Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
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From the Archives
Features • Spring 2009
In 1964, two years after the publication of his debut novel, *One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, *Ken Kesey left California on a cross-country road trip. He took recording equipment, hallucinogenic drugs, and a dozen friends. Kesey drove east in part to escape the loneliness of novel writing, but he was also putting both physical and symbolic space between himself and the creative writing program at Stanford, from which he had graduated in 1962. He took his education with him, though: the Merry Pranksters drove a school bus.
There is a provocative irony in the fact that *One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*—one of the twentieth century’s loudest anti-institutional novels—was written for class credit. That irony, Mark McGurl writes in his book *The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing,* lies at the heart of the last half-century of American fiction.
McGurl’s argument that the advent of creative writing “stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history” is an important one, and it is going to be controversial. The first graduate-level creative writing program began in 1936, and there are now more than three-hundred of them scattered throughout the country, with four hundred additional degrees offered to undergraduates. Admissions are competitive; as McGurl writes, students love creative writing “suspiciously much.” The estimated success rate for creative writing graduates—that is, how many actually go on to write for a living—is roughly one percent. (It is ninety percent for medical school graduates.) Each year, thousands of students voluntarily put themselves in debt for what amounts to a slightly modified extension of their college education. It is hard to imagine what the country’s literature would look like without it.
***
Anyone can write alone for free on weeknights; what creative writing students go broke for is the workshop. We think of writing as a private struggle, but that is now out of date. Creative writing is both social and theatrical. Seated at a large seminar table with a dozen peers, students receive advice, respond, debate the wording of a particular line, all under the parental gaze of the creative writing instructor. McGurl writes that the workshop’s sociability is alternately “supportive and savage.” Like colleges, creative writing programs always present themselves as nurturing communities, but students know that every word and attitude is subject to brutal scrutiny. Their teachers have been happy to dish it out. Flannery O’Connor believed that teaching was a negative exercise: “We can learn how *not* to write.”
O’Connor graduated from the country’s most prestigious writing program, which was also the first. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop began in 1936, and it was a long time in the making. The clearest point of origin for creative writing as an academic discipline is Wendell Barrett’s course in Advanced English Composition, which he began giving at Harvard in 1884. Students who had previously been asked to compose themes on given topics—“Can the immortality of the soul be proved,” say—were now asked to write daily assignments on whatever they wanted, the only criteria being “that the subject shall be a matter of observation during the day when it is written . . . and that the style shall be fluent and agreeable.” With his Vandyke beard, walking stick, and spats, Barrett was not only a teacher of creative expression but also a charismatic model of creative *being. *By its second year, his course was attracting one hundred and fifty students.
Barrett described his class as an “educational experiment,” and within thirty years his formulation could be found at the heart of the progressive movement in American education. In 1894, a thirty-five year old philosophy professor named John Dewey arrived at the University of Chicago. The Pullman Strike, which was taking place at the time, brought him into contact with the social scientist Jane Addams. One of the goals of Addams’ social settlement Hull-House, founded in 1889, was to help prepare the poorest members of Chicago’s rapidly expanding immigrant communities for life as Americans. Addams frequently found that the ideas they generated for guest lecturers and other educational programs were more useful than her own. Hull-House became a model for collaboration and pluralism that would resonate throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
By 1894, Hull-House was resonating with Dewey as well. “There is an image of a school growing up in my mind all the time,” he wrote. “A school where some actual & literal constructive activity shall be the centre & source of the whole thing.” Two years later, Dewey founded his own educational experiment, the University Elementary School of the University of Chicago, which would eventually become the still-famous Laboratory School. The children there did not learn anything that they did not also do. They cooked lunch, for example, which provided an occasion for teaching arithmetic by requiring students to weigh and measure ingredients, and they also built little smelters and worked with iron. One of the consequences of Dewey’s experiments was the conceptual marriage of learning and doing, and his ideas on education, in slightly modified versions, are how creative writing programs explain and justify themselves. They are literature laboratories, and stories are experiments in creativity.
It wasn’t until the decades following World War II, when the student populations of American universities began to resemble the ethnically diverse residents of Hull-House, that creative writing really found its place. In 1946, the President’s Commission on Higher Education advocated a radically expanded public role for the university in American life. The GI Bill sent millions to college, presenting universities with what Paul Buck would describe in *General Education in a Free Society* as an “unimaginably varied” set of tasks: “How can general education be so adapted to different ages and, above all, differing abilities and outlooks, that it can appeal deeply to each?” Creative writing, with its emphasis on ways of knowing instead of bodies of knowledge, was part of the answer, and it was folded into the expanding multi-versity.
Across the American cultural landscape, the value of creativity was appreciating. Throughout the 1950s, a C.I.A.-funded organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom organized exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist art throughout the Western bloc of Europe, where they were intended to dazzle the nearby Soviets. The painter-cowboy Jackson Pollock, a drunken monument to the very idea of the lone hero-artist, led the charge. We think of the 50s as the great era of American conformity, but no other decade did more to make individual artistic expression a specifically American value. By 1961, creativity had secured its place as a public good; Raymond Williams wrote that “No word in English carries a more consistently positive reference than ‘creative.’” He was right (and still might be). In the 1960s, the number of graduate writing programs multiplied by ten.
***
Paul Engle was a poet, editor, and translator, but he is mostly remembered for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he ran for twenty-four years. He believed that “good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.” Others have had doubts about “made.” Flannery O’Connor wrote that “the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift.” That’s not very encouraging, and it gets worse. Philip Roth, who taught at Iowa in the 60s, believed that one of the creative writing instructor’s responsibilities is to “discourage those without talent.” In the most radical critiques, the creative writing program actually smothers talent rather than encouraging it. What the Iowa Workshop lacks in creativity, the leftist novelist and one-time lover of Simone de Beauvoir Nelson Algren wrote, it makes up in “quietivity.” Like many people who worry that creative writing programs are useless or even harmful, Algren taught at a creative writing program. (He is also rumored to have lost some $35,000 playing poker in his spare time on the Iowa plains.)
Throughout the last half-century, two American writers have embodied Engle’s equation for good fiction: Ernest Hemingway (made) and William Faulkner (born). The *Des Moines Register* once published a photograph of Engle typing away with a whip curled within easy reach, and one imagines that when he used the whip it was to make students write more like Hemingway. One creative writing commonplace is “Show, don’t tell,” and Hemingway, whose characters seem to live by the even simpler motto, “Don’t tell—drink,” is the patron saint of well-disciplined fiction. No genre fits creative writing as well as the minimalist short story—in large part because it is possible to cover the whole thing in a two hour seminar—and Hemingway lore has it that he once wrote a complete short story with only *six* words: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never used.” While Hemingway never enrolled in college, he believed that the best way to improve was to put in the hours, to simply go away and write. He sent himself away to a kind of MFA in miniature in 1921, taking private tutorials in Paris from Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein. (Frank Conroy once called his own MFA experience “sort of a Fascist version” of the Lost Generation’s European heyday.)
Even as the Program era was turning out accomplished minimalists like Raymond Carver, however, it was also preserving the Faulknerian impetus to let loose. With less than one full year of post-secondary education, Faulkner was the ideal model of self-realized individual talent, and his legacy is at the heart of another Program era cliché: “Find your voice.” As identity politics began to take shape in the 60s and 70s, a flood of previously underrepresented ethnic, racial, and social voices began to make themselves heard. Philip Roth was one of them; his *Portnoy’s Complaint,* an electrified current of neurotic sexual hysteria, ends by wordlessly asserting its protagonist’s voice:
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!"
Roth was yelling on behalf of Jewish maleness, but other groups took inspiration from his example. In 1975, Anchor Books published *AIIIEEEE!–An Anthology of Asian-American Writers.*
A writer can find too much of his voice. Thomas Wolfe, who studied playwriting at Harvard before beginning to produce enormous autobiographical novels in 1929, described himself in the University of North Carolina yearbook as a “young Shakespeare,” and also a “genius.” The Hemingway-Faulkner dialectic usually finds a more comfortable middle ground, resulting in what McGurl calls “fine writing,” the lively but not overbearing prose of John Updike, among others. It is precisely the tasteful brilliance of Updike’s style that made him a kind of father figure to an entire generation of Program writers. Fine writing is the quintessential Program style, and Updike is the quintessential fine writer. It’s funny that he never attended a program himself.
Another quintessential Program writer who never actually enrolled in one is Joyce Carol Oates, who now teaches creative writing at Princeton. Updike is frequently called “prolific.” He has no idea. Oates has published thirty-six novels, with three more on the way in the next year or so. There are also thirty-three collections of short stories, as well as eight more novels written under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, three written as Lauren Kelly, and eight novellas. Twelve volumes of essays and criticism, eight plays, and ten books of poetry. When she was first discovering her own poetic voice, she once produced twenty-eight poems—“some of them rather long,” according to her biographer—in one day. In 1982, Oates published her fifteenth novel, which James Wolcott reviewed with an article titled “Stop Me Before I Write Again: Six Hundred More Pages by Joyce Carol Oates.” She seems to write like other people blog.
Writing is easy for Oates—some think *too *easy. “The novels of most so-called serious writers are usually exercises of craft and care,” writes Wolcott, before going on to describe *A Bloodsmoor Romance* as “word-goop.” The term “genre-fiction,” always a pejorative in a serious literary setting, sometimes hovers around Oates’ name. Isn’t it supposed to be difficult, even for geniuses?
The idea that creativity stops being creative if it happens too regularly: now *there’s* something to make people uncomfortable with creative writing programs. Oates, who has turned out not just a large body of work but an extraordinarily varied body of work, is like her own private Iowa, and she helps to dismantle the myth that the production of art is anything other than a completely predictable human activity. It’s what keeps critics in business: there will always be something to write about. This is not to say that the name on the spine doesn’t matter—as McGurl writes, Oates’ output is “inimitable”—but just that individual and institution are not mutually exclusive terms. Kesey would have told you otherwise, but think how many teachers have used *Cuckoo’s Nest* to lure adolescent rebels back into the educational fold. After his merry trip east and a stint in jail, Kesey returned to the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon. In 1987, he went back to his alma mater to teach creative writing.
Applicants to creative writing programs offer to institutionalize themselves in exchange for the chance to flower out as individuals. All institutions of higher education now make this promise, to a greater or lesser extent: You can be whatever you want. Nothing is closed to you. Growing up, I was told so often that I was unique, that I could choose any career path, that the opportunity began to look more like an assignment. Colleges do not just open the door to self-realization. They make you walk through it. As an undergraduate, I have been told more times than I can count that my college learning experience is not limited to the books I read and the essays I write, but sometimes that has sounded like a pretty attractive college learning experience. Engle once dreamed that he was an inmate, and that Iowa was a concentration camp.
That may be a little melodramatic, but McGurl’s insight is to see what Engle’s anxiety has done to American fiction in the last half-century. Again and again, postwar novelists have written institutional allegories, thinly veiled retellings of their own MFA days. “No sooner did American institutions (in many cases begrudgingly) open their doors to outsiders of various kinds,” McGurl writes, “than these newly minted insiders often wanted to get back out, if only in a spiritual sense.” It’s why we have the campus novel, the usually satiric portrait of university life; writers like to remind themselves of the possibility of outside, that they can transcend the university that hands them a paycheck. And yet the reality of institutionalized creative writing—with its deadlines, workshops, and departmental meetings—does not melt away and disappear in the face of publication, and vague dreams of freedom haunt postwar fiction. “Hardly Big Nurse,” Kesey wrote of his Stanford creative writing seminar. “But hardly City Lights Bookstore up the freeway,” either.
Some are worried by the fact that creative writing happens at a university, but they are missing the point. The issue is what doesn’t happen at a university, and the answer is, “increasingly little.” In 1959, George Stoddard, then the dean of the New York University School of education, observed that “slowly we are becoming a nation of college alumni, as we are already one of high school graduates.” That process continues today. Some of those college alumni will produce the next half-century of great fiction, but it’s impossible to predict which ones. Likewise, an MFA only promises that you’ll write well, not that you’ll make it onto future syllabi. “Not even in America,” wrote John Barth, “can one major in Towering Literary Artistry.”
Fiction • Spring 2016
Angela straightens my hair next to the window so she can smoke and breathe it outside. Every second or so her eyes do a one-two flick: around the room, outside, back around. It’s a Sunday night, so it’s only the two of us home, plus her friend Heloise, who sits on the bed painting her nails, watching us watch the house next door.
Features • Winter 2014 - Trial
A specter is haunting the World Wide Web—the specter of smarm.
Or so Tom Scocca, features editor at Gawker, would have it. His bombastic opinion piece “On Smarm” took the online literary world by storm last December, drawing not just affirming nods from fellow smarm-conspiracy theorists but replies from big names like Maureen Dowd and Malcolm Gladwell as well. (It also drew a fair number of unique page views: more than “I Can’t Stop Looking At This Weird Chinese Goat,” but less than “Two Minutes Of Nothing But Goats Yelling Like Humans,” which is fairly strong on the Gawker scale of buzz).
In Scocca’s view, the proliferating complaints about snark and its dominance have got the whole thing upside down. We do not live in an age of snark, he says. We live instead in an age of smarm— and here, Scocca argues, in a succinct eight and a half thousand words, be the real dragons. Scocca is reluctant to explain just what he means by snark. He would rather talk about smarm, which he defines like this:
*Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves. *
The real danger of smarm, Scocca writes, is that it lets people off the hook: It uses niceness as a cover for evasion. Faced with any kind of criticism, the “smarmer” tries to silence the critic without addressing the content of the objection.
Armed with this exciting new term, Scocca’s essay assembles a formidable parade of smarmers for us to scrutinize—smarmers in literature, smarmers in journalism, smarmers in politics. Isaac Fitzgerald, editor of the newly created BuzzFeed Books section, cops a particular bruising for his determination to publish only positive book reviews, in adherence to the “Bambi rule”—*If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.* The “no haters” ethos of BuzzFeed, Scocca claims, has allowed that website to thrive in the “online sharing economy,” where agreeability leads to popularity and popularity leads to value. Other so-called smarmers are called out, as well: Joe Lieberman, Niall Ferguson, and Jonah Lehrer— Mayor Bloomberg even gets a look-in—not to mention Malcolm Gladwell, and from there, naturally, the whole political discourse of Bush-era foreign policy.
Special attention is reserved for Dave Eggers, the “most significant explicator of the niceness rule,” the “true prophetic voice of anti-negativity,” whose by-now half-famous “sell-out” rant in an interview with* The Harvard Advocate* in 2000 culminated in a feverish invocation to create rather than dismiss: “Do not be critics, you people,” Eggers fumed. “Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.”
Scocca uses Eggers as his point of entry and exit in the piece. Eggers’s rant must surely be the epitome of smarm. *Don’t call me a sell-out*, Scocca’s puppet-Eggers seems to say. *You have no right, because I am out here doing real work, whereas you are simply sniping from the sidelines*. Such a glass-jawed refusal to be criticized must no doubt be an act of bad faith. And surely, if the world is run on smarm, then the only right response is to rebel—to defend at all costs the right to criticize and interrogate.
Except that Scocca doesn’t really make this case in his article. For one thing, he is wrong about Dave Eggers. (For another, he seems to misrepresent most of his sources.) Scocca’s essay is strongest where it critiques the ways in which the politically powerful make appeals to niceness as a way to silence debate. But only very few of his examples fit this framework. Throughout the majority of his piece, Scocca is actually on the defensive: He conceptualizes snark and smarm as opposing forces, hoping to use the ubiquity of smarm as a justification for snark. By stretching smarm so thin, however, Scocca fails to articulate a useful or coherent sense of the concept.
I found Scocca’s essay to be rather appealing when I first read it through, and this appeal is what makes “On Smarm” worth returning to—the article has the potential to operate quite forcefully, as long as its sources are not double-checked and as long as its rhetorical tricks remain unexamined. Scocca earns his supporters through an extensive use of double-negative: Anti-negativity is smarm, which is bad (because Bush!), so we must prefer its opposite—negativity, and therefore snark. But this double-negative hinges on a false set of alternatives. One can refuse smarm and refuse snark as well. In fact, snark and smarm are not so incompatible, as Tom Scocca’s lengthy screed confirms. “On Smarm” reveals itself to be a botched manifesto for snark—and in its dreary and self-interested botching, it begins to take the form of Scoccan smarm.
One must argue back against Scocca’s piece, not for the sake of positivity, but for the sake of the real casualty of Scocca’s argument: all the useful and productive forms of negative speech.
*
“On Smarm” was met by an odd reception. Malcolm Gladwell posted a reply that insisted on the value of “niceness.” Maureen Dowd affirmed her conviction of the need for negativity. Ryan Kearney at *The New Republic*, meanwhile, jumped in to defend Scocca’s pillorying of Dave Eggers. A strange ambiguity characterized the whole debate, propelling it ever further into abstraction. This unease was neatly captured by Dylan Matthews, Tom Scocca’s interviewer at the *Washington Post*, who confessed that he “kind of” sympathized with one of his readers who complained that he or she was “completely unable to construct ideas out of those words” that had been published.
If the categories at play in Scocca’s argument—snark and smarm, negativity and criticism—are proving difficult to mobilize in the snarknado’s aftermath, then this is not because they are overly intellectual or remarkably intricate. It is because they are bullshit categories, or at least poorly defined ones. This vagueness in terms is not incidental to the thrust of “On Smarm.” It is integral to the logic of the piece, and to the scope of its ambition.
The key misdirection at the heart of the essay is Scocca’s unwillingness to address the question of snark. At first, he appears to accept the definition he lifts from Heidi Julavits’s essay in* The Believer*: “a hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt.” But then, without any explicit justification, it becomes clear that defending snark is his real intention. “On Smarm” is even framed around the rhetorical question: “to what is [snark] responding?”
The answer, of course, is smarm. And what makes smarm appealing is the fact that it justifies snark. “Some snark is rotten and harmful and stupid,” Scocca confesses. “Smarm, however, is never a force for good.” Changing the subject to smarm allows Scocca to avoid the task that he seems remarkably eager to avoid: Not once in the over 8,000 words of this *snark de triomphe* does he give a positive example of snark.
Scocca’s trick lies in suggesting that every one of his critics is necessarily a smarmer. Smarm, then, begins to mean “resistance to snark.” Which Scocca wants to quash, for all of the obvious reasons, but he refuses to do so by arguing directly with his critics—foremost among them David Denby, who wrote a book on the topic called* Snark*. He does not argue for the merits of snark, nor does he attempt to show a difference between what he and his colleagues do and what Heidi Julavits has identified. Scoccan snark, like Scoccan smarm, would rather talk about anything except itself. And so we are taken on this ponderous journey through time and space-breaks (with, admittedly, a few solid insights along the way), only to find out that the destination is an outdated, indirect justification for what the former Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio has decried as “snappy snarky snarking snark-snark shit.”
The double-negative that lends “On Smarm” its rhetrical force is enabled by this cultivated ambiguity of terms. If smarm is anti-negativity, then we should opt for anti-anti-negativity—that is, plain old snarky negativity. So unless you believe that every gesture should always be positive, congratulations! You have just joined Team Snark. No, you don’t get a free t-shirt.
After Scocca’s initial attack on Dave Eggers, he takes a second to anticipate the reader’s objections. His response to these is telling. “That’s it,” Scocca writes. “You’re getting it. That’s smarm.” By insisting on snark as the natural alternative to smarm (and vice versa), and by keeping the argument locked in abstraction, Scocca can claim any ideological ally he likes—and he can smear just about anybody he likes, whether or not he has the necessary evidence.
David Denby’s book on snark, which was one of the inspirations for the essay, is never addressed in the piece. Instead, in a section lumped in near the end, Scocca recounts a review Denby wrote on Spike Lee’s* Do The Right Thing* back in 1989, which (in Scocca’s retelling at least) made a problematic stance on race and violence. “Keep this in mind,” Scocca writes, “when David Denby puts himself forward as an expert on the terms of appropriate and inappropriate response.” Denby on “snark” goes completely unaddressed. Scocca tries to disqualify him by attacking him ad hominem, using a completely tangential point to mobilize the reader’s moral suspicions and to make Denby seem not up- but downworthy. Does this open Scocca up to criticism—for using snideness and suggestiveness instead of actual argument?
*That’s it*, Tom Scocca might reply. *That’s it. You’re getting it. That’s smarm.
* Scocca also proposes through a suggestive parenthetical aside, devoid of any context, that Chris Jones—with whom he has previously had a public spat—is a sexist. What if one took Scocca to task for this laziness, as well?
* Yes, yes*, Tom Scocca cries, triumphant. *You’re getting it.* These objections are not smarmy at all, however—they are an argument back against poor, unfinished, self-serving criticism. Scocca’s use of “smarm” permits the kind of evasiveness that he associates with smarm in the first place. *Stand back,* he seems to say, *in the pose of the smarmer. What I’m doing is important, and it’s us against them. If you argue with me, then you are part of the problem, not the solution. So hush now, people, hush. *
***
Tom Scocca’s screed feels decidedly out of place on the pages of Gawker.com. It doesn’t fit the web design; it doesn’t fit the tagline *Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news*. It also sits uncomfortably in Scocca’s own writer’s profile: days before “On Smarm,” he published a literal ranking of the sauces. Such diversity of output is an asset, not a liability, to Scocca and his employer. Still, the curious placement of this essay is part of the story of its production, and there is something to be gained by reading “On Smarm” in the context of Gawker’s current identity crisis—which is also Gawker’s branding crisis, since content and marketing are never too far from each other in the Gawker Media empire.
As Scocca’s argument builds to a crescendo, he connects the alleged smarm of Dave Eggers to the marketing discourse of personal branding. Spuriously linking Eggers’ *Advocate* rant to an essay called “The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters, Scocca associates the style of smarm with the “credentialism” of the marketer. (Remember that Scocca has linked BuzzFeed to marketing, as well, through the currency of agreeability.) What Scocca brushes aside, however, is the fact that negativity can also be a brand, as long as it works in predictable ways. And he should know, since the best example of this kind of branding happens to be his employer, Gawker Media. In fact, one of the products available on Gawker’s advertising page is something called a “Partner Post,” which offers companies the following proposition: “Your message, our signature tone.” As Chris Matthews at CNET puts it:
*Here is a brand that is very open about what it is. And it is very open about where its priorities lie. Every customer of Gawker knows precisely what the product is, why they are using it and what to expect…The relationship between brand and user is clear, consistent and, therefore, functional. *
Snark is imperative to the Gawker Media empire; it is the “signature tone” of the Gawker brand. If we are going to accuse Dave Eggers of smarming back at his critics, in the interests of defending his brand, then we might level the same accusation at Tom Scocca.
The Gawker brand is currently faced with a unique set of pressures, a situation which makes Tom Scocca’s screed all the more valuable as a rare moment of insight into the self-understanding and the worldview of a senior Gawker editor. It would be unfair to demand that Scocca be consistent with the priorities of his employer: By no means is “On Smarm” necessarily *the* Gawker manifesto. Still, we can read it as one possible Gawker manifesto for the moment. Scocca does, after all, refer to his “personal stakes and connections,” and his piece is listed at the top of Gawker’s “The Best Gawker Posts of 2013.”
Gawker’s identity crisis is an enviable one: As the world’s most successful blog over the last decade, it no longer fits its underdog image. Gawker Media (which also owns Deadspin, Lifehacker, Jezebel, and io9, among others) enjoyed over 100 million unique page views in November couldn’t find this. With ultra-low costs and high advertising revenues, the Gawker bloggernaut is one of relatively few consistently profitable media enterprises. An anti-establishment bent gave the cheek of early Gawker a sense of rebellious moral purpose. But the original Gawker concept—snarky, pitiless, shamelessly ratings-driven—is increasingly under pressure from its size and its influence. As Carla Blumenkranz at *n+1* has convincingly argued, the sarcasm that is charming from an underdog can seem bullying in the mouth of a top dog. “You could say that as Gawker Media grew, from Gawker’s success,” Blumenkranz wrote, “Gawker outlived the conditions for its existence.”
Another threat to Gawker’s traffic dominance comes in the form of the cat-crazy BuzzFeed and the choir-preaching feelgood factory of Upworthy. Gawker’s dedication to both popularity and seriousness has seen it tugged in two different directions. As Andrew Phelps at the Nieman Lab reports: “Half of people think Gawker is diluting its high-quality material with Chinese goats; the other half think Gawker should stick to Chinese goats and stop trying to do real journalism.”
Last December, after BuzzFeed’s November traffic had surpassed that of Gawker, Gawker’s chief Nick Denton responded with a surprising defense: “The crowd will eventually choose the juicy truth over a heartwarming hoax,” he told the *Financial Times*. Denton also complained about Upworthy: “even smarmier than BuzzFeed.” The happy union of snarkiness, traffic, and truth-telling appears to be unraveling for Gawker. After years of cultivating snark as a way to keep the bastards honest, what ever is Gawker to do when its editors wake up one morning and realize with a shock that now they are the bastards? Hence Nick Denton’s appeal to the moral high ground— and hence Tom Scocca’s too, perhaps.
Gawker’s proud fixation on page views has an immense influence on its content—which need not pose a problem to a small, snarky gossip blog. But this fixation becomes problematic when Gawker begins to take on real news, and when the interests of virality begin to clash with newfound claims of journalistic responsibility. As Felix Salmon has reported, when a suspicion arose that one of Gawker’s viral posts had linked to a fake (“Grandpa Writes Letter Disowning Daughter After She Disowns Gay Son”), Gawker’s editor John Cook had the following to say:
*I’d rather be calling bullshit on stuff like this than calling attention to it...But we are tasked both with extending the legacy of what Gawker has always been—ruthless honesty—and be reliably and speedy on top of internet culture all while getting a shit-ton of traffic. Those goals are sometimes in tension. *
Caught between responsible journalism, gossipy snark, and an army of viral cats, the Gawker brand is facing serious pressure. Thankfully, Tom Peters has a pointer for moments of crisis: “Go back to the comparison between brand You and brand X—the approach the corporate biggies take to creating a brand.” For Gawker, there is nothing so priceless as an opportunity to carve out distance from BuzzFeed on the grounds of its own seriousness. At best, Tom Scocca uses Isaac Fitzgerald’s comments at the launch of BuzzFeed Books as a token excuse for timeliness. At worst, it is a cynical tool for defensive self-branding.
But this is snark that we are talking about, here. Snark doesn’t position itself in the marketplace: Snark flips the bird and wanders off. Snark doesn’t respond to David Denby with a many-thousand-word treatise, smarming its way out of real criticism. Snark, at its best, has no time for the moral high ground.
Tom Scocca makes the case that smarm is usually the weapon of the powerful. What would a world look like where the beleaguered Gawker Empire continues to snark but adds smarm to its arsenal? The comments sections for “On Smarm” gives some indication. When one commenter objects that the problem of snark in reviews has not been addressed in Scocca’s essay—and adds that the affected world-weariness of young Gawker writers seems “unearned, and cheap”—he is met with the following reply from Scocca: “‘Unearned’ is on the Smarm Bingo card.”
In reply to Malcolm Gladwell’s rather dashed-off response, which challenged Scocca’s selective use of quotations from the Eggers interview, Scocca wrote:
*Malcolm Gladwell deepens our understanding of smarm by explaining that when Dave Eggers wrote the words ‘Do not be critics,’ he meant people should be critics. *
By this point, Scocca is simply pointing and accusing. Yes, you’re getting it, he is saying. That’s smarm. And he is using that accusation as a way out of the argument.
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What Scocca seems to ignore in all this is the difference between gratuitous negativity and valuable criticism. Scocca wants to take the world’s fact-checkers and conscientious objectors as his allies— though it is unclear whether they would choose him as their ally. When he conflates negativity (the saying of negative things) with negativity (a stance of sneering dismissal), he erases the possibility of a productive or creative kind of criticism—something different from critical-ness. In either case, the task remains to rescue productive criticism from Scocca’s sinking ship.
Luckily, as it turns out, a good start on this difficult task has already been made by Scocca’s own sources, in the many parts of their works that he neglected in his quest for incriminating evidence. David Denby’s Snark spends a vast number of pages sorting through exactly which kinds of negativity he finds unhelpful and which kinds he supports. Far from being opposed to negativity as such, Denby ends his book with a note of praise for Stephen Colbert’s critical powers and with a plea for his readers to go out and commit some “vituperation that is insulting, nasty, but, well, clean.” Denby, it turns out, is not opposed to negativity at large (I certainly got the impression he was while reading “On Smarm”).
In her own Believer essay, Heidi Julavits is not out to trick you when she writes: “To be perfectly clear—I am not espousing a feel-good, criticism-free climate.” She goes on to confess an “intellectual crush” on the “curmudgeonly” critic James Wood. Even in his overwhelmingly negative book reviewing, Julavits argues, there is a positive belief in the better possibilities for contemporary fiction, along with “room for a dialogue with Wood, which indicates there’s something to wrangle over.” Taken in full, Julavits’s essay is much more a plea for productive criticism than it is an attack on snark itself. Tom Scocca quotes her with the following line:
*“If snark is a reaction to this sheer and insulting level of hyperbole, fine—” *
but then he cuts her off there, removing the second half of the sentence, which asked why the writer (who has not chosen the book cover or written the PR copy) should have to receive the disdain. Scocca silences a voice that does believe in the uses of negativity: He would rather paint her as one more member of the worldwide Smarmy Army.
The difference between takedown negativity and productive negativity was exemplified in that other great drama of last December, the *Love Actually* saga. Christopher Orr of *The Atlantic* came out with a ruthless critique of the much-beloved Frankenstein’s Monster of a rom-com. After much online grumbling, Orr clarified his point. He held disdain for *Love Actually*only because he thought it missed all the important parts of love: his negativity, under pressure, clarified the possibilities that the film left out. In doing so, Orr was making a set of positive, descriptive claims about love. He was telling a love story of his own.
Over at Jezebel, meanwhile, at the girl-targeted holding of the Gawker Media empire, Lindy West produced a breathtaking, hilarious takedown of the film. Her intentions were clear from the get-go: the piece ran under the title “I Rewatched *Love Actually* And Am Here to Ruin It For All of You.” West was in no mood to cut Richard Curtis any slack, and her piece admitted no quality to the more successful elements of the film. (In her frenzy, West also denounced something that was actually fairly realistic in the film, and fairly easily double-checked: the presence of Portuguese guest workers in rural France.) West’s piece makes for enjoyable reading, but she has approached the film with different aims from the aims of a critic. She came to snark, and she took no prisoners.
By no means do I believe the Lindy Wests of the world should have their keyboards taken from them. West’s piece is certainly not without value. Yet it is not a meaningful contribution to criticism in the way that Christopher Orr’s essays are. Tom Scocca defends the role of snark in messianical terms, as if it is the only available answer to BuzzFeed’s Bambi Rule and his smarmy opponents. In the field of arts criticism, at least, this is plainly not the case. There, negativity certainly has its place—but we should be careful not to confuse the playful vanity of the takedown rant with the productive critical output of those who will stand hard by their claims. And if Scocca wants to refute the criticisms of snark that are posed by Denby, Julavits, and Eggers, then he must do so on terms more specific than his essay presents.
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Which brings us back to poor, poor Dave Eggers, victim now of not one but two attention-seeking takedowns, if we count Tom Scocca alongside his old mates and allies who launched* n+1* in 2004 with a vitriolic—and since partially retracted—attack on Mr. Eggers and the “Eggersards.”
“Do not be critics, you people.” It is certainly no coincidence that Dave Eggers was speaking to *The Harvard Advocate*when he made this argument. Eggers was offering specific, pragmatic advice to a group of undergraduates. He was also provoked by a line of questioning that was grating and self-satisfied in tone. The* Advocat*e interviewer began by communicating his hopes that Eggers was finally free from the “perfidious yoke of those Massachusetts McSweeneys. Talk about a McFaustian bargain!” It is also important to read the Eggers interview in terms of the very specific discussion that was being entertained. The *Advocate* president was not arguing about the quality of Eggers’s work—he was questioning Eggers’s legitimacy purely on the grounds of the material conditions of how Eggers was publishing. This discussion is a familiar one for young people who are interested in alternative culture and suspicious of the influence that mainstream success might have on an artist’s integrity. Does success alone make you a sell-out? Is Dave Eggers, then, a sell-out? The crucial point here is that no one was asking questions about the honesty or the quality of Dave Eggers’s work. He was not being fact-checked by the *Advocate* president. He was on trial for complicity with power, and the punishment was tossed on the don’t-read pile. So, when Dave Eggers says, “Do not dismiss a book until you have written one,” he means exactly what he is saying: Do not dismiss it, out of hand, without having read it. He is arguing specifically about the proposition that mainstream success might make somebody unreadable. Against that proposition, he says: No. Read them.
And then, of course, you can do whatever you like to them. Dismissal is not the same as negative feedback; dismissal means not even thinking about it. Eggers clearly admits the existence of “fair and helpful book critics.” What he is arguing against here is specifically the kind of negativity that knows it’s out to get you in advance: the kind of negativity that won’t even listen. He is arguing specifically against snark, not against negativity at large.
The overblown tone of Eggers’s speech in this interview is certainly worth criticizing. Nevertheless, his words take on a different meaning when they are read in their proper context. The “sell-out” accusation was never targeted at Eggers’s work—it was targeted at the fact of his success and his activity.
As a former* Advocate* president myself, I feel inclined towards Eggers’s words in the context of undergraduate literary culture. The line being adopted by the Eggers interviewer is one that brings out the worst in us, as student editors: It prefers the easy gains of ridicule to the real rewards of the learning that goes on when one exposes oneself to new and alternative ways of thinking. If anecdotal evidence is worth anything, then I shall be the first in line to testify that snarky talk from college *literati* finds its roots, more often than not, in one’s own creative insecurities. I have seen it, and I have done it myself.
By structure and by necessity, the *Advocate *staff must make negative decisions: stories must be rejected from the issues, and would-be editors must be rejected from the masthead. Although our authority is scant, we find that we need to be critics—which is fine, for the most part, because we do believe in criticism. But the exercise of that criticism must take place in a creative community of young people, a community where vulnerability is necessary if anything interesting is ever going to get done. What kinds of criticism we might permit ourselves in such a field is a difficult question to answer. There is a value to open-mindedness and generosity, here, which goes above and beyond the responsibilities of established writers. And there is a value to giving each other the benefit of the doubt. In national politics, ambition is a danger. Among young artists, we could show a little more patience for each other’s ambitions, as long as they are honest.
The debate on snark and smarm has been dominated by the kind of thinking that maintains that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It is easy to like Tom Scocca’s essay on these grounds: He doesn’t like racism, he doesn’t like sexism, and he doesn’t like Upworthy. This kind of opposition, though, is a false one. If criticism really were a case of balancing Boo against Yay, mixing snark in with smarm, then it would be an easy job indeed. Leon Wieseltier of *The New Republic* seems to accept this binary at face value when he says, in Maureen Dowd’s column: “I never thought I’d utter a sentence like this, but I stand with Gawker against BuzzFeed.”
God forbid that those should be our options. Awesome and Yuck are not a ying and yang for online journalism—they are a Scylla and Charybdis. Snark and smarm alike should be treated with suspicion by truly thoughtful criticism. They are evasive, self-congratulating techniques, both of which are anathema to the needs of a productive creative community. Snark and smarm are friends who pose falsely as enemies, and one can stand against both of them at once.
The snafu over “On Smarm” poses serious questions about what might be missing in this phony set of undesirable alternatives. In a new media landscape that is increasingly obsessed with counting page views, meeting quotas, and delivering “the perfect feed,” the answer might be something like thoughtfulness. Or perhaps, in this brand-dominated online space, which specializes in figuring out what we want and then giving it to us, the answer lies in something like surprise. Something like courage.
Fiction • Summer 2019
I met Qiuhai on a fall day in a harbor city—a manner fitting for her name, although I wouldn’t have said this out loud. Names were flexible and wishful like that. You could create a beautiful memory out of any name. For Qiuhai, I chose to preserve where we met and the conditions of it: how our small classroom was framed by a specific time in the year and, further away where we couldn’t notice it, the sea.
I see her looking up from her textbook first, cropped gray hair pushed away from the face. Then Zhengjie sits in the desk at her right side, smiling easily and arched toward the book where the answers are, his smile moving back and forth between the other two of us in the room. I knew them together only—one unit.
“Teacher, we are very happy to meet you at this time,” Qiuhai said in a low voice after I introduced myself in misshapen, childlike Mandarin Chinese and closed the classroom door on the first day. Her husband glanced at the window beside it to make sure no one else walked down the hall. “We’ve already been called for the test.” Her mouth was a short frown, and she pushed both sides of her hair away, two hands in the same quick gesture.
“The test?”
“Cit-zenship interview,” she sounded out in English.
Zhengjie wheeled his desk closer to mine. “Our friends”—he gestured with both hands toward the hallway—“told us it would take seven or eight months for the officials to send out the appointment notice. For those months we planned on coming here to prepare. But two months after we turned in the N-400, we already got the government notice. Her test,” he said, and at this point he whispered, palms upward on the table, “is at the end of October.” He glanced in her direction. “Then I’ll go two weeks after.”
“Teacher, you will help us, correct? We only have five weeks together.” Qiuhai’s hands were pressed together earnestly, one tangled in the other’s fingers.
I was a freshman in college teaching at a local community center in Chinatown for the first time. Immigrants, mostly elderly, came to learn English and prepare and practice for their naturalization exams. I wasn’t the only college student helping out: small groups of undergrads came from different schools around the area. We volunteered under an organization staffed by people who’d grown up in Chinatown, but most of us didn’t have connections to the neighborhood ourselves. Our parents were from the generations that had immigrated on student visas in the 80s and 90s, recently enough to be disconnected from the misfortunes of history.
Qiuhai was still watching, both hands clasped in her lap. I said that of course I’d help her, and I made the promise to myself too—if there was one thing I could do to remediate for any of my past lives, I would start here with this woman who was older than my own grandmother but scared and, for all I knew, kinder. “We’ll do the best we can.”
She smiled, and even her smile had the slightest shape of a frown. Then we ran through the citizenship exam for the first time. She struggled with English and made no effort to hide it, apologizing and pushing her hair out of her face. If she couldn’t understand the question I asked, she repeated it to herself under her breath with her mouth twisted slightly down, sounding out the same words, narrowing in on a segment or phrase, while staring a bit past my eyes. Sometimes the answer came out like that. Other times, she couldn’t hear the question I asked, and recited the answer to the one she thought she’d heard.
Zhengjie listened to the questions alongside her. When Qiuhai repeated questions to herself, I sometimes glanced his way—he looked up toward the ceiling to remember an answer and then checked the textbook with a smile. When he was confused, he put his hand against his head to think, flattening a patch of white hair.
2026