What makes Medium worth reading is that you can find things here that DON’T FIT into publications. I read The Ringer. I enjoy the Ringer, but the Web is chock-o-block full of the stuff that the Ringer pumps out. Cable news has thousands of people doing the exact same thing as The Ringer. There were probably tens of thousands of people in the U.S. who were watching the NBA draft with the sole purpose of fashioning some content from it. All of that writing had to go through an editorial process. I’m not saying good things can’t come through that process. They can and they do, but, for the most part, the hot takes on the NBA draft end up with a sameness tainted by a whiff of desperation. It’s someone’s job, after all, to get you to read that stuff. Businesses are depending on your eyeballs.
In contrast, I like to read almost anything Lon Shapiro has to say about the NBA or sports. I don’t have much interest in sports statistics, but I do when Lon writes about them. I don’t know why. I don’t even care if I agree with him or not. Sometimes I fundamentally don’t understand what he is saying (when he gets to the fine points of tennis I don’t understand some of the terminology). What makes his comments and blog posts better than the ringer is… I don’t know what. They’re genuine? He’s funny? I like his other writing so I like them?
Same thing with Steve Bouchard’s TWITPOL. There are a lot of people who make their living riffing on politics. I find TWITPOL funnier than anything out there. Funnier than the late night comedians, funnier than SNL, etc., etc. I don’t know why. Part of my admiration is that I can’t believe that it is the work of just one guy. It is straight sauce. He lets it fly.
The beauty of reading blogs or comments is that you are picking at the detritus left outside of the editorial circle. There is a lot of noise. There is plenty of stupidity, but the serendipity is serendipitous, the weird is weird, and the funny is really funny.
As Medium gains more and more people and the need to make money begins to assert itself like a set of venture-capital thumbscrews, a lot of the joy has leached from the platform. There is a horrible sameness that grows like a shadow each time I refresh my feed. For the past couple of months it has been hard to find the joyful funny.
The Real Car Talk is an exception. It is really funny. It is beautifully written. I think it reads like vintage 1970s National Lampoon, but it is better because it doesn’t descend into the sexist and crude world view that so many of their great pieces sunk to.
The fact that it “doesn’t fit” is because it is unique and original. Maybe someone besides Bullshittist will come along and say they want to publish it. They might want to change the title or the picture, or something, and those changes may kill some of the goodness.
Bullshittist has found a lot of great things. I don’t mean to slag Medium publications. I’m a big fan of many of them.
In the meantime, I’m so thankful that you published it here. I hope it finds the audience it deserves.
