Nellie Bowles has published a book!

MONDAY, MAY 20, 2024

On balance, we disagree with Michelle Goldberg's reactions: Who the heck is Nellie Bowles? The foremost authority thumbnails:

Nellie Bowles 

Nellie Bowles is an American journalist. She is noted for covering the technology world of Silicon Valley. She has written for the English-language Argentine daily the Buenos Aires Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, The California Sunday Magazine, the technology journalism website Recode, the British daily The Guardian beginning in 2016, then for Vice News, The New York Times and most recently The Free Press.

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In 2021, Bowles along with Bari Weiss launched Common Sense on Substack. The publication changed names to The Free Press in 2022. The Free Press is now the top earning Substack with more than 630,000 total subscribers. Bowles is the company's head of strategy and writes a weekly column called TGIF.

Her story “The Sperm Kings Have a Problem: Too Much Demand” was turned into a feature-length documentary, produced by The New York Times and FX and came out in March 2024.

Her first book, entitled Morning After the Revolution, was released in May 2024 by Thesis, a new imprint of Penguin Random House.

Last Friday, Bowles appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher in connection with the publication of her book. To watch the Overtime segment, you can just click here.

We haven't read Bowles' book. The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has. 

Goldberg offers an assessment of Bowles' book in her new column for the Times. We'll offer our reactions to Goldberg's reactions, not to the Bowles book itself.

Goldberg starts by offering an overview of Bowles' book. Along the way, she offers an assessment we're inclined to credit, then becomes more negative.

Headline included, Goldberg's column starts like this:

Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It.

In her new book, “Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History,” Nellie Bowles, a former New York Times journalist grown disillusioned with both the mainstream media and the left, writes about the year 2020, when the combustible confluence of the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the prospect of Donald Trump’s re-election made politics and culture go “berserk.” She describes a liberal intelligentsia “wild with rage and optimism,” brimming with “fresh ideas from academia that began to reshape every part of society.” Her name for this phenomenon, often derided as “wokeness,” is the “New Progressivism,” and her book attempts, with varying degrees of success, to skewer it.

There is much about that febrile moment worth satirizing, including the white-lady struggle sessions inspired by the risible Robin DiAngelo and the inevitable implosion of Seattle’s anarchist Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Bowles dissects both in the book’s best sections. She seems to be inspired by the great works of 1960s and 1970s New Journalism about the absurdities of the counterculture, most famously Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” and Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” But “Morning After the Revolution” is undermined by Bowles’s lazy mockery and insupportable generalizations.

“At various points, my fellow reporters at major news organizations told me roads and birds are racist,” she writes. “Voting is racist. Exercise is super racist.” Even allowing for 2020’s great flood of social-justice click bait, these are misleading and reductive caricatures. It’s hardly revisionist history, for example, to point out that Interstates were tools of racial segregation.

Is Bowles' book really clogged with "lazy mockery and insupportable generalizations?" Not having read the book, we have no idea.

Our reaction is mixed with respect to the examples Goldberg provides. For example, is it true that "Interstates were tools of racial segregation?" 

As far as we know, yes, it is true—and this general situation has been widely noted.

On the other hand, did reporters at major news organization also "tell us that birds are racist?" Probably not, but we did question the journalistic judgment involved when major orgs—from the New York Times on down—offered front-page reports about the movement to rename various species of birds due to the racism of the ornithologists and naturalists whose names they currently bear.

That struck us as possibly a bit performative on the part of the news orgs in question. More on that general perception below.

We've raced right by the early comment by Goldberg (not by Bowles) with which we're inclined to agree. That's the comment in which she refers to "the risible Robin DiAngelo" and (with apologies) to "her white-lady struggle sessions" (Goldberg's term).

For ourselves, we'd skip that second mocking formulation. But we have found DiAngelo's antiracism ministry to be largely "risible" and presumably counterproductive. For that reason, we were glad to see Goldberg come out and use that short, non-gendered term.

That helps explain why we're inclined to disagree with where Goldberg seems to come out with respect to Bowles' book. 

As noted, Goldberg starts by saying that there's a lot that's worth satirizing in Blue America's reactions to the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. On balance, though, Goldberg thinks that Bowles overdoes it—and she ends up saying this:

There are aspects of the New Progressivism—its clunky neologisms and disdain for free speech—that I’ll be glad to see go. But however overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities. That energy has largely dissipated, right when we need it most, heading into another election with Trump on the ballot.

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Even if it could be sanctimonious and grating, I fear we’ll come to miss the progressive urgency that marked the Trump presidency. Bowles writes as if the uprisings of 2020 were sparked by anomie rather than real crises. She describes them with an analogy to allergy science: “When the area around a child is very well disinfected, her immune system will keep searching for a fight.”

In thinking about that period, I also tend to reach for health metaphors, but different ones. America reacted to Trump as if he were a novel pathogen and became inflamed. Now our immune system is exhausted, and the virus is returning stronger than ever.

On balance, we're inclined to disagree about "the New Progressivism." Here's why:

It seems to us that so much of the journalistic reaction was so blatantly performative—was so transparently faux; was so poorly executed on a journalistic basis—as perhaps to do more harm than good. 

One part of America "reacted to Trump"—but another large part of America largely reacted to us! All too often, their reactions may have made more sense than our outbursts of activism did.

The transparent phoniness of much that occurred may have done as much harm as good. Within the journalistic realm, much of the work in question struck us as transparently fake, and the technical journalistic incompetence routinely ran down like the waters of a mighty mountain stream.

A lot of what we progressives said and did is very hard to defend. Someday, we'll force ourselves to tell you about Al Sharpton's speech—and we have long admired Al Sharpton—and you'll perhaps have a better idea of what we mean.

Trump may be on the comeback road. How much of that tracks back to us?