one of my favorite ledes ever
Raphaelite uncanniness, Graydon's next party, the cerebral influencers shall inherit the earth...
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Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Orleans car crash conspiracy investigation: Worth The Read? (<- Rebranding this because it doesn’t feel right to make any corporate comms account contend with the “longass” descriptor” ) Hard yes. I had every intention to skip over this one while flipping through The New Yorker issue on a long train ride on Friday — the culture was feeling almost too PRK-saturated for a second there (my lobster too buttery, my steak too juicy, etc.) with the roll-out of his new book — but figured I’d at least skim the first few paragraphs to see if I could pick up any lede writing tips.
The story itself is very, very wild — if PRK hasn’t already sold the film rights on this one, I’m not above quitting my life to launch a production company and snag them myself. The reporting is phenomenal, too, but I most admired the way such a sprawling piece — which centers on a handful of principal characters, the trucking industry, personal injury law, post-Katrina NOLA economics, and an intricately choreographed scam where people are crashing cars into semi trucks on the highway on purpose — starts off with the widest lens possible.
Instead of, say, plunking you down in NOLA and introducing you to the shady stuntwoman-turned-personal-injury-lawyer or the main “slammer” who drives a cream Cadillac Escalade (the “meet the main character” lede), or beginning with a lecture on like, the history of insurance fraud through the ages (which would be very New Yorker), PRK first begins with an S tier version of the kind of intro you were taught in grade school to never attempt: Have you ever wondered what it would be like to crash into a tractor-trailer?
There’s a reason why so many of us had the instinct to start every elementary school essay with that kind of question: We implicitly know that good storytelling requires us to make contact first with the reader’s own neuroses and experiences before we can get going narratively. By writing a lede that essentially poses that question and then answers it with grisly, data-driven detail, PRK nails the universal horror that serves as the true spiritual driver of the story. Crazy, right? Yeah so there are people who do this on purpose! Let me explain… That’s how he gets you to care about the statistical anomalies around tractor-trailer crashes on a particular stretch of a particular interstate; by the time you, the reader, start connecting the dots about Interstate 10, your own intended commute is screwed. That subway stop has come and gone, baby, and you can’t stop reading.
(While writing the subject line for this newsletter, I almost went with this is the OBAA of lede-writing and then realized that both the Paul Thomas Anderson Oscar-winning movie and this piece belong in the same category of recent excellence in car-driven storytelling. You can’t tell me the American dream isn’t alive!)
For the record, I was on my way to The Met in hopes of seeing the Raphael exhibit, which art world friends warned me would be hopelessly mobbed by lines day and night. I’m happy to report (once I finally finished the piece and got off the train) that at 4:45pm last Friday, there was no line to get into the exhibit (though it was still pretty crowded). I was glad to have read Zachary Fine (the New Yorker’s new go-to art critic, post-Arn?)’s dispatch earlier, which included a helpful directive to make a beeline for the society portraits if you’re short on time.
It was funny, though. The paintings are so technically excellent that I got this unnerving feeling that I was looking at something AI-generated, when objectively I knew these were priceless Renaissance masterpieces. But there was something about Raphael’s total brushlessness (a technical term), the big cartoon-like eyes, the glitchy wrongness of the babies, the unearthly luminosity of all that glowy flesh... (Fine gets at this in his review as well: “A modern eyeball can handle only so much before it starts to derange itself in search of a single painterly quirk or sliver of personality.”) Better to rinse the retinas out in between each gaze by looking at the sketches and their pleasingly mortal traces.
Forget Influencers. Welcome to the World of the ‘Alternatively Influential,’ per Katie Deighton for The Wall Street Journal, which caught my eye for great use of the word demesnes (as in “tastemakers who have real clout in their own demesnes”). This is basically a follow-up to the Brigade story/effect, wherein talent agencies are starting to assemble rosters of “cerebral” talent — basically, influencers who come pre-loaded with cultural currency, taste, or a certain ideology, mass reach be damned.
Overall, it seems like a rather pleasant evolution of the influencer economy; if the “traditional” model of influencership required chasing virality via the social media machine so that you could build up a large enough audience to advertise against, the “alternative” strategy is based on amassing niche expertise or appeal to a specific (and ideally affluent) group of highly loyal followers. So it’s less a game of lowest common denominator, and more so a matter of understanding — than playing up — your edge.
To draw the connection between “quiet luxury” and taxes, Avery Trufelman does make you work for the answer (i.e. listen to a 58-minute talk with author Ray Madoff) but I promise it’s going to make you sound much smarter for your trouble.
I’ve been wondering what Graydon Carter is going to do now that Airmail has been taken off his hands; someone suggested to me recently that maybe he’d get more into the publishing world and start his own indie press, Tyrant Books style. After all, if last year’s tell-nothing memoir was any indication, he isn’t quite ready to burn real bridges or eschew society in any kind of interesting way.
Well, per The Hollywood Reporter, he’s apparently up for his biggest challenge of tastewashing (an instant classic Kyleism) yet: making Anthropic cool by hosting a Cannes party with CEO Dario Amodei. This isn’t a total surprise since the Airmail store is where Anthropic did that moronic Claude “thinking cap” pop-up last October (Graydon sold Airmail later that month). In some ways I do respect industry veterans who can’t stay away from the mix; in other ways I’m like, surely there are other ways to write off one’s Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc residency as a business expense. In other other other ways, finding out that Anthropic is also hiring a regular non-Graydon events lead for a salary of $400,000 sounds about right, seeing as the scarcest skill in Silicon Valley is the ability throwing a decent party. (Though Anthropic buying their way into cultural relevance sure makes the luxury fashion house takeover of every significant cultural event — looking at you, ever single brand on earth at Salone this past month — seem adorable, no?)
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The way PRK silenced the overexposed-to-his-face masses by dropping that piece the same week... a ten is speaking!!!!
SUCH a good close read of that lede