The New Kings Of Nonfiction (2007)

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You know that thing that a lot of millennials and Gen Xers do when they say something like, “How is 1996 simultaneously four years ago and also 29 years ago?” I’m sure you’ve seen or heard it. Playfully pretending to not understand how the passage of time works to avoid coming to terms with the fact that life is just an airport-style moving sidewalk toward death and our metaphorical baggage is just another type of figurative baggage. 

To be fair, the passage of time is tricky. Once you live enough years, how are you supposed to sort them all out and remember when things changed? You (and we) think this way now, and this way has enough solid logic behind it to make you assume that the previous way of thinking was a really long time ago. 

All that is to say, 2007 is a tough one to pin down. I would have assumed that a compilation of narrative nonfiction writing published in 2007 would hold up pretty well. Then again, a baby born the same day this particular compilation of narrative nonfiction, The New Kings of Nonfiction, was published graduated high school this year and hopefully has a better sense of what constitutes critical writing. 

For starters, the title was taken pretty literally. Of 14 stories featured, only two were written by women (Susan Orlean and Coco Henson Scales). That seems like a wildly antiquated selection process and an easily avoidable mistake. But beyond demographics, I’m pretty shocked (with the benefit of being halfway through my second decade as a professional writer and not a junior in high school like I was when this was published) by the inclusion of people who I think are flat out Not Good Writers. (The book was curated, edited and introduced by Ira Glass, host of “This American Life.” I’d like to think that Glass is someone who generally approaches things with his heart in the right place, but I guess that’s the whole 2007 of it all. Prisoner to the moment. I don’t know.)

You might say to that, well, I’m sure they’re better writers than you. To which, depending on my mood, I’d either respond, no, actually, you’re wrong or, OK, if a book is published calling me a “king” then I could handle someone with a book review blog saying I’m not a good writer. 

Let’s start with Malcolm Gladwell. When I was 23, I thought Malcolm Gladwell was a good writer. My brain sort of gets stuck in a knot working out two things: 1.) It’s OK to have liked bad writing when you’re 23 and 2.) When I happened to be 23, it seemed like everyone thought Malcom Gladwell was a good writer. 

^{Quick aside: Gladwell recently made headlines for saying incredibly bigoted things about an entire demographic of people. I had actually written this entire post before he said those things, and I really don’t have any interest in drawing attention to that sort of line of discourse. You have access to the same declining-in-effectiveness Google that I do. I’m going to stick to Gladwell as a hack writer and not write about Gladwell as a hack commenter-of-society’s culture wars.}

To say that Gladwell’s writing is like an Intro to Sociology course seems like an apt insult, but an Intro to Sociology professor would help students avoid the lazy conclusions reached by Gladwell. The greatest example you’ll see of this is a story from his 2013 book, David and Goliath, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, about Vivek Ranadivé, a Silicon Valley billionaire, who, in Gladwell’s telling, overcomes his inexperience in the basketball realm to coach his daughter’s 12-and-under team to championship success through sheer, you guessed it, disruption. 

How, you ask? By implementing a full-court press, a strategy never considered in the ranks of California’s youth basketball coaching circles. 

Having this summarized for you may have had the same effect as reading the story a few years after its release did for me: like you are losing your goddamn mind. Perhaps, and I could be wrong here, coaches were not putting physical pressure on 10-year-olds trying to get the ball up court because it is still a point when the players are developing their skills and learning the game, and any reasonable coach of a small child would adhere to the idea that winning is not all that important at such a young age. In other words, the other coaches were not running a full-court press because they’re not assholes. 

The same year that this story was published, Ranadivé purchased the Sacramento Kings. The “David and Goliath” arc was basically PR by a lazy thinker, who was willing to perpetuate the myth that tech CEOs are successful because of their innovative thinking and not their ability to extract resources, hoard wealth and, by and large, profit by turning things that already work into things that work in a different and often worse way. The only person Ranadivé appears smarter than is Gladwell.

Since he bought the team, the Sacramento Kings’ win/loss record is 386-494. In a decade, the team has only had two winning seasons. One of these years they’re going to have to consider the full-court press. 

*To be fair, the Gladwell selection in this compilation is not quite as egregious. He seemed to be a little more eager to prove himself in 2007. 

Also featured are Chuck Klosterman, who managed to make himself a best-selling music/culture writer despite going deep into his forties seemingly without ever consuming any piece of culture directly made by Black people, and Michael Lewis, a still celebrated author but one accused of building entire frameworks off of lies exploiting his book’s primary subject. 

One story in The New Kings of Nonfiction I did indeed feel deeply: a chapter excerpted from Bill Buford’s book Among Thugs in which Buford embeds with violent soccer hooligans in Europe. The chapter is vivid and curious and had me thinking about the current rise of American and global fascism and the subtle differences between, for lack of a better word, sincere violence and the violent posturing that often ends with the same result.

But I think I’ll go check that book out from the library and review it later. I spent too much space here being mad about Malcolm Gladwell. 

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My Favorite Three-Song Stretch From My Favorite Radio Show

Do y’all realize how good Freddie King was? Like, do you really, really understand? Listen to the entire two-hour episode here.

‘Til next time buckaroos…