'The Atlantic' Visits Me at Home, and I Win an Award

This has been quite a day at The Honest Broker

This has been a whirlwind day at The Honest Broker. And I’m only halfway through it.

I woke up to a deluge of emails. Well, that happens daily—everybody and their dog know my private email address—but it was a flood of Biblical proportions today.

The emails were in response to a feature article about me in The Atlantic. It went live this morning.

I’m depicted in quite a surprising way.

I tend to think of myself as a cheery, upbeat bloke. But I’m a bit scary in this profile.

The article begins:

Last year, I visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.

He welcomed me into his suburban-Texas home and showed me to a sunlit library. At the center of the room, arranged neatly on a countertop, stood 41 books. These, he said, were the books I needed to read.

The display included all seven volumes of Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ; both volumes of Oswald Spengler’s World War I–era tract, The Decline of the West ; and a 2,500-year-old account of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, who “was the first historian to look at his own culture, Greece, and say, I’m going to tell you the story of how stupid we were,” Gioia explained.

Gioia’s contributions to this lineage of doomsaying have made him into something of an internet celebrity. For most of his career, he was best-known for writing about jazz. But with his Substack newsletter, The Honest Broker, he’s attracted a large and avid readership by taking on contemporary culture—and arguing that it’s terrible. America’s “creative energy” has been sapped, he told me, and the results can be seen in the diminished quality of arts and entertainment, with knock-on effects to the country’s happiness and even its political stability.

He’s not alone in fearing that we’ve entered a cultural dark age. According to a recent YouGov poll, Americans rate the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports…

You can read more at this link.

I will have some things to say about this article in the near future.

For a start, am I really so pessimistic? I definitely have more positive perspectives on culture today than these opening paragraphs indicate. (And in fairness to author Spencer Kornhaber, he does admit that later in the article.)

I also plan to share with subscribers my diagnosis and forecast related to cultural decline—yes, there are alarming symptoms! I’ll lay out the genuine threats artists and other creative people face right now.

But I will also talk about ways we can respond, and maybe even prevail. There are legit grounds for optimisim. Our glass really might be half full.

This gives me an excuse to encourage readers to take out a premium subscription. That’s the best way to support my work, and to ensure you have access to all future articles and updates.

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If you want to support my work, the best way is by taking out a premium subscription (for just $6 per month).

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This morning I also learned that I’ve been awarded the Robert Palmer-Helen Oakley Dance Award for Excellence in Writing.

The award is decided by a vote of the members of the Jazz Journalists Association. For me, that’s a big deal. Few things in the writing (or any) trade are more gratifying than the support of one's peers. So I want to take this opportunity to thank them for this honor.

By the way, I also believe that this is a validation of the Substack platform. Other nominees have institutional affiliations with the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and other powerful media outlets. It’s clear to me that indie and alternative journalism is finally approaching parity with these insitutions in terms of reach and influence.

I’ll have more to say about all these subjects in the near future.