Normally, when someone is obviously, painfully wrong on a topic, it offers a warning to take that person’s other opinions with a bucketful of salt. But, occasionally, it can serve as a bullshit offset, a sink into which you can pitch all your wrongness to keep it from contaminating the rest of your thinking.
Thanks, John Gruber, for showing us how it’s done.
As a kind of prelude to what I’m going to discuss in terms of identity and the stuff of identity, I’ll point to this fine New York Times Magazine piece by Gershom Gorenberg on proving one’s Jewishness in order to marry in Israel. The pivoting grafs:
Trust — or lack of it — is the crux. Zvi Zohar of Bar-Ilan University explained to me that historically, if someone said he was a Jew, “if he lived among us, was a partner in our society and said he was one of us, we assumed he was right.” Trust was the default position. One reason was that Jews were a persecuted people; no one would claim to belong unless she really did. The leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Israel in the years before and after the state was established, Avraham Yeshayahu Karlitz (known as the Hazon Ish, the name of his magnum opus on religious law), held the classical position. If someone arrived from another country claiming to be Jewish, he should be allowed to marry another Jew, “even if nothing is known of his family,” Karlitz wrote.
Several trends have combined to change that. In an era of intermarriage, denominational disputes and secularization, Jews have ceased agreeing on who belongs to the family, or on what the word “Jew” means.
Among close communities, and especially among those with long histories of discrimination and persecution, trust is the engine of belonging. Trust is bestowed first by the say-so of trusted others, and when that’s unavailable, the fall-back is to documentation of heritage, lineage, an extrinsic point of connection. To marry in Israel, it’s not enough to be a Jew: someone with authority has to declare you Jewish.
That be itself seems problematic: being oscillates, depending upon the point from which identity is constituted. It works the other way, too, with those who apply for a visa to the land of their ancestors to be told by the consulate that they have always been citizens. (At college, I had a friend who was born and raised in Britain, but held an American passport through a parent: when visiting the US, it amused him that regardless of his accent and birthplace, the border agents would always say ‘welcome home’.)
On one level, it’s situational, a matter of utility. Not being able to prove one’s Jewishness to the satisfaction of Israel’s rabbinical judges is only an impediment to those who wish to marry or take advantage of the Law of Return; it won’t prevent you from holding a Passover seder. (Though having your identity questioned in such circumstances might have its own consequences.) Similarly, that grandfathered claim to a passport or to sporting eligibility only becomes part of who you are should the need or opportunity arise.
For the most part, we still function on trust and tokens, but the changing character of our interactions outpaces both the formal and informal structures in which they are used.
Long (and long-delayed) discussion on ‘the stuff of identity’ coming.
But to get back in the mood for writing, it’s a happy coincidence that the latest spat over Nick Denton’s editorial methods appears at the same time as another brief profile of Felix Dennis, something the media desks seem to write up on a semi-regular basis.
Dennis changed American magazine publishing in the late 90s. It was obvious from Maxim‘s first few British issues that it was doomed to fourth place in a market saturated by lad mags; it was also clear that Americans were buying import copies of Loaded with nothing of their own to compare. Conventional wisdom was that the format wouldn’t work: you had your serious gentlemen’s monthlies, the sporty-outdoors mags, the aging hipster mags, the pinkish Details in post-Truman decline. All neatly stratified and commodified. Instead, Maxim’s US launch in 1997, driven by Dennis and a no-bullshit British staff, immediately made GQ and Esquire look fusty, and put Details out of its misery.
Of all the lad mags, Maxim was the one you’d least have expected to succeed in the US, based upon content and market positioning. But that misses one key element: Felix Dennis. Ten years on, it outsells all its US competitors combined, most of which now imitate some or all of its house style. (Details is back on the shelves, though in name only.) As for Dennis himself, he’s no longer at the helm, predicting the slow decline of print mags; that didn’t stop him from getting around $250m for offloading his American titles last year. (Translation: even more time to spend writing doggerel in Mustique. As a poet, he’s a great magazine publisher.)
That’s your model for understanding Nick Denton and his American blog menagerie, his treatment of writers, his PPV earnings model, his zest for publicity. (The comparison is inexact: if Denton writes poetry, he keeps it to himself; his prose sings like a goose.)
All done with complete unnerving honesty. Which you have to admire — from a safe distance.
Update: Denton’s made the comparison himself. (Note to self: 2003 and Kinja seems like a long time ago.) But the report presents it simply in terms of Maxim‘s content, not the wider aspects of how both Dennis and Denton seem to view publishing.