" content doesn't actually drive traffic. But clearly it does something, because otherwise we would not use it. The spectacle of a major magazine achieving its profitability, in any part, by not paying freelancers for work on the Internet should concern its readers.

Let us take this out of the theoretical. I am implicated in this. As I've said before, I've asked several people over the years to guest-blog here. The work that they put in generally took longer than the work Thayer was asked to put in. I never once offered to pay them. I just went through my emails to check, and it never even came up.

They were not all academics with institutional support, a frequent argument for not paying writers. Some of them were freelancers like my friend Brendan Koerner, or artists like my buddy Neil Drumming. Others were commenters here, Breakerbaker or Andy Hall. And they worked for free, turning out excellent work. Yes, they were commentators, not shoe-leather reporters: "reporting" seems to have talismanic effect over the consciousness. But labor is labor. If you have a problem with Thayer not being offered monetary payment for his labor, then you should have a problem with every guest post you've ever seen on this blog.

And having discovered that you have a problem, you should think about how we might make things better. I would strongly urge you against the idea of nostalgia. It is not at all clear to me that the past was better. First, there are all kinds of ways I can make you work for free. I can sign you up to a contract for very little money (say ten cents a word) and then tell you I won't pay until the month after publication. I can then "forget" to send your check and make it so you won't be paid until you spend a great many hours effectively as a bill collector. You will then have to decide what is worth more to you -- the three or four hundred dollars I owe you, or the time you will spend chasing me to get it. And this is to say nothing of reimbursing you for expenses.

What I just described is very real situation of magazines in the past. There were (and are) magazines that existed seemingly wholly by not paying writers. And it's not always the case that the writers regard those magazines as vampires. When I freelanced for the Washington Monthly, I was told by an editor that checks were not cut unless the writer specifically called for his or her money. The thinking was that the Monthly was fighting the good fight, and many of the people writing for them weren't actually doing it for the money. At the time, that was generally true. The Monthly was one of the few outlets doing really good reported opinion journalism. And it was always struggling to stay afloat. As it happened, I needed whatever checks I could get. But I never held their payment policies against them.

That was at a time when I was still completely a creature of print, and the Monthly was the only place that really allowed me to do what The Atlantic allows me to do now. When my friend Prince Jones was killed, it was the Monthly that gave me space to take a hard, reported look at the police department. It was the Monthly that gave me its cover to consider the decline of Louis Farrakhan as a political force. The New Republic would not have done that. No other magazine I pitched was at all interested in anything about Farrakhan, beyond his anti-Semitism. They just did not care.

Which is to say something more -- they did not care about the political and cultural imagination of black people. They didn't care not because they were evil or scheming to keep black people out. They didn't care because they could not afford to care, or had decided they could afford not to. Magazine editors who agree to pay agree to invest in your thoughts and conception -- both when those thoughts and conceptions are rooted in reporting, and when they are not. When you bring them stories from a world they do not know, and when you are a writer in your 20s they do not know, there's very little upside in their investing in you or your ideas.

Theoretically, paying people to write is not just a moral good but a service to your publication. A budget forces editors to think hard about what they publish, since every article is an investment of resources. But in the crush of deadlines and work, there is great pressure to simply go back to the well of those you know can deliver. When I came into this business, those who could deliver were almost always white -- or those who got the chance to show that they could.

The vast, vast majority of magazine editors then were white. Before I placed my Bill Cosby story here, it was rejected by a major magazine. The magazine editor told me that the top editor would only want the piece if it was "a big-picture, intellectual take by someone like Skip Gates."

This note was written by someone who was actually advocating on my behalf. The person was not filled with animus, or a desire to prevent me from writing for the publication. The editor's job was to convince the top editor to invest in me and my vision of Bill Cosby. The top editor was only willing to do that if the investment was made in someone the magazine knew -- such as Henry Louis Gates. (You may also see in this why I don't want to be anyone's HNIC. Ever. I don't ever want my name raised in any conversation like that.)

Two things helped me break through. The first, being vouched for by someone in a position of power who had a relationship with someone else in a position of power. I met that person when costs of investment were low: I worked for David Carr at a rate of $100 dollars a week and ten cents a word for anything I published. The first summer I worked for him, I made $1,700. I did not consider myself underpaid. This was 1996. The New Republic had just told the world that black people had evolved to be stupid, and it seemed like every week they were saying something just as racist. I was at Howard University, surrounded by a community of brilliant black people, cut off from the Ivies. None of them had the contacts or the resources to reply. They just had to take it. I can't tell you how much that angered me. I was made in that moment. And when I got my first break in writing, I didn't think about being ripped off. I thought about whipping ass. I haven't changed.

The second thing was the destruction of the monopoly on publication by gate-keepers. When Yglesias wrote me, I didn't care a whit about payment. I cared about a world wherein writers wrote stories like this, and no black people were around to answer. Matt didn't have to ask himself whether I was worth investing in. He just had to like what I did. What we call "paying for work" in magazines is certainly that. But for those of us trying to break in, it also meant a system of soliciting sponsorship rooted in a finite budget. In order for me to fight with people, some white male had to believe enough to put up funds. Matt didn't have to put up any funds. And now everyone got to fight. Some of the writers I most admire -- Jamelle Bouie, Adam Serwer, Gene Demby -- advanced themselves, in part, by writing for free in the form of blogging. These people are warriors. And fifteen years ago -- under the system that is so lustily praised -- they would not have existed.

When I came to The Atlantic, I saw guest-posting as an opportunity, not just for black writers but for anyone who had something to say and had found themselves foiled by the sponsorship system. They too deserved to fight.

I am not saying that this is a perfect, or even ideal, system. On the contrary, an ideal system would be one in which people's labor was paid for -- regardless of color, regardless of whether they are writing "commentary" or "reporting," regardless of whether they are established or not. It would be paid for because their ideas deserve to be heard.

What I am asking you to do is to avoid an appeal to a more noble past. I lived there. It wasn't noble. It was fucked up. Like right now is fucked up. When you ask me to show solidarity with writers who aren't being paid, you should also ask yourself what solidarity white magazine writers have shown over the years with struggling black writers who could not break in. You are appalled that Nate Thayer was once offered $125,000 to write for The Atlantic, and was then offered nothing. Fair enough. Are you equally appalled that there were virtually no black writers who could have gotten the same deal?

Dick Cheney's Stenographers

Hank Stuever at The Washington Post looks at the new documentary The World According to Dick Cheney, and finds it wanting:

The film, fresh from Sundance and having its television premiere Friday night on Showtime, is a sturdy but ultimately stifled exercise in the most polite methods of interrogation -- to which its subject is entirely immovable and not prepared to surrender anything, even a smile. The lone artistic move in "The World According to Dick Cheney" is to hire actor Dennis Haysbert as narrator -- the voice of Allstate insurance, presently, but, more important, the fictional president of the earliest seasons of Fox's "24," a show that absorbed some of our culture's excess panic attacks about counterterrorism, torture and general millennial doom. Here, Haysbert's voice is a nostalgic touch in a film that badly needs any help it can get to keep the viewer engaged.

I don't know that Dick Cheney has had a rough interview since leaving office. Reporters have mostly been awed by the spectacle of Cheney attacking Obama, and have given him the mic. At the same time I am sure Cheney has been fairly smart about selecting who he will talk to and who he will not. In fairness, I should note The Post's series Angler was hard-hitting, high-level journalism.

'You Know Nothing of My Work'

The most educational thing about coming to MIT has been this--my first real, long-term exposure to  a large community of Asians and Asian-Americans. It hasn't so much changed anything about my thinking, so much as it's reinforced that which already thought. I was already skeptical of  broad statements about groups which comprise a relatively large share of the human population. 
But having members of that group regularly in your face makes this more than theory. It moves it from "intellectual truth" to "core truth"--so much so that you stop even considering them as a "group."  This is not about color-blindness. It's not an assertion of who "they" are, but a statement about who "you" are. You may well know that humans are the same. But this truth often lives in brain. It is a beautiful thing when it migrates to the bone. 
Last Monday we discussed David Brooks' column "The Learning Virtues" in my class. The column purports to contrast "Asian" approaches to education with "Western" approaches. At various points "Chinese" is traded in for "Asian" and "American" for "Western." My essay classes have all been majority Asian and Asian-American. This made for a Marshall Mcluhan-like spectacle. The idea that "there is no such concept" for "nerd" in Chinese language and culture made me suspicious. But now I was faced with Chinese (and Taiwanese-American) students in the class who literally laughed at the idea. 
I think this is argument for "diversity" at our education institutions. Humanism in theory isn't enough. You need to be confronted with actual humans to really feel it. It has become increasingly clear to me that I am not a member of any "black race." That there is no such thing. I am, very much, a black person. This describes my history, my culture, my dialect, my community, my family, my collective experience with America. But there is nothing in my bones that makes me more like other "black persons" than like anyone else. 
Perhaps this seems basic and elementary. But somehow in seeing more of the world--in being around people of another "race"--I've begun to really feel the absurdity of it all. 

'You Know Nothing Of My Work'

The most educational thing about coming to MIT has been this--my first real, long-term exposure to  a large community of Asians and Asian-Americans. It hasn't so much changed anything about my thinking, so much as it's reinforced that which already though. I was already skeptical of  broad statements about groups which comprise a relatively large share of the human population. 
But having members of that group regularly in your face makes this more than theory. It moves it from "intellectual truth" to "core truth"--so much so that you stop even considering them as a "group."  This is not about color-blindness. It's not an assertion of who "they" are, but a statement about who "you" are. You may well know that humans are the same. But this truth often lives in brain. It is a beautiful thing when it migrates to the bone. 
Last Monday we discussed David Brooks' column "The Learning Virtues" in my class. The column purports to contrast "Asian" approaches to education with "Western" approaches. At various points "Chinese" is traded in for "Asian" and "American" for "Western." My essay classes have all been majority Asian and Asian-American. This made for a Marshall Mcluhan-like spectacle. The idea that "there is no such concept" for "nerd" in Chinese language and culture made me suspicious. But now I was faced with Chinese (and Taiwanese-American) students in the class who literally laughed at the idea. 
I think this is argument for "diversity" at our education institutions. Humanism in theory isn't enough. You need to be confronted with actual humans to really feel it. It has become increasingly clear to me that I am not a member of any "black race." That there is no such thing. I am, very much, a black person. This describes my history, my culture, my dialect, my community, my family, my collective experience with America. But there is nothing in my bones that makes me more like other "black persons" than like anyone else. 
Perhaps this seems basic and elementary. But somehow in seeing more of the world--in being around people of another "race"--I've begun to really feel the absurdity of it all. 

I Didn't Think About Being Ripped Off, I Thought About Whipping Ass

As I said in comments on Monday, I think Eva14 pretty much offers up the most trenchant critique of The Atlantic not paying for freelance work:

...the company has been in the news as posting growing profits as a result of its web set-up. I don't generally applaud corporations that expand their profitability by shifting from low-paid workers to unpaid workers, do you?

I don't know how much of a shift there's been, but that's beside the main point. The Atlantic is now profitable, and we have been very happy to tell other media outlets that this is the case. It strikes me as fair to then ask by what means that profit has been attained. I've said in comments that "work for free" content doesn't actually drive traffic. But clearly it does something, because otherwise we would not use it. The spectacle of a major magazine achieving its profitability, in any part, by not paying freelancers for work on the Internet should concern its readers.

Let us take this out of the theoretical. I am implicated in this. As I've said before, I've asked several people over the years to guest-blog here. The work that they put in generally took longer than the work Thayer was asked to put in. I never once offered to pay them. I just went through my e-mails to check, and it never even came up.

They were not all academics with institutional support, a frequent argument for not paying writers. Some of them were freelancers like my friend Brendan Koerner, or artists like my buddy Neil Drumming. Others were commenters here Breakerbaker or Andy Hall. And they worked for free, turning out excellent work. Yes, they were commentators, not shoe-leather reporters: "reporting" seems to have talismanic effect over the consciousness. But labor is labor. If you have a problem with Thayer not being offered monetary payment for his labor , then you should have a problem with every guest post you've ever seen on this blog.

And having discovered that you have a problem, you should think about how we might make things better. I would strongly urge you against the idea of nostalgia. It is not at all clear to me that the past was better. First, there are all kinds of ways I can make you work for free. I can sign you up to a contract for very little money (say ten cents a word) and then tell you I won't pay until the month after publication. I can then "forget" to send your check and make it so you won't be paid until you spend a great many hours effectively as a bill collector. You will then have to decide what is worth more to you--the three or four hundred dollars I owe you, or the time you will spend chasing me to get it. And this is to say nothing of reimbursing you for expenses.

What I just described is very real situation of magazines in the past. There were (and are) magazines that existed seemingly wholly by not paying writers. And it's not always the case that the writers regard those magazines as vampires. When I freelanced for The Washington Monthly, I was told by an editor that checks were not cut unless the writer specifically called for his or her money. The thinking was that the Monthly was fighting the good fight, and many of the people writing for them weren't actually doing it for the money. At the time, that was generally true. The Monthly was one of the few outlets doing really good reported opinion journalism. And it was always struggling to stay afloat. As it happened, I needed whatever checks I could get. But I never held their payment policies against them.

That was at a time when I was still completely a creature of print, and the Monthly was the only place that really allowed me to do what The Atlantic allows me to do now. When my friend Prince Jones was killed, it was the Monthly that gave me space to take a hard, reported look at the police department. It was the Monthly that gave me its cover to consider the decline of Louis Farrakhan as a political force. The New Republic would not have done that. No other magazine I pitched was at all interested in anything about Farrakhan, beyond his anti-Semitism. They just did not care.

Which is to say something more--they did not care about the political and cultural imagination of black people. They didn't care not because they were evil or scheming to keep black people out. They didn't care because they could not afford to care, or had decided they could afford not to. Magazine editors who agree to pay agree to invest in your thoughts and conception--both when those thoughts and conceptions are rooted in reporting and when they are not. When you bring them stories from a world they do not know, and when you are a writer in your 20s they do not know, there's very little upside in their investing in you or your ideas.

Theoretically, paying people to write is not just a moral good but a service to your publication. A budget forces editors to think hard about what they publish, since every article is an investment of resources. But in the crush of deadlines and work, there is great pressure to simply go back to the well of those you know can deliver. When I came into this business, those who could deliver were almost always white--or those who got the chance to show that they could.

The vast, vast majority of magazine editors then were white. Before I placed my Bill Cosby story here, it was rejected by a major magazine. The magazine editor told me that the top editor would only want the piece if it was "a big-picture, intellectual take by someone like Skip Gates."

This note was written by someone who was actually advocating on my behalf. The person was not filled with animus, or a desire to prevent me from writing for the publication. The editor's job was to convince the top editor to invest in me and my vision of Bill Cosby. The top editor was only willing to do that if the investment was made in someone the magazine knew--such as Henry Louis Gates. (You may also see in this why I don't want to be anyone HNIC. Ever. I don't ever want my name raised in any conversation like that.)

Two things helped me break through. The first, being vouched for by someone in a position of power who had a relationship with someone else in a position of power. I met that person when costs of investment were low: I worked for David Carr at a rate of $100 dollars a week and ten cents a word for anything I published. The first summer I worked for him, I made $1700. I did not consider myself underpaid. This was 1996. The New Republic had just told the world that black people had evolved to be stupid, and it seemed like every week they were saying something just as racist. I was at Howard University, surrounded by a community of brilliant black people, cut off from the Ivies. None of them had the contacts or the resources to reply. They just had to take it. I can't tell you how much that angered me. I was made in that moment. And when I got my first break in writing, I didn't think about being ripped off. I thought about whipping ass. I haven't changed.

The second thing was the destruction of the monopoly on publication by gate-keepers. When Yglesias wrote me, I didn't care a whit about payment. I cared about a world wherein writers wrote stories like this, and no black people were around to answer. Matt didn't have to ask himself whether I was worth investing in. He just had to like what I did. What we call "paying for work" in magazines is certainly that. But for those of us trying to break in, it also meant a system of soliciting sponsorship rooted in a finite budget. In order for me to fight with people, some white male had to believe enough to put up funds. Matt didn't have to put up any funds. And now everyone got to fight. Some of the writers I most admire--Jamelle Bouie, Adam Serwer, Gene Demby--advanced themselves, in part, by writing for free in the form of blogging. These people are warriors. And fifteen years ago--under the system that is so lustily praised--they would not have existed.

When I came to The Atlantic, I saw guest-posting as an opportunity, not just for black writers but for anyone who had something to say and had found themselves foiled by the sponsorship system. They too deserved to fight.

I am not saying that this is a perfect, or even ideal, system. On the contrary, an ideal system would be one in which people's labor was paid for--regardless of color, regardless of whether they are writing "commentary" or "reporting," regardless of whether they are established or not. It would be paid for because their ideas deserve to be heard.

What I am asking you to do is to avoid an appeal to a more noble past. I lived there. It wasn't noble. It was fucked up. Like right now is fucked up. When you ask me to show solidarity with writers who aren't being paid, you should also ask yourself what solidarity white magazine writers have shown over the years with struggling black writers who could not break in. You are appalled that Nate Thayer was once offered $125,000 to write for The Atlantic, and was then offered nothing. Fair enough Are you equally appalled that there were virtually no black writers who could have gotten the same deal?

How the Quiet Car Explains the World

I'm sitting in the quiet car of an Amtrak train making my weekly voyage up top. There's a rule that prohibits loud talking and digital devices. Cell phone usage is also prohibited. There are signs at the top of the car labeled "Quiet Car" with the rules prominently displayed. "Quiet Car" is scrawled on the outside, also. The conductor, at the beginning of the trip, announces over the intercom, "If you can hear this you are in the quiet car..." and then explains the rules.
As I write this someone's digital device is going off. The woman apparently can't figure out how to shut it off. She does not want to repair to another car to figure this out. She wants to do it here in the quiet car. She is not alone. Somewhere around 75 percent of the time that I've ridden in the quiet car, somewhere has decided that there is a cell phone conversation they must have, or a song that they must play so that all can hear its melody blaring out the headphones. Two weeks ago, one group decided to grab some beers and make a party of it. 
These people are almost always dealt with by a conductor or other passengers. But I've never quite been able to figure out why they come to the Quiet Car. It's not a matter of not knowing the rules, so much as a matter of not caring. It's almost as if the offenders regard the regular cars as a public lavatory, and the Quiet Car as a private bathroom where they may repair to handle their shit.
I like a good bar. I like taking my wife to good bars and drinking with her. Every once in a while we'll be at a bar and someone (they are invariably white*) will stumble over drunkenly and decide that we should be engaged in conversation with them. These encounters range from the annoying (people deciding you need to hear their life story) to the borderline violent (someone telling my wife to "shut the fuck up" -- you can imagine how that went over) to the outright racist. (Dude pulls out a picture of his dog and then tells us, "My dog's a nigger." That actually went over better.) But what they all share in common is the inability to read the rules and know the ledge; the belief that we are their private stall.
It is not unlike what I've noticed here when commenters arrive and complain about the prohibition against threadjacking, the deleting, or moderation as a whole. The Internet is filled with comment spaces, most of them only barely regulated. But that is not enough. One must have the right to talk however one wants, here, specifically.
I think what we have here is a working definition of an asshole -- a person who demands that all social interaction happen on their terms. Assholes fill our various worlds. But the banhammer only works in one of them. 
*I am pretty sure this is because of how violence influences black communities. There's a whole choreography (especially among black men) around avoiding it. It's fairly easy to see and broadcast. If you've been acculturated to people being shot/stabbed/beat up over minor shit, you tend to be a little more careful in your interactions. You never know who you're talking to. And if you are black person of a certain age, you are intensely aware of that.

'Lucrative Work-for-Free Opportunity,' Cont.

Rosiland Jordan is a fairly regular commenter here and also an experienced journalist. She currently works at Al Jazeera English. Rosiland stopped in to offer a useful dissent to my own arguments. I shall now exploit her labor and repurpose her typically insightful comment as my own original content. Although according to Rosiland, she should be paying me.
As a journalist whose face is an integral part of her work, I long have had limits placed on how I communicate "professionally" beyond my deadlines. Basically, if I'm doing anything closely related to what I do -- interview people on camera, write scripts, conduct research, talk on the TV for a news program, voice a TV story, or present -- my current employer has to give me explicit permission. That's because my employer benefits by having me collect, analyze, and present facts, anecdotes and personal observations on a daily basis. My employer pays me a respectable salary and benefits for that exclusivity, and I accept it willingly.
When I appear on panels or on other programs as an "expert observer," I typically do so for free -- it's about exposure for both my employer and for me. When I've been asked to appear at universities and am offered a cash honorarium, I usually turn it down, even though many other journalists gladly accept them. If I have to take the money, I donate it to charity with everyone's knowledge. (Coffee mugs, however, I gladly take and brandish. Coffee mugs are fantastic.) When student groups visit my bureau, I'll speak to them and answer all their questions for free. Here it's not about the exposure, but about the sharing of information and life skills that so many people just won't get otherwise, and I'm thrilled to do it.
Now, I haven't written for any other publications. I've always wanted to, but truth be told, I haven't had the time, and I love to sleep. If I did, I would need my employer's permission -- that rule is written into my contract, and I could lose my job if I didn't get permission first.
I'd also insist on payment -- even if it were a nominal amount. I'd be willing to negotiate -- but a check would have to be cut in my name. (By the way, $1 is not worth my time. I have an opportunity cost, and $1 isn't even on the same continent.) Now, if the publication didn't want to pay me at all, and still wanted the work -- well, it would be out of luck. There is absolutely no reason why any publication should think that it can profit from my 23 years of journalism experience, or from the investment my current and previous employers made in my career, without opening its wallet. That is exploitation. That is how the economy in the southern USA functioned for centuries. I am not interested in reestablishing a slave economy in any venue.
In the US, which does not have a robust intellectual tradition or climate, writing of all sorts is a PRODUCT. Companies that are trying to turn a profit do so by offering a collection of good products to potential consumers. If the companies could produce this collection with full-time staff alone, they'd already be doing it, and this discussion is moot. However, they cannot do produce this collection by themselves, and so they need freelance/occasional writers to help them do that. THIS IS A BUSINESS DEAL. FULL STOP. PEOPLE WHO PROVIDE ANY PRODUCT OR SERVICE TO A BUSINESS MUST BE PAID. FULL STOP.
Moreover, if the collection of products is attractive, consumers make a choice to spend money on that collection and not others. That is how companies earn their income. They have an obligation to share that income with the people who helped make that income stream possible: the freelancers.
Incidentally, I do write for my employer's website, as it's an expected part of my job. It's written into my contract. Accordingly, I'm compensated for doing the work; I, and no one else, am providing something that helps drive traffic to my employer's website. I cannot understand why this isn't happening at all magazines or newspapers (whether print-only, internet-only, or hybrid).
One other note: I do go comments-diving on the blogs, and I respond to others' ideas and opinions. I use my own name. I know that I have to watch crossing the line that protects my ability to report impartially, but still I comment. I'm nearly 47 years old, and I have seen and experienced many things so far in my life. I don't see why I should keep my mouth shut. I believe people should be using their real names, and be willing to defend their positions online. It's the only way I believe we can elevate the discourse in this country. What's more, I enjoy meeting and learning from other people -- that's why I'm a journalist -- and I'm not going to pass up a chance to engage, to challenge, to be challenged intellectually just because of my career.
Now, should I be paid to comment? No. I'm doing this on my own time. In my opinion, blog comment sections are akin to the old woodstove at the general store -- you wander in, you pull up a stool, you join a conversation, you go a few rounds, you wish each other a good day, and you go on about your business. You're deriving a particular kind of satisfaction and an education from taking part, and you're connecting with other people.
If anything, blogs should be charging people a nominal fee for the ability to take part in this conversation, because it's costing them money to make the space available. If you walked into that general store, you'd probably buy a soda or a cup of coffee as a thank-you for the opportunity to shoot the sh** for a bit.

'Lucrative Work-for-Free Opportunity'

This week Nate Thayer kicked up some dust after The Atlantic asked him to repurpose a previously published piece for our site. The editor here said that her freelance budget was spent, and that she couldn't pay Thayer:

Thanks for responding. Maybe by the end of the week? 1,200 words? We unfortunately can't pay you for it, but we do reach 13 million readers a month. I understand if that's not a workable arrangement for you, I just wanted to see if you were interested. Thanks so much again for your time. A great piece!

Thayer sent her the following response:

I am a professional journalist who has made my living by writing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giving my services for free to for profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children. I know several people who write for the Atlantic who of course get paid. I appreciate your interest, but, while I respect the Atlantic, and have several friends who write for it, I have bills to pay and cannot expect to do so by giving my work away for free to a for profit company so they can make money off of my efforts. 1200 words by the end of the week would be fine, and I can assure you it would be well received, but not for free. Frankly, I will refrain from being insulted and am perplexed how one can expect to try to retain quality professional services without compensating for them. Let me know if you have perhaps mispoken.

Thayer then took the e-mail conversation he'd had with the editor and published it, name and e-mail of the editor included. When asked about writing "for exposure" by New York magazine, Thayer said:

I don't need the exposure. What I need is to pay my fucking rent. Exposure doesn't feed my fucking children. Fuck that!" he continued, adding that he can't even afford to get online. "I actually stick my fucking computer out the window to use the neighbor's Internet connection. I simply can't make a fucking living."

When asked whether he'd warned the editor at The Atlantic before publishing her name and e-mail. Thayer said he had not, and then added:

 "I understand the position she is in and I do not know her and I am sure she is simply doing her job," said Thayer. "I would reject such a position on ethical and moral grounds, personally, which is maybe why I'm broke."

I've been watching all of this with some curiosity, mostly because, as Matt Yglesias notes over at Slate, I got my start at the online Atlantic working for free. In May of 2008 Matt wrote me a note entitled "Lucrative Work-For-Free Opportunity" with the following text:

Hey -- we don't know each other, but I've been reading and enjoying your blog since I read your great Bill Cosby piece in the Atlantic and I saw I'm on your blog roll, so I figure you probably know who I am and I might as well reach out. In part, just to say that I like your blog, but more selfishly because I'm trying to put together an elite roster of guest-bloggers to help me out the week of Memorial Day (May 27-30) when I'll be on vacation. The idea is to get a bunch of people so that nobody in particular is expected to produce much volume. I'm not in a position to offer any compensation, but I think it is a good opportunity for a newer site to get introduced to a wider audience and build traffic, and self-promotional posts about a new book aren't out of bounds. 
What do you say? matt

Effectively Matt was asking me to work for exposure, much like the Atlantic editor was asking Thayer. In 2008, I was not some young fresh-faced college kid. I was 32. I had worked in print for twelve years, virtually my entire adult life. I had been on staff at the Village Voice and TIME magazine. I'd freelanced for the New York Times Magazine and had begun dipping my toe in the online water by freelancing for Slate and blogging on my own.
I made very little money freelancing. Indeed, when Matt wrote me I had just published a freelance piece for The Atlantic's print magazine. The piece paid me $16,000 -- the largest amount of money I'd ever been paid for a story. It sounds like a lot until you factor in that I had worked the story since late 2006 when I was still at TIME. I was laid off in early 2007 and spent most of that next year doing more reporting, and finishing my first book. That $16,000 was basically all I made in that one year period. 
To put it bluntly, I was -- like most freelancers -- hurting. My wife had been unerringly supportive. My son was getting older. I was considering driving a cab.
Here is what I wrote back:

I say I'd love to do it, but I need a day to juggle some things and make sure I can. My main concern is I've got a couple pieces do right around then, and I need to make sure I'm not over-committing. You and Andrew post a TON, whereas a good day for me is probably, five or six posts. What would you be looking for from each person, in terms of daily post rate? And wouyld I be able to cross-post from my blog or would you want exclusivity? 
The compensation is a non-issue for me.

Matt agreed to cross-posting and I did it. And it was delightful. It was especially delightful because there other professional journalists there with me -- Kay Steiger, Kathy G, Isaac Chotiner, and the awesome Alyssa Rosenberg.
I agreed to write for Matt because I wanted exposure. I was not a "young journalist." This was not my chance to break into the profession. What I was was a product of a time when you could be brimming with ideas and have no place to say them. People who talk about "gate-keepers" have mostly had the good fortune of living inside the castle walls. I lived outside. I had a style and voice that had never seemed to fit anywhere (except my first job at Washington City Paper.) 
I could not convince editors that what I was curious about was worth writing about. Every day I would watch ideas die in my head. When I was laid-off from TIME, the lack of a job was bad. But what hurt more was that this story, which I felt in my heart to be so important, was going to die. What the internet offered was the chance to let all of those ideas compete in the arena, and live and die on the merits. And Matt was offering a bigger arena. I was ecstatic.

Matt wasn't the only person to ask me to "work for exposure." Earlier that same year Talking Points Memo had done the same, and I was ecstatic. I was ecstatic any time anyone took my ideas seriously enough to offer them a platform. Most people never get that. 
Over the years I've had writers come here and "work for exposure" with some regularity. My friend the historian Jelani Cobb has done yeoman's work, some of it based on actual reporting. Judah Grunstein was nice enough to allow me to publish an e-mail, which I thought had a lot of substance, as a piece. Aaron Schatz from Football Outsiders has been here. The great historian Thomas Sugrue has come into this space and done awesome work. So has Adam Serwer. So has Brendan Koerner. So has Ayelet Waldman. So has Mark Kleiman. So has Michael Chabon. So has Shani Hilton.Last year we brought historian Kate Masur, film critic A.O. Scott and writer Tony Horwitz together to discuss Lincoln. None of them were paid. 
And lest you think The Atlantic is somehow unusual, ask yourself how often you've seen writers/thinkers/historians/intellectuals etc. in online "conversation." Ask yourself how often you've seen guest-bloggers at sites like The Daily Dish. Do you believe these people to be paid? Do you believe them to not actually be doing work? Tomorrow I will go on television, a prospect that I try (lately unsuccessfully) to avoid. I try to avoid it because it is work. I have to prepare information that I hope to provide. I have to think about what I'm saying. I have to make sure I know what I'm talking about. I have to tell my nervous self to shut up. No one pays me--or any other guests--for these contributions. We work "for exposure."
Nate Thayer wrote a long reported piece and was being asked to chop down that piece, and provide it for this platform. He was asked to do this for free. That would have been work. All journalists have had to chop down longer pieces into something shorter. Some of us have had to do it for whole books. I assure you that the time it takes to cut 5,000 words to 1200 words is nowhere close to the time it takes to blog here twice a day for a week. And as someone who's done straight reporting, as well as opinion writing, I can also assure you that the notion that doing one well is "less work" than doing the other well is very wrong. The Lincoln roundtable was hard. We had to consider each other's thoughts and criticisms and engage them seriously. Each time Kate, Tony S., or Tony H. wrote I felt the game getting harder, and each piece after became harder. When I write op-eds for the Times, I often start writing a week in advance, and spend hours each day getting myself closer to what I want to say. Often I have to consult with historians or with other books. It's work.
Writing is always hard. I understand why someone might not want to do it for exposure. I've certainly had professional journalists like Thayer turn me down. But those journalists have also taken the title of "professional" seriously enough to not print my e-mail address and all of my private correspondence without asking me. Indeed, it's the high morality and offense-taking which most puzzles me about all this, given that writers, all around us, are "working for exposure," given that every one of us is participating in a system in which they consume for free.
I think journalists should be paid for their work. Even here at The Atlantic, I think it would be a good idea to provide a nominal amount, if only as a token of respect for the work. But more than that, I want more jobs at more publications wherein journalists have the basics of their lives (salary, health care, benefits) taken care of. Whatever The Atlantic isn't, right now, the fact is that it currently employs more journalists than it ever has in its entire history. There are real questions about whether we will always be able to do that in this new world. But that is landscape on which all media currently tread. It's not perfect. But it never was.