The magazine you’ve been waiting for
If, that is, you crave fresh takes on Marilynne Robinson or Talmudic takes on AI
A bit of an update on me.
I have been having a grand time the past few weeks: watching my children start school (one of my daughters is now attending my old high school, and one day she wore my old high school cross-country sweatshirt, which is pretty nifty), getting back into yoga now that the open-water swimming season is behind me, drinking seasonal pumpkin-flavored beverages. Oh yes, I am the pumpkin-obsessed guy being made fun of here. I asked ChatGPT to make me “an image of a macho man obsessed with pumpkin-spice lattes”:
Amazing. How did they know? Is my Macbook camera spying on me?
But the main thing I have been doing is working on a new magazine, and the magazine finally launched, yesterday. It’s called Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, and it is published by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, at Washington University in St. Louis. The magazine is a successor to, and relaunch of, Religion & Politics, which went on hiatus a year ago. I was thrilled to be asked to take the helm, and I used the opportunity to solicit pieces from some of my favorite writers. And thus you can read Blake Smith’s take on the illiberalism of Marilynne Robinson (who is generally treated as a secular saint, like Oprah or Elie Wiesel, beyond reproach and above criticism); Sara Wolkenfeld’s smart piece on Talmudic wisdom for how to talk to Siri, Alexa, and other AIs; Jay Michaelson’s history of anti-masking laws, which some are trying to revive to use against anti-Israel protesters; and Eddie Glaude’s essay on the civil rights icon Ella Baker.
Please read any and all of these works, and read my editor’s letter, in which I say,
In publishing, one often talks about comparative titles, or “comps” (“This book is for anyone who loved Peyton Place, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and The Da Vinci Code”). If asked for comps for Arc, I would say, “This magazine is for anyone who subscribes to (and may get around to reading her issues of) The New York Review of Books, reads America or The Christian Century or First Things, laments the demise of Books & Culture, can name a favorite episode of This American Life, has a religious or spiritual practice, wishes he had the time to audit courses at the local college, enjoys the photography of Gillian Laub or Joel Sternfeld, reads the novels of Walker Percy or Philip Roth or Zadie Smith, watched Ramy, or listens to BBC radio’s Desert Island Discs.”
But what you can really do is sign up for our newsletter, so that you get fresh content from Arc every week. As ever, as they sing on The Golden Girls, thank you for being a friend.
Harvard has no YouTube game
My brother Dan works in communications at the University of Texas, and he wrote recently about his ongoing search for a university that has cracked the code of using its faculty to produce good content for a non-specialist audience, on YouTube, say. He writes:
Harvard hasn’t done it, nor MIT, RISD, Caltech, Stanford, Oxford, or the Sorbonne. Go to their websites or YouTube channels and what you’ll find is that we’re all basically doing the same thing and speaking with the same institutional voice. There is a lot of variation in the production quality, and some occasional one-off pieces that transcend that institutional vibe, but the default mode is intelligent but bland, smooth, and boosterish.
There are many reasons for this. One is that it’s just extremely hard at a baseline to make stand-out work. You have to find the right people, provide them the right resources and incentives, and then get lucky. It doesn’t happen often. As someone pointed out to me recently, Oprah’s podcast failed. Oprah. It’s hard to be good. But our communications also tend to feel institutional simply because we’re institutions. We serve many masters, and not all of them prioritize the kind of exciting, public-facing, creative cultural products I’m talking about. That’s fair enough — the university is also working to educate students and produce ground-breaking research, as it should — but it can make the search for the communications holy grail that much harder.
The one true exception, about which I’ve been obsessing for much of my career in university communications, is the University of Nottingham …
Intrigued by what Nottingham got right? Read the rest of this post here. Subscribe to Dan’s personal newsletter and podcast here.
Have you met a Scientologist lately?
I used to do a bit of reporting on Scientology, which was fun, sometimes spooky, and got a lot of attention—because people cared about Scientology. A lot. Ten or 15 years ago, maybe because American politics had not become the circus it now is, maybe because reality TV had not yet expanded to slake all of our thirst for real-life weirdness, the public had an unending appetite for news of Scientology. It helped that some of the famous Scientologists were the most famous people in world: Tom Cruise and John Travolta.
But have you heard of a famous Scientologist since, say, Beck? Is Giovanni Ribisi still in the church? Oh I know, I know—”Laura Prepon, from Orange Is the New Black,” you’ll all say. Fine. But even that feels like a very late-Obama reference. And, oh wait! She is not even a Scientologist any more, hasn’t been for years:
So it’s with a slight feeling of nostalgia that I read in a local New Haven news source that…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Oppenheimer to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.