The Social Stock Market

A lesson on how to treat people

The release of Glass Century, my new novel, is nearly upon us. I was extremely glad to see that the Wall Street Journal declared it “absorbing . . . charged with heart-in-throat suspense” and added that “the amplitude of Glass Century is also its greatest strength. The people it depicts are as textured and as durable as their city.” The Brooklyn Rail, likening Glass Century to Richard Price’s later work, said it was “sparkling” and “a complex portrait of greater New York over the last half-century.” More reviews will be forthcoming.

Please preorder the novel! Preorders are everything. Unfortunately, my launch party at P&T Knitwear has sold out. But please join me for a reading on May 8th at Matthew Gasda’s Brooklyn Center for Theatre research. Party afterward to follow. I’ll be reading, too, with the legendary John Pistelli. Secure your tickets now because they will sell out very fast.

If you’re in Philadelphia on May 12th, come out to Head House Books to see me read with the great Adrian Nathan West. Same as always: get your ticket because they’ll go fast.

And if you’re interested in having me in your city, just email ross@rossbarkan.com. I can check and see if a visit is possible. It’s fun to get around America.

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There’s a paragraph in Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, his polarizing if riveting account of a life in letters in midcentury America, that’s always stuck with me. “Every morning,” he wrote in the 1967 memoir, “a stock-market report on reputation comes out in New York. It is invisible, but those who have eyes to see can read it. Did so-and-so have dinner at Jacqueline Kennedy’s apartment last night? Up five points. Was so-and-so not invited by the Lowells to meet the latest visiting Russian poet? Down one-eighth. Did so-and-so’s book get nominated for the National Book Award? Up two and five-eighths. Did Partisan Review neglect to ask so-and-so to participate in a symposium? Down two.” All of this is, of course, amusing, and only meaningful if you know anything about literary institutions and figures that have been forgotten by most ordinary people—Jackie Kennedy, who worked as a book editor and would occasionally date writers like Philip Roth, being the exception. It’s a dynamic, though, that lasted, at the very minimum, for another half century. Though no one in 2010s media and literary circles talked of a social stock market, one obviously existed. You knew, subtly, if you were up or down or just stalled out. Those of rising stock were poached by larger outlets, asked to appear on television, and offered book deals. It was the era of the superstar digital reporter, the select few who could harness Twitter and rapidly amass enormous followings in the manner of Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post and Olivia Nuzzi of New York Magazine. On the literary side, where I was much more of a nonentity—I would publish my first novel in 2018 to little attention—it was clear who the stars were, both the established writers ascending to a new plane (Colson Whitehead, Rachel Kushner) and the twenty-somethings with million-dollar breakouts (Emma Cline, Brit Bennett).

The goal, for me, was to climb either ladder. Novels were my greatest passion but I was a staff reporter at the New York Observer who wouldn’t have minded regular Times bylines. My own stock, I knew, was decent; I was well-regarded as a strong local political reporter. What it wasn’t, though, was meteoric. As a reporter, I was not in tremendous demand. In my mid-twenties, the hottest new club to join was BuzzFeed, and the digital upstart never gave my phone a ring. Neither did Vice, another popular insurgent, nor long forgotten but highly trafficked websites like Mic. I remember mostly what it was like to occupy a respectable tier that brought with it no special glitz, no invitations to CNN unless I was literally quitting my job at the newspaper owned by Jared Kushner. Within the Observer, I was not a superstar, either. I remember, tentatively, approaching the books editor to ask about possibly reviewing a novel in the future. The editor, who bore a striking resemblance to Harry Potter, eyed me with disdain, and neither allowed me to review a book nor returned my emails. My stock simply wasn’t high enough.

What I do recall about that time is who, above me in the journalistic and literary hierarchies, treated me well—and who did not. I give credit to people like Michael Powell, the New York Times columnist who would patiently answer my emails whenever I sent them (I wanted advice on how to write about politics.) A few other higher-level writers were less generous. A lesson I took from this time and applied to my career, as I entered my thirties, was that it was important to not just network and attempt to make connections with those further along than me but to also be receptive to those who may, for the time being, lack my clout. My stock, today, is higher than it was a few years ago, and I’m conscious of that. At the same time, I know what it is like to start from the relative bottom—I’ve faced too many rejections on the article-pitching and book-submitting front to count—and I know what it means to be offered a helping hand by someone who has more experience. A little bit does indeed go a long way.

At the same time, there’s a self-interested reason to be kind and generous to those who haven’t yet ascended in this invisible stock market: you really have no idea where they’ll end up. Snub the neophyte today, treat him lousy, and he’ll remember—and one day, he might lord above you. Careers evolve. Much of this stock market, of course, is changing. Literary prestige is dying and the National Book Award nominees can’t strut their stuff like they used to. Even a Substack subscriber count isn’t an accurate enough gauge: there are writers here with followings of a few thousand who punch well above their weight, and those at fifty or sixty thousand who have plainly seen better days. As the prestige economy withers and the Podhoretzian conception of the literary stock market disappears, the environment is blasted open. And this means it pays to be nice—not in a false way, but in supporting those you believe are talented. That’s been my philosophy. I won’t pay a fake compliment, and I won’t boost writers I don’t like. If I do enjoy someone’s work, I try to let them know and promote it how I’d like. This is good practice, both from a moral and strategic standpoint. Treat others how you’d like to be treated. Remember, in any endeavor, it’s better to have allies.

All of this leads back to Substack, where I’m writing this. Is there too much back-scratching? False flattery? Self-satisfaction? That’s a complaint I hear, though I’m not sure I agree with it. Operating, too, in the world of mainstream media—and observing, as much as I can, the literary landscape—I can say with some authority that all the pathologies bemoaned on Substack are found there in spades. In the 2010s, reporters would swarm Twitter and boost their friends all day. They’d shun their enemies, usually reporters or pundits who espoused opinions they didn’t like. Twitter was the playground, and also where jobs were dispensed. Grow popular on Twitter and expect an editor to reach out asking you to pitch them. Book deals could be had there if you managed enough clout. That’s all gone now, and some of the energy has migrated to Substack, if in a fashion I find far more pleasurable. There’s less sniping and bile on Substack, as well as less naked careerism. A Substack writer wants a following, and maybe money, but the vast majority of them aren’t desperately hustling in a shrinking media ecosystem, straining to get ahead. The spirit is calmer.

If there is a stock market of newsletter writers with larger followings and different colored checkmarks, it’s all deemphasized from Twitter’s heyday. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, he stripped the various journalists, pundits, and quasi-celebrities of their blue verification badges, or checks. I was one of those “blue checks” who lost the magic badge. I had received one through my time at the Observer, where an editor applied for us. It was around 2014 or so, and having one didn’t seem remarkable. As the decade wore on, the blue check took on a quasi-mythic status, with certain users extolling it while others, increasingly conservative, bemoaned what they saw as a left-liberal aristocracy. (Never mind that many conservative journalists, pundits, and politicians had blue checks.) It was the sort of thing, by around 2019, you could use to impress people, which felt odd. Musk did the media a great favor when he destroyed the Twitter stock market and obliterated the petty contests for prestige that took place there every day. Now there’s Bluesky, which I joined and left, and Threads, which has little relevance and exists mostly because anyone who created a Threads account can only delete it if they also delete their Instagram. X just doesn’t mean much. My sense is that YouTube and Substack are going to be extraordinarily dominant over the next decade. YouTube will control a growing share of TV, film, music, and podcasting output, and Substack will hold enormous sway in the realm of the written word. Writers who want audiences—writers who do not have them already—will likely need a Substack presence of some kind and book publishers will have to promote seriously within the platform. Media organizations that ignore Substack entirely will have less reach than those that embed there. I am not making a value judgement; I’m simply stating reality as I see it. We’re in the early innings of a new kind of revolution.