I thoroughly enjoyed the opening article in the latest n+1, in which the editors review the environment in which we currently read journalism online. Sweeping in scope and full of humour and common sense, the central conceit is that Twitter is no longer a useful platform for discovering quality journalism:

Twitter was unproductive, depressing, and a big waste of time, but until recently it never made anyone feel quite this stupid. The Musk era has been defined by a relentless barrage of idiocy, which has seeped into the infrastructure. The sense of chaos, the eternal return of memes and controversies, the algorithmic de-emphasis on tweets that link out to anything other than tweets, the emergence of the most annoying people in new and surprising contexts (Bari Weiss and Musk: a true signature collab) — all of it is too much, especially when all one wants is interesting articles.

I left Twitter years ago. I also enjoy reading quality journalism, and this article resonated with me because I, too, found myself subscribing to Air Mail and Semafor and the London Review of Books and The New Yorker and the New York Times. And I, too, found that the pub walls changed the experience, not necessarily for the worse, and I, too, wonder whether quality journalism can survive like this. And it’s interesting to read a thoughtful, detailed critical analysis of these fleeting thoughts—even while not agreeing with every one of its points.

It’s worth a few minutes of your time.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.