I've written some version of this before, but entertainment, media, and academia-worlds into which the Harper's letter would fit-are more consumer-driven than they have ever been. +

In the entertainment world, social media has brought people nearer their favorite actors, writers, and musicians than a handwritten letter-which can be easily filtered out by an entertainer's security detail, or simply thrown out-could.

In turn, consumers who care enough about Jenny Slate's next film or Angie Thomas's next book to DM them or leave a long Facebook post drive decision-making. There's a Sorkinism that kinda gets at this: "Decisions are made by those who show up."

So when Jenny Slate speaks solemnly about race and privilege, maybe she really is genuinely jarred by what she is hearing from fans. Find a way to ask her!

Similarly, today's students are being saddled with more debt than I ever had for my fancy-pants schools, and I'm not even 40 yet! These kids are entering campuses from an America in which their parents may've struggled to find a job or recover savings during an economic crash. +

Or maybe their parents got new jobs, re-couped some money, then lost both AGAIN during a freaking deadly pandemic, and what are their schools saying to them? These young people are grasping for some kind of stake in their institutions. +

This leads me to the various campus flare-ups over speech. When I think of all the things I stopped and couldn't stop as an RA-drug abuse, car accidents, vandalism-I think we need to allow the young to be wrong in ways that are not extremely dangerous.

I'd rather have a kid disrupt a lecture than drive drunk, but that doesn't mean you don't take the kid aside after the lecture.

On the matter of young people taking media jobs after years of campus activism: newsrooms have always been loud and argumentative. They should be. They must be. +

There was a time, right after 9/11 until the mid-2000s, that most major print & TV newsrooms leaned toward US military interventionism. Skeptics and anti-interventionists (Ashleigh Banfield, Phil Donahue) caught elbows, real, career-changing elbows.

So, do newsrooms go through stretches where it feels like LOTS of members are forcefully agreeing about one thing or one set of things? Sure.

I'm thinking of some reporting by the great Mara Gay about black voters' general comfort with Joe Biden. There ARE differences between those voters' view of him and that of many younger reporters and activists to which social media has introduced me. +

However, I think the main difference is one of language instead of goals. "Woke" and "just plain aware" mean the same thing. "Defund the police" and "spread resources around so teachers needn't buy erasers & the cops don't get tanks" mean the same thing.

So, here's an outside-the-box idea: pay your reporters to travel! All the time! Even when they don't have an assignment! Send them on one of those wonderful overnight Amtrak trips Caity Weaver took. I'm not saying lots of reporters aren't well-traveled, but it's always needed.

Finding money would take some finessing. Maybe donors pony up. Maybe useless, shallow sections (like the new-agey "better living" shit) are eliminated from papers and news sites.

Related to this thread, here are some tips for social media use:

-Know who you are before you sign up, so there's little chance soc. media plays a big role in defining your identity.
-Don't sign up for its own sake or due to peer pressure; know what you want before you do.

Ten years ago, I wanted to tell brief cat jokes on this platform, and, well...