Same, same but different

Why does it often feel like you're reading the same piece over and over again?

As a journalist, the trickiest question of the day is always: what do we say that’s new? We have a ‘peg’, that is to say a new release, or a new piece of data, but what about our angle is fresh? I recently realised that, as an editor, I am now receiving the same anniversary pitches for 30 years of films and albums that I was getting five years ago for their 25th anniversary. I dread to think of receiving them yet again 10 years from now, for their 40th.

Meanwhile celebrity interviews often contain, literally verbatim, the same quotes across several rival publications. Sometimes, while fact-checking a new interview, I have come across an interview the celebrity gave 10 years ago, giving the exact same quotes a decade on. With big cultural events, I’m reading the same headlines across a three-year cycle: this was a good year for women at the Brits, this was a bad year for women at the Brits, the Oscars have lost their way, does anyone care about the Golden Globes anymore? With every online ‘controversy’, I can predict the next day’s headlines, many of them beginning: “Why X is wrong about…”

This is inevitable, of course, when hundreds of publications are publishing hundreds of articles every single day. It’s not that writers’ and commissioners’ ideas are boring, it’s just that we are swimming in a deluge of content. I don’t blame celebrities for recycling the same old stories – if I were being interviewed about my life every two years across half a century I would absolutely do the same. In fact it’s not uncommon for a friend to smile patiently while I tell an enthusiastic anecdote, only to tell me they’ve already heard it on my podcast.

It is, to be honest, why I have been writing this Substack less frequently over the last year. As I consume more and more content via Substack and podcasts, it can sometimes feel like there is nothing left to say. There is discourse about everything, and there is discourse about the discourse, and the entire time you get the feeling that you’ve heard it all before. Even hot takes now come in handfuls, which is perhaps why, every now and then, a journalist is pushed to say something truly mad, as per this New York Times op-ed about Taylor Swift.

Which all makes me sound very curmudgeonly and divinely uninspired. I don’t have a solution, other than that there should be less content – she says writing content – and I should probably go and live in a shed off-grid for a month and throw my phone in the nearest river.

Perhaps for people who aren’t in journalism, and therefore aren’t required to read literally everything, this isn’t so much of a problem – you can curate a very tight, and perhaps very niche, media diet. And Substack – when it isn’t churning out endless pieces on how to make money on Substack – has been brilliant for that.

One of my favourite Substack newsletters is GIRLS by Freya India, who is writing truly original, considered essays about the struggles facing young women today – from the rise of therapy speak and loneliness to the problem with the cult of ‘self love’. In her most recent newsletter – a soul searching and philosophical conversation with fellow writer Paul Kingsworth – she explains the reason she reached out to Kingsworth: because he writes “with a deep concern for the human soul” rather than writing to create a personal brand.

As Freya then says: “I see a lot of people losing their souls to the demands of constant commentary and keeping up a public profile”. I was particularly struck by her contrasting the peaceful silence of a church with the noise of online:

“When I scroll through ‘X’ I feel my faith in the world, in other people, and in love, degrading. It’s hard to put into words, but I think of that feeling when you walk into a beautiful, dimly-lit church, where your soul feels a little lighter, where the world feels different—the exact opposite of that feeling is scrolling through TikTok. That’s the only way I can describe it. It’s doing the opposite to your soul. “

It is hard, though, to consider the soul when you’re also trying to pay your rent. A personal brand is indispensable to anyone trying to make it in the creative industry, and algorithms require constant feeding. We’re all just trying our best to play an increasingly difficult game, and so we have to comment, on everything, all the time.

But despite my grumbling, the idea that there is nothing left to say is preposterous. It just feels that way because such a cluster of people are all writing about such a small array of topics largely determined by a cyclical news agenda. The irony is that the editors who, like me, complain about there being ‘nothing new’ to write about are the ones who probably turn down eccentric pitches for being too ‘niche’. Because at the end of the day, niche things don’t do very well online. And the sweet spot – a niche way into a mainstream topic – is increasingly hard to find.

To end on a positive note, here are some other unique and wonderful pieces of writing I’ve enjoyed over the last month – you see, they are out there, I just need to get better at seeking them out:

If you think you can hold a grudge, consider the crow, by Thomas Fuller

I’ve been fascinated by animal vengeance since reading about the orcas who were ramming into boats, possibly led by matriarch orcas acting upon a personal grievance. Elephants have been suggested to do the same. I had no idea, until reading this New York Times longread, that crows can recognise faces, and grudges can run through generations of crow. One crow mob ‘victim’ recounts how the crows learned which bus he took home from work every day and attacked him daily until he moved. It reminds me of the two summers I spent fearing for my cat Nino’s life when he angered a family of Starlings, who then proceeded to dive bomb him every time he left the flat.

The Tarot of Songwriting 09 - The Hermit, by Laura Marling

A Pass the Aux reader recently recommended musician Laura Marling’s lovely and whimsical Substack. I loved this post about her hazy afternoon taking psychedelics before leaving the house without her phone, and, via instinct only, finding her way across fields and woods to the garden party her friends and husband were at. Considering I can barely get to my local tube station without Google Maps, I am extremely impressed.

Inside Israel’s fight to make fathers of its dead soldiers, by Jenny Kleeman

I’d never read anything about postmortem sperm retrieval before, so this Financial Times longread about its ethics, in the context of the uptick in PMSR following October 7, was fascinating. Kleeman writes: “In a country where many are descendants of Holocaust survivors, family continuation is deemed paramount. It’s assumed that everyone wants to have kids. Where pronatalism, grief and reproductive technology collide, the question of whether the young men who died would actually have wanted their sperm taken and used to create grandchildren for their bereaved parents is merely an afterthought.”

A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending, by Tad Friend

I’d briefly heard of rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz in 2022, when he was accused of trying to sell stolen pads of handwritten Eagles lyrics (the case was then dropped), but I knew next to nothing about the history of the rare book trade. Horowitz is its eccentric, and intimidating, kingpin, and this New Yorker profile reveals his ruthless and manipulative tricks. Take, for instance, how he tried to convince Tom Wolfe to sell him his archive: “Don’t leave the archive to your children. After you’re dead, it will all be even more poignant for them, because the material comes to embody their bygone beloved mother—all that’s left of you. It just becomes a sour, brackish, unpleasant experience.”

The Invisible Man, by Patrick Fealey

This Esquire piece was going viral on journo Twitter last week for all the right reasons: a heartbreaking, beautifully written personal essay from an award-winning former journalist and art critic, Patrick Fealey, who became homeless after suffering manic depression and being diagnosed with Bipolar I in 1997, age 29. The callous prejudice and harassment he encounters from the police and public is exhausting and begins to erode his own sense of self. Patrick writes: “The definition of homeless is we have no home, no place to go. If “I think, therefore I am” is true, we are people who are. We are, and we stand on this ground. If you deny us ground, you are denying us our “I am.” Isn’t that negation of our existence?” The essay has made such an impression that a GoFund Me was started to help Patrick – at the time of writing it has raised over $142,000.

A Hackney Story, by Max Daly

The Fence’s newsletters, along with Popbitch’s naughty missive, are my favourite emails of the week. It’s clever, irreverent and playful – Graydon Carter described it as “the illegitimate offspring of Private Eye and Evelyn Waugh, with a bloodline that stretches back to Gillray and Rowlandson.” See here its recent guide to the worst pubs in London and writer Ed Cumming taking another Ed Cumming out for lunch. But it also publishes some very thoughtful essays and investigations, such as this one on the history of Hackney’s murder mile. I highly recommend subscribing to its quarterly print magazine to support independent writing and see its illustrations.

She was a child Instagram influencer, her fans were grown men, by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Michael H. Keller

My jaw was on the floor the entire time reading this profile of child influencer Jacky Dejo, who, with her parents’ consent, was posting sexualised pictures of herself to her Instagram from the age of 13. She even founded her own photo-selling platform where teenage girls sell ‘racy’ images to grown men. She argues that she helps other young girls by giving them guidance on how to protect themselves in this dangerous online world, while achieving financial empowerment, and calls her critics “body haters”. It follows the New York Times’s earlier investigation into child influencers.

I Made Rachel’s English Trifle and Forced My Entire Family to Eat It, by Rachel Handler

This writer and I clearly shared the same professional existentialism last week. As Handler writes: “When my editor asked us if we had any ideas about how to cover Friends’ anniversary, I was briefly reminded of the chaotic meaninglessness of the universe. Everything about Friends had already been said, and would be said again, perhaps in five more years, then again five more years after that.” But this hilariously silly Vulture piece is proof that, actually, there is always something fresh to say if you think creatively enough.

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