Writer's Diary
2/21/26
The strangest part of even moderate fame and success is that people form opinions about you without having met you, or they start rumors to confirm or disconfirm some presupposition about your identity based on your work or your public persona, whatever that is. It’s all kind of circular. (Or they want to work with you, but for whatever reason haven’t or can’t, and so they need to justify why they make you the problem.)
I don’t recommend it—microceleb. If you’re doing something notable, and you’re doing so in a way that basically mocks the safe route—whether that safe route is the political safe route or the social or the aesthetic one—or if you are hard to categorize and easy to project onto, your fate is set. There’s no hope of being treated fairly by the groundlings or the plebeians, especially in a Gen Z moral surveillance squad. You have to literally just survive it. Keep working. Focus on the many people who do have your back and like your work. And ironically, those people outnumber the former category by 100 to 1. It’s just the squeaky wheels that create such temporary misery.
An opposite thought: a springlike day before a storm; in good mood and good health; surrounded by wonderful people; a fun past few nights; good things happening on stage.
THURSDAY I was in Philadelphia for a private off the record dinner at an old social club—which of course I can’t talk about, can say I enjoyed (the kind of conversations you can have when you have smart and high-agency people in journalism and policy thinking in a non-aggressive, non-aggrieved, non-partisan way, which you really can’t do in the public commons of the internet anymore).
I think we’ll see more and more demand for off-ramps from hyper-partisan, aggressive discourse.