Do you want to be right—or happy?
The other day a friend asked me why I do what I do. It’s a reasonable question, albeit one that reveals a baseline level of privilege we both share. But I found it surprisingly confronting.
The friend (his name is Toby) is a management consultant and had a clear answer: People have problems that are beyond their scope to solve, so he comes in and figures out how to solve them, and that’s satisfying. I consider that a good answer.
The best I could come up with, standing in Toby’s kitchen as he made lamb stew, is that I like being right. Not in the way that people think they are right in threads on Twitter, or on American cable news, or at raucous pub sessions. Instead, my version of being right involves doing quite a bit of work to prove, with minimal doubt, that my hunch about a particular thing is correct. Sometimes, you do the work and figure out you’re wrong. In that way, it’s not an instinct or a feeling—it’s a process with the risk of failure attached.
I don’t, for the record, think this is a particularly admirable quality. Ask anyone who knows me personally and they’ll likely say my preference for being right is pretty damn annoying a lot of the time. As someone wise once said: “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” I too often choose the former.
However, being right in journalism doesn’t mean that everyone has to agree with you. Instead, it means people can’t effectively challenge you without first doing quite a bit of work themselves (unlike those pub companions). A good example came this month from the weirdness of wellness beat in the form of celery juice.
I saw a bunch of people (actually they were exclusively white girls) performatively drinking it on Instagram, and something about the brazenness of the claim that drinking a vegetable that is 95% water can cure chronic illness just got to me. And so I did some work, which included interviewing the guy responsible for making it popular. (The interview was completely insane.) Then I wrote about it and a bunch of people were like, “Yeah holy shit. You’re right this is totally nuts.” Meanwhile, the people who thought I was wrong struggled to point to any reason other than their gut feeling or their own personal anecdote.
If you believe in sanity and facts—which these days is, admittedly, a big if—I was right, if only for that moment in time. For better or for worse, that feeling is hugely motivating to me.
Things I wrote
I wrote, produced, and hosted my first video story! It’s about the rise of “live like a local” tourism and the effect it has on locals’ lives in cities like Lisbon, which has experienced an explosion of tourism in the past six years. I’m grateful to the whip-smart video team at Quartz for teaching me how to do this and I’m proud of how this turned out.
As you already know, I wrote about the dubious and viral popularity of celery juice (I also went on Canada’s CBC radio to talk about it).
I wrote about how flying with a severe, life-threatening food allergy is a completely arcane and unfair process.
My take: It would be great if Airbnb didn’t acquire HotelTonight, which is the only remaining website/app that makes booking a hotel room tolerable.
As a personal policy, I only espouse ~wellness tips~ that cost nothing and require minimal equipment and effort. Here’s one.
I was a guest on the BBC World Service show Tech Tent, talking about technology’s role in our lives and effect on our mental health. (Also lol to men who are professors at prestigious universities bragging about selling books without having to use social media. Good for you, my dude.)
Things I read
“Even when I was incredibly drunk and poor, the one thing I would never sell was my books.” (A A Gill) These archived House & Garden pieces are delicious. [House & Garden]
On viewing ambition as both a blessing and a personal curse. [The Cut]
On San Francisco’s horrifying (and very visible, palpable, confronting) caste system. [Wired]
On privileged westerners who are obsessed with Hindu spirituality only when it’s repackaged by other privileged westerners. [Quartz]
These paintings of nineties east London make me low-key emotional. [The Guardian]
How to be a digital flâneur. [Quartz]
Think how different the world would be if we believed the (well evidenced) fact that money stops adding to your happiness once you earn more than £50,000 per year. [The Guardian]
“On some cellular level, it will always be Friday evening, 8 p.m., alone at a messy desk.” [Medium]
There are countless things about Donald Trump to be repelled by, but his arbitrary capitalization habits are really up there for me. [NYT]
Things I heard (so many things this month!)
This podcast tracking the Theranos meltdown and the stunning, brazen fraud of Elizabeth Holmes is delicious. [ABC News]
Thanks to this interview, I have a huge girl crush on socialist, anti-austerity activist, single mom, and cookbook author Jack Monroe. [Under the Skin]
Is there a more charming man than Stanley Tucci? [Love Stories]
I loved hearing Deborah Francis articulate what she gained from not having children. Chiefly, the ability to be generous to more people who need it, rather than to your own offspring. [How to Fail]
Julie Snyder—the woman behind This American Life, Serial, S-Town and the entire narrative podcasting genre you love it—on how she does it. [The Longform Podcast]
I think Aaron Sorkin is a good embodiment of what’s good about American ambition and chutzpah, so it’s super interesting to hear him talk about American decline. [Marc Maron]
Lifestyle tip
Firstly, please donate to my sister’s fundraising effort to help victims of northern California’s Camp Fire, which has fallen out of media focus despite a situation with a lot of need.
Also, support your local butcher! Close readers of this newsletter will know that I am against food restrictions of any kind. However, this year I resolved to be more intentional about my meat intake (because, you know, climate change). This means I’m only cooking meat when it’s from my local butcher. I’m lucky to live near a great one, but even if you don’t, I think it’s possible to follow the same idea: Put a little effort (and a bit more money) into the process of buying meat, which means you will eat it less and enjoy it more.
Word soup
“A bar has a responsibility. It is part of the fabric of a community; a beacon of warmth, an old friend, a birthplace of dreams and an egalitarian refuge. We take our responsibilities seriously.” —St John Bread & Wine
“In the mornings he would walk…. At the start of a walk, alone or moving, the sun at his back or cold rain down his collar, he was more himself than under any other circumstance, until he had walked so far he was not himself, not a self, but joined to the world. Invisibly joined. Had a religion been founded on this, purely this, he would have converted….. Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot…. Your walking was a devotion.” —Elizabeth McCracken