Ambitious People

Not that long ago, New York’s Emily Gould dedicated her newsletter to listing the extraordinary accomplishments of past n+1 interns. This strikes me as fundamentally strange business, but I can’t deny that from the standpoint of a certain kind of fretful left-leaning former National Honors Society member, the roster she assembles is impressive. (I have embedded that list in a footnote below.1) The accomplishments listed are the kind that my readers enjoy theatrically disdaining, but the simple reality is that many many people would like to be successful in the way of that list, and that ultimately is the only real currency of success, the envy of other people. Sorry if that’s cynical, but I don’t make the rules. Take it up with Gore Vidal.

I have this endless back and forth with a particularly vocal portion of my readership - I describe some cultural and social conditions I see as important to the American elite, they write comments and emails scoffing at the idea that those things could ever be important. My stock response is that disdaining the things that elites care about does not make those things inconsequential; you are free to argue that Ivy League degrees tell us nothing of value about those who hold them, but as long as the people who hand out jobs and status care about those degrees, they are consequence-bearing, and so you shouldn’t ignore them. I also think, frankly, that these readers protest too much. They theatrically say things like “I can’t imagine living a life where this stuff matters!” because a part of themselves very much does think it matters, and they are uncomfortable with what that says about their own place in our complicated sociocultural sorting systems. (No one ever complained more about “hipsters,” in the hipster heyday of the mid-2000s, than those who lived very similar lives but felt themselves to be somehow apart from and above that culture.) You don’t have to concede to those feelings, though. I think you do have to concede to the fact that the American elite has outsized influence and power, and that the American elite is in a constant state of wrestling with its own self-definition and relationship to itself. I write about the New York Times, my readers complain that the New York Times doesn’t matter, and all I can say is… yes it does, including ...