In this episode, Kat Rosenfield discusses the interplay between her work in journalism and fiction writing, exploring themes of culture, cancel culture, and the importance of preserving beauty in a chaotic world. She reflects on her journey as a writer, her experiences in the young adult fiction community, and the dynamics of societal expectations surrounding sex and gender. The conversation culminates in a call to embrace beauty and normalcy in everyday life. The Karol Markowicz Show is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Tuesday & Thursday.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Marktiz Show on Imeartradio.
My guest today is Kat Rosenfield, columnist and the Free
Press and author of six novels, including the soon to
be released How to Survive in the Woods.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
So nice to have you on.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Kat, Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
So you write columns at Free Press, but you're also
a fiction writer, and I find those two things to
be very different from each other. Do you find that
they're a completely different skill set? Like I could not
write fiction at all, and I can write columns like
standing on my Head? So do you see a difference
between them or are they kind of the same category
(00:40):
to you?
Speaker 4 (00:40):
I mean, I want to say, like, don't sell yourself short.
You may find someday that there's a novel inside of you.
I think of fiction writing and the journalism and the
culture writing that I do as approaching the same set
of questions from different angles in different ways, and so
to me, they inform each other. I'm very interested in
trying to describe what I'm seeing in the world and
(01:03):
trying to understand the world, and I think that journalism
and fiction offer two different ways, too, different lenses through
which to do that, but.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
There's a lot of interplay there.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I guess I could see that.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I just feel like it's a completely different style of
writing that I I'm not telling myself short, I just
know I can't do it. So I see my own
brand as just be normal, And you know, that's sort
of where where I feel like my writing comes from.
And I see you very similarly, especially where the topics
(01:33):
of sex and gender are concerned. Like, I think a
lot of your columns are like, just be normal about sex.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Do you feel like that's true or is there more?
Speaker 4 (01:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
I wouldn't say that I'm as prescriptive about it as that.
I try mostly to stay on the like is side
of the ISA distinction. I'm not really interested in telling
people how to live or what to do. But when
it comes to things like sex, I do think that
I frequently end up just pointing at something that is
true and a little bit inconvenient.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Which is that we got rid of a lot of.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
The traditional strictures and structures surrounding sex, and you know,
there were good reasons for doing that, and then maybe
there were some not some good reasons for doing that.
You know, I would say like feminism, women's liberation. Good
reason for doing it, just the urge to burn down
everything old Maybe not such a good reason. But the
upshot of all of it, you know, whatever the original
(02:30):
motivations were, is that we dismantled something that was a
sort of a Chesterton's fence. It was performing a function
in society, and we didn't replace it with anything. And
now we're sort of flailing around trying to reinvent new
rules on the fly, and we don't really know what
to do, and it's not going very well. So when
it comes to things like sex, yeah, I think that
we have gotten into this weird place where there's this
(02:52):
expectation about how it's going to go, especially for people
who are inexperienced and young, and it's just sort of
understanding their sexuality for the time that is not aligned
at all with reality or how things work for most people.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Interesting. I love telling people what to do.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
I don't understand at all not telling people what to do.
I think that's also part of my brand. So how
did you get into writing about this or how did
you find this?
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Do you feel like this is your beat? I guess
I should start with.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
That culture is my beat.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Every time someone says, like, what exactly do you write
about it, I'll paraphrase and rather steal from Diddyon and say,
I'm just writing to understand what I see and what
it means. I'm very interested in how we treat each
other as people who we are to each other, and
increasingly I'm getting interested in sort of the moral questions
of what we owe to each other. The word morality
(03:44):
I used to shy away from a lot more, but
I'm rediscovering that it's useful when talking about, you know,
interpersonal relationships or the state of the human race. And
So how did I get into writing about this particular
things that I write about now? I actually really owe
(04:06):
in large part to having been a young adult fiction
writer at a time when a lot of the things
that came into the cultural mainstream around i want to say,
twenty nineteen, twenty twenty that really broke forth in what
we think of as like the Great Awokening, which I'm
using scare quotes away. I was in the young adult
fiction community as an author, and young adult fiction is
(04:29):
where a lot of kind of wacky stuff that eventually
broke out mainstreams started to incubate early and I saw
it happening. I saw this very sensorial, censorious, very like
angry and sort of weaponized social justice rhetoric starting to
take effect. Everybody was like intently focused on politics, as
(04:52):
that they were a proxy for character. And I said
something about this really foolishly apparently.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Immediately got canceled.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
Basically, yeah, but you know what happened there was as
I mean, personally, it's not fun to be canceled. It's
you know, one of the more excruciating experiences you can
have as an adult. But journalistically, it was very interesting
to me that this happened, and I got very curious
about the dynamics that fuel something like this, you know,
that make people so afraid of somebody just observing.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Things that are you know, true in their community.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
And different from what they're observing.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
That's really the problem is that you had a perspective
that they didn't share and that couldn't be allowed and
that needed to be immediately put down.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
How did you get out of it? Like, how did
you recover?
Speaker 4 (05:42):
It took a few years, but the thing that happened
there where I did not write another young adult fiction novel.
I haven't written one since that was twenty seventeen, so
that part of my life did effectively end because the
community kind of ostracized me and it made.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
It difficult for me to be there.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
But the fact that it was journalistically interesting to me
that had happened made me want to investigate it more deeply,
and I ended up writing about not specifically my cancelation,
because I think that's kind of boring, but about the
dynamics holistically that caused something like this to unfold into
(06:21):
from a moment where descent is considered intolerable into a
full blown witch hunt.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
And I wrote about that.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
For Vulture and this piece called the Toxic Drama of
Why Twitter, and I wrote about this book.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
I remember this, Yeah, yeah, that was twenty seventeen.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
This book Got the Black Witch was sort of my
case study for how one of these campaigns to destroy
somebody who's considered to have run a foul of the
community's political pieties in some way. I did an examination
of that. I talked to a bunch of people, and
that piece just went wildly viral, and I realized at
that point that I had stumbled onto something that not
(06:54):
only did I find interesting, but that.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Other people found interesting. To read about.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, because I think twenty seventeen, you know, it wasn't
really a thing yet. I think twenty twenties, early twenty
twenties is really where cancel culture got going. Maybe in
the YA world, that's where it was happening, like you said, originally,
but it wasn't a widespread thing yet. I wish I
had the date, But when was the whole I forgot
(07:19):
the girl's name, but has blank landed yet? The thing
that yeah, Justine Siko, has Justine landed yet?
Speaker 3 (07:26):
I think that was twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen, It
was earlier. It was early on. Yeah, you know, you.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
Had these sort of emergent dynamics how we were treating
each other on social media. People were starting to realize
that it was an amazing tool for public shaming, and
then in communities that had gotten very like politically orthodox,
it was used as a method of not just shaming,
but shunning, you know, ostracization, professional destruction.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Yeah, she got.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Fired upon landing because she had made a joke about
going to Africa and hoping she doesn't get and she
wasn't like a public figure or anything. It wasn't it
wasn't like your congressman said this, it was just some
lady on Twitter.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Yeah, I mean even worse than that. It was a joke.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
Actually that was intended to be self depreciating and at
her own expense. She was trying to make a joke
about her own white privilege. And that was such an
interesting example of how the people who end up getting
just really bitten the hardest by this type of dynamic
are the ones who subscribe to it already. You know,
(08:30):
they're already trying to apologize for their privilege or whatever
it is, and that makes them that much more susceptible
to being destroyed by it.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
I've written about this a lot, where there was only
so much, for example, that this cancel culture thing could
do to conservatives, like how are you going to cancel?
Ben Shapiro, Like, I don't like where you said, you know,
canceled It wouldn't matter. But they really did go after
liberals more than anybody else because they were the easiest
to take down because they already believed in a lot
of it.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Did you always want to be a writer?
Speaker 4 (09:00):
Stumbled backwards into it? I always liked to write, but
when I graduated from college, I needed to make a living,
and I didn't really understand writing as a thing that
was remunerative in any way.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
I had just had this image of somebody like a
in a.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
Turret in a tower, wearing fingerless gloves, like typing and starving.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
So I started out actually as a publicist.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
And I have never been more terrible at a job
in my life. Publicity, I think, is in many ways
the option of journalism, which I think of as a
truth seeking enterprise. Publicity is about trying to like tell people,
you know, convince people that a bad thing is good
and just the story.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
You want told bad but yes, you want them to
tell the story you are away.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Yes exactly.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
You're trying to manipulate the narrative instead of uncover the truth.
And you know, journalism, I think is about uncovering the truth.
I'm much more comfortable on the other side of things.
I was such so a terrible publicist. It's like indescribable.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
What was bad about it?
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Like, did you feel like it was hard to kind
of cold call people? I also did pr in the
early days of my employment, but I didn't love calling
people on the phone.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
But other than that, yeah, I mean, that was the
era of the cold call before everything went digital, and
I did get yelled at on the phone, yeah, a
few different people.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
What else was I bad at?
Speaker 4 (10:25):
Just you know, that type of social interaction, having to
hype something up.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
I found it really really exhausting.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
And that was on top of office culture, which just
generally was not a great fit for me. I've always
been meant to be in the turret with the typewriter.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
As it turns out, I like that.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Well. One of the people that yelled at me when
I was in PR was Fred Dicker. He was a
journalist in New York. I guess he covered state politics
and he was the scariest person to call. And now
we're friends and he's been on the show. So oh,
life can comfortll circle.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
I love that. I wish I could remember the names
of somebody who me, but oh, he.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Was the scariest.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
So I'd never forget Fred Dicker for sure. We're going
to take a quick break and be right back on
the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
I think when I met you in New York? Am
I crazy? Or did you do yoga teaching?
Speaker 3 (11:18):
I do? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (11:19):
I do?
Speaker 4 (11:20):
Still yeah, yeah, less than I do or less than
I did. Rather, I was prior to the pandemic, teaching
between ten and fifteen classes a week, and now I'm
down to two because it's it takes a lot of
time I prefer to be writing. It's you know, a
better use of my time to be writing. And also
as I go deeper into middle age, I find that
(11:42):
making a living with my body is like I make
it sound like I'm actually a prostitute, but.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
It's hard, you know, it's grueling, it's.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Exhausted living with my body.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
I like that though.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
I like the way that sounds, even though it might
be questionable to some people.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Yeah, so you do still do it, but I do still.
I find that it's interesting because yoga teaching is actually
an example of what people originally meant to describe when
the term emotional labor was coined, where it's you're managing
people's moods. It's a in some sense as a service
(12:19):
oriented position. And I really unironically.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Love that about it.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
I Yeah, I love you know, the you know, being
able to kind of hold the energy in a room.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I sound very woo woo right now, but I get it.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
Yeah, yoga is my community. I love everybody who is there.
The studio where I work is within walking distance of
my house. So I feel like this is this very embodied,
physical and other person focused thing that I do that
allows me to keep a foot in the real world and.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
To just be normal, like you were.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
Just which I do is important, even if it's not
my ethos as a writer, it is kind of my
ethos as a person.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
So yeah, yeah, And you give off this very calm,
peaceful vibe. Nothing to you, I feel like you really
radiate that for sure. What do you worry about switching
to something completely negative?
Speaker 4 (13:13):
Oh God, I worry about This is a weird thing,
but it's something I've been thinking about a lot, trying
to keep the space around me beautiful when I feel
like it is trying to like empty the ocean with
a teaspoon. This is I wasn't expecting to talk about this,
(13:34):
so it may make it a little bit galaxy brained,
But I've been thinking a lot about the work of
preserving beauty, which is I think, a kind of a small,
c conservative way to view the world, you know, understanding
that life is precious.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
I think a lot, for instance, about like the.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
Trees in the town where I live, and how people
are always trying to cut them down because they're inconvenient
in some way. And I'm always hoping that nobody will
cut the trees down because they're beautiful, and you know,
it takes a really really long time to grow a
new one. You can't just like willy nilly destroy things.
And I feel like there it takes so many people
(14:12):
of my mindset to make a dent against the impulses
of just one person who doesn't share that mindset, who
tends towards destruction, or who wants to create ugliness. And
so yeah, this is like the kind of big existential
thing that I worry about. I feel like I'm fighting
a losing battle against people who want to make the
(14:33):
world ugly on purpose.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Really well, why do they want to make it ugly
on purpose? But I believe you, I just I'm trying
to think what their motivations could be.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
I mean, one of the things that I was really
bizarrely distressed by was the pa and e vandalism that
happens in ann Arbor.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Did you hear about this? Oh yeah, somebody a vandalized peonies.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
They went into this botanical garden where they have a
spectacular pa andy bloom every year, and of course, you know,
peonies are a short lived flower, so it was like,
you know, a week or two out of the year
where everything is just extravagantly in bloom and so beautiful,
and it's and it's so tenuous this moment, and it
was about to be that moment the peonies had finally bloomed,
and these people went in and they cut the heads
(15:16):
off all of the pennies for Palestine.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Oh man, yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
And they can say ann arbor, like that's really gross.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
And they left these flyers all over the garden saying like, basically,
we ruined this beautiful thing because you don't deserve to
think about beautiful things or enjoy beautiful things when somewhere
in the world something bad is happening.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
And that's, you know, to me.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
An example of people who think they're you know, they're
making the world ugly for a good cause, so to speak.
But I don't think it's a good thing to do.
I think it's actually incredibly evil.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah, how many Palestinians were freed because they cut off
those peonies.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
I'm gonna just go ahead and ball park it at zero.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
It's just it's ridiculous. What a ridiculous thing to do,
and I'm sorry for those flowers. That's a really interesting take.
I really never thought about people making the world uglier
for their variety of causes. What you know, even if
I agreed with the cause, I still would find that
to be just repulsive.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
And how dare you?
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (16:19):
Yeah, I find it so nihilistic and so upsetting for
that reason, it just feels like an incredible breach of
the social contract.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yeah, what advice would you give your sixteen year old self? Like,
what a sixteen year old cat need to know?
Speaker 4 (16:35):
Ooh, you know, there are things that I might have
wanted not to experience at that time in my life
because they were painful. But on the other hand, they
were incredibly formative and incredibly useful experiences. So I don't
think that I would tell her anything except keep doing
(16:55):
what you're doing. Hmmm.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
I like that because teenagers love to hear doing what
you're doing.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
It's funny, a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Have a lot of things that they would tell their
teenager to change, because I think that they're maybe not
even the people who are happy with how things turned out,
they still think their teenager could have done a better job.
Kind of getting them to that adulthood point. But it's
interesting that you wouldn't want to change anything.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Where did you grow up?
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Upstate New York? A little town called Koksaki?
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Okay, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
I know upstate pretty well, but not there.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
The jokes that I always tell, the joke I always
tell about Koksaki is that unless you know somebody in
prison or you are a dairy farmer, I know might
have not heard of it.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Interesting, I actually know some prisons upstate, just not New York.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Kuksak.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
I guess, yeah, that's there too.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
There.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
That is, it is the part of upstate New York
that's rural enough, but also I guess close enough to
whatever necessary infrastructure that they do have correctional facilities up there.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Well, I've loved this conversation.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
I've always thought your writing was so interesting and just unusual,
and you're a fantastic writer. But I love the way
you cover topics, and I love the perspective that you have.
Leave us here with your best tip for my listeners
on how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 4 (18:25):
Oh my goodness, I mean, I want to riff on
the thing that I was previously saying and just encourage
them to kind of make make things beautiful where they can.
This has ended up being the most wu woo conversation.
I've never had one like it.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
It's all right, we accept all here on the show.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
I mean, I'm in a little bit of a weird
woo woo place, but I you know, I really want
to encourage people to rediscover, like I kind of embodied
in sensory pleasures, including you know, making the space around
them beautiful, including you know, things like looking at your
full r or you know, experiencing the kind of tactile
(19:04):
pleasures of the world like enjoy your food, Smell the
rose that you pass on your walk, like go outside
and take a walk, touch grass, be.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
Normal grass, Yeah, be normal.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Don't cut the peonies. Yeah she is Kat Rosenfield. Check
her out at the Free Press and look for her
new book, How to Survive in the Woods, coming next spring.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Thanks so much for coming on.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Kat, Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Marktiz Show on Imeartradio.
My guest today is Kat Rosenfield, columnist and the Free
Press and author of six novels, including the soon to
be released How to Survive in the Woods.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
So nice to have you on.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Kat, Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
So you write columns at Free Press, but you're also
a fiction writer, and I find those two things to
be very different from each other. Do you find that
they're a completely different skill set? Like I could not
write fiction at all, and I can write columns like
standing on my Head? So do you see a difference
between them or are they kind of the same category
(00:40):
to you?
Speaker 4 (00:40):
I mean, I want to say, like, don't sell yourself short.
You may find someday that there's a novel inside of you.
I think of fiction writing and the journalism and the
culture writing that I do as approaching the same set
of questions from different angles in different ways, and so
to me, they inform each other. I'm very interested in
trying to describe what I'm seeing in the world and
(01:03):
trying to understand the world, and I think that journalism
and fiction offer two different ways, too, different lenses through
which to do that, but.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
There's a lot of interplay there.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I guess I could see that.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I just feel like it's a completely different style of
writing that I I'm not telling myself short, I just
know I can't do it. So I see my own
brand as just be normal, And you know, that's sort
of where where I feel like my writing comes from.
And I see you very similarly, especially where the topics
(01:33):
of sex and gender are concerned. Like, I think a
lot of your columns are like, just be normal about sex.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Do you feel like that's true or is there more?
Speaker 4 (01:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
I wouldn't say that I'm as prescriptive about it as that.
I try mostly to stay on the like is side
of the ISA distinction. I'm not really interested in telling
people how to live or what to do. But when
it comes to things like sex, I do think that
I frequently end up just pointing at something that is
true and a little bit inconvenient.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Which is that we got rid of a lot of.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
The traditional strictures and structures surrounding sex, and you know,
there were good reasons for doing that, and then maybe
there were some not some good reasons for doing that.
You know, I would say like feminism, women's liberation. Good
reason for doing it, just the urge to burn down
everything old Maybe not such a good reason. But the
upshot of all of it, you know, whatever the original
(02:30):
motivations were, is that we dismantled something that was a
sort of a Chesterton's fence. It was performing a function
in society, and we didn't replace it with anything. And
now we're sort of flailing around trying to reinvent new
rules on the fly, and we don't really know what
to do, and it's not going very well. So when
it comes to things like sex, yeah, I think that
we have gotten into this weird place where there's this
(02:52):
expectation about how it's going to go, especially for people
who are inexperienced and young, and it's just sort of
understanding their sexuality for the time that is not aligned
at all with reality or how things work for most people.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Interesting. I love telling people what to do.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
I don't understand at all not telling people what to do.
I think that's also part of my brand. So how
did you get into writing about this or how did
you find this?
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Do you feel like this is your beat? I guess
I should start with.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
That culture is my beat.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Every time someone says, like, what exactly do you write
about it, I'll paraphrase and rather steal from Diddyon and say,
I'm just writing to understand what I see and what
it means. I'm very interested in how we treat each
other as people who we are to each other, and
increasingly I'm getting interested in sort of the moral questions
of what we owe to each other. The word morality
(03:44):
I used to shy away from a lot more, but
I'm rediscovering that it's useful when talking about, you know,
interpersonal relationships or the state of the human race. And
So how did I get into writing about this particular
things that I write about now? I actually really owe
(04:06):
in large part to having been a young adult fiction
writer at a time when a lot of the things
that came into the cultural mainstream around i want to say,
twenty nineteen, twenty twenty that really broke forth in what
we think of as like the Great Awokening, which I'm
using scare quotes away. I was in the young adult
fiction community as an author, and young adult fiction is
(04:29):
where a lot of kind of wacky stuff that eventually
broke out mainstreams started to incubate early and I saw
it happening. I saw this very sensorial, censorious, very like
angry and sort of weaponized social justice rhetoric starting to
take effect. Everybody was like intently focused on politics, as
(04:52):
that they were a proxy for character. And I said
something about this really foolishly apparently.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Immediately got canceled.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
Basically, yeah, but you know what happened there was as
I mean, personally, it's not fun to be canceled. It's
you know, one of the more excruciating experiences you can
have as an adult. But journalistically, it was very interesting
to me that this happened, and I got very curious
about the dynamics that fuel something like this, you know,
that make people so afraid of somebody just observing.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Things that are you know, true in their community.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
And different from what they're observing.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
That's really the problem is that you had a perspective
that they didn't share and that couldn't be allowed and
that needed to be immediately put down.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
How did you get out of it? Like, how did
you recover?
Speaker 4 (05:42):
It took a few years, but the thing that happened
there where I did not write another young adult fiction novel.
I haven't written one since that was twenty seventeen, so
that part of my life did effectively end because the
community kind of ostracized me and it made.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
It difficult for me to be there.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
But the fact that it was journalistically interesting to me
that had happened made me want to investigate it more deeply,
and I ended up writing about not specifically my cancelation,
because I think that's kind of boring, but about the
dynamics holistically that caused something like this to unfold into
(06:21):
from a moment where descent is considered intolerable into a
full blown witch hunt.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
And I wrote about that.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
For Vulture and this piece called the Toxic Drama of
Why Twitter, and I wrote about this book.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
I remember this, Yeah, yeah, that was twenty seventeen.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
This book Got the Black Witch was sort of my
case study for how one of these campaigns to destroy
somebody who's considered to have run a foul of the
community's political pieties in some way. I did an examination
of that. I talked to a bunch of people, and
that piece just went wildly viral, and I realized at
that point that I had stumbled onto something that not
(06:54):
only did I find interesting, but that.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Other people found interesting. To read about.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, because I think twenty seventeen, you know, it wasn't
really a thing yet. I think twenty twenties, early twenty
twenties is really where cancel culture got going. Maybe in
the YA world, that's where it was happening, like you said, originally,
but it wasn't a widespread thing yet. I wish I
had the date, But when was the whole I forgot
(07:19):
the girl's name, but has blank landed yet? The thing
that yeah, Justine Siko, has Justine landed yet?
Speaker 3 (07:26):
I think that was twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen, It
was earlier. It was early on. Yeah, you know, you.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
Had these sort of emergent dynamics how we were treating
each other on social media. People were starting to realize
that it was an amazing tool for public shaming, and
then in communities that had gotten very like politically orthodox,
it was used as a method of not just shaming,
but shunning, you know, ostracization, professional destruction.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Yeah, she got.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Fired upon landing because she had made a joke about
going to Africa and hoping she doesn't get and she
wasn't like a public figure or anything. It wasn't it
wasn't like your congressman said this, it was just some
lady on Twitter.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Yeah, I mean even worse than that. It was a joke.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
Actually that was intended to be self depreciating and at
her own expense. She was trying to make a joke
about her own white privilege. And that was such an
interesting example of how the people who end up getting
just really bitten the hardest by this type of dynamic
are the ones who subscribe to it already. You know,
(08:30):
they're already trying to apologize for their privilege or whatever
it is, and that makes them that much more susceptible
to being destroyed by it.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
I've written about this a lot, where there was only
so much, for example, that this cancel culture thing could
do to conservatives, like how are you going to cancel?
Ben Shapiro, Like, I don't like where you said, you know,
canceled It wouldn't matter. But they really did go after
liberals more than anybody else because they were the easiest
to take down because they already believed in a lot
of it.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Did you always want to be a writer?
Speaker 4 (09:00):
Stumbled backwards into it? I always liked to write, but
when I graduated from college, I needed to make a living,
and I didn't really understand writing as a thing that
was remunerative in any way.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
I had just had this image of somebody like a
in a.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
Turret in a tower, wearing fingerless gloves, like typing and starving.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
So I started out actually as a publicist.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
And I have never been more terrible at a job
in my life. Publicity, I think, is in many ways
the option of journalism, which I think of as a
truth seeking enterprise. Publicity is about trying to like tell people,
you know, convince people that a bad thing is good
and just the story.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
You want told bad but yes, you want them to
tell the story you are away.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Yes exactly.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
You're trying to manipulate the narrative instead of uncover the truth.
And you know, journalism, I think is about uncovering the truth.
I'm much more comfortable on the other side of things.
I was such so a terrible publicist. It's like indescribable.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
What was bad about it?
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Like, did you feel like it was hard to kind
of cold call people? I also did pr in the
early days of my employment, but I didn't love calling
people on the phone.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
But other than that, yeah, I mean, that was the
era of the cold call before everything went digital, and
I did get yelled at on the phone, yeah, a
few different people.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
What else was I bad at?
Speaker 4 (10:25):
Just you know, that type of social interaction, having to
hype something up.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
I found it really really exhausting.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
And that was on top of office culture, which just
generally was not a great fit for me. I've always
been meant to be in the turret with the typewriter.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
As it turns out, I like that.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Well. One of the people that yelled at me when
I was in PR was Fred Dicker. He was a
journalist in New York. I guess he covered state politics
and he was the scariest person to call. And now
we're friends and he's been on the show. So oh,
life can comfortll circle.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
I love that. I wish I could remember the names
of somebody who me, but oh, he.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Was the scariest.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
So I'd never forget Fred Dicker for sure. We're going
to take a quick break and be right back on
the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
I think when I met you in New York? Am
I crazy? Or did you do yoga teaching?
Speaker 3 (11:18):
I do? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (11:19):
I do?
Speaker 4 (11:20):
Still yeah, yeah, less than I do or less than
I did. Rather, I was prior to the pandemic, teaching
between ten and fifteen classes a week, and now I'm
down to two because it's it takes a lot of
time I prefer to be writing. It's you know, a
better use of my time to be writing. And also
as I go deeper into middle age, I find that
(11:42):
making a living with my body is like I make
it sound like I'm actually a prostitute, but.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
It's hard, you know, it's grueling, it's.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Exhausted living with my body.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
I like that though.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
I like the way that sounds, even though it might
be questionable to some people.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Yeah, so you do still do it, but I do still.
I find that it's interesting because yoga teaching is actually
an example of what people originally meant to describe when
the term emotional labor was coined, where it's you're managing
people's moods. It's a in some sense as a service
(12:19):
oriented position. And I really unironically.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Love that about it.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
I Yeah, I love you know, the you know, being
able to kind of hold the energy in a room.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I sound very woo woo right now, but I get it.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
Yeah, yoga is my community. I love everybody who is there.
The studio where I work is within walking distance of
my house. So I feel like this is this very embodied,
physical and other person focused thing that I do that
allows me to keep a foot in the real world and.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
To just be normal, like you were.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
Just which I do is important, even if it's not
my ethos as a writer, it is kind of my
ethos as a person.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
So yeah, yeah, And you give off this very calm,
peaceful vibe. Nothing to you, I feel like you really
radiate that for sure. What do you worry about switching
to something completely negative?
Speaker 4 (13:13):
Oh God, I worry about This is a weird thing,
but it's something I've been thinking about a lot, trying
to keep the space around me beautiful when I feel
like it is trying to like empty the ocean with
a teaspoon. This is I wasn't expecting to talk about this,
(13:34):
so it may make it a little bit galaxy brained,
But I've been thinking a lot about the work of
preserving beauty, which is I think, a kind of a small,
c conservative way to view the world, you know, understanding
that life is precious.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
I think a lot, for instance, about like the.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
Trees in the town where I live, and how people
are always trying to cut them down because they're inconvenient
in some way. And I'm always hoping that nobody will
cut the trees down because they're beautiful, and you know,
it takes a really really long time to grow a
new one. You can't just like willy nilly destroy things.
And I feel like there it takes so many people
(14:12):
of my mindset to make a dent against the impulses
of just one person who doesn't share that mindset, who
tends towards destruction, or who wants to create ugliness. And
so yeah, this is like the kind of big existential
thing that I worry about. I feel like I'm fighting
a losing battle against people who want to make the
(14:33):
world ugly on purpose.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Really well, why do they want to make it ugly
on purpose? But I believe you, I just I'm trying
to think what their motivations could be.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
I mean, one of the things that I was really
bizarrely distressed by was the pa and e vandalism that
happens in ann Arbor.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Did you hear about this? Oh yeah, somebody a vandalized peonies.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
They went into this botanical garden where they have a
spectacular pa andy bloom every year, and of course, you know,
peonies are a short lived flower, so it was like,
you know, a week or two out of the year
where everything is just extravagantly in bloom and so beautiful,
and it's and it's so tenuous this moment, and it
was about to be that moment the peonies had finally bloomed,
and these people went in and they cut the heads
(15:16):
off all of the pennies for Palestine.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Oh man, yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
And they can say ann arbor, like that's really gross.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
And they left these flyers all over the garden saying like, basically,
we ruined this beautiful thing because you don't deserve to
think about beautiful things or enjoy beautiful things when somewhere
in the world something bad is happening.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
And that's, you know, to me.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
An example of people who think they're you know, they're
making the world ugly for a good cause, so to speak.
But I don't think it's a good thing to do.
I think it's actually incredibly evil.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah, how many Palestinians were freed because they cut off
those peonies.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
I'm gonna just go ahead and ball park it at zero.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
It's just it's ridiculous. What a ridiculous thing to do,
and I'm sorry for those flowers. That's a really interesting take.
I really never thought about people making the world uglier
for their variety of causes. What you know, even if
I agreed with the cause, I still would find that
to be just repulsive.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
And how dare you?
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (16:19):
Yeah, I find it so nihilistic and so upsetting for
that reason, it just feels like an incredible breach of
the social contract.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yeah, what advice would you give your sixteen year old self? Like,
what a sixteen year old cat need to know?
Speaker 4 (16:35):
Ooh, you know, there are things that I might have
wanted not to experience at that time in my life
because they were painful. But on the other hand, they
were incredibly formative and incredibly useful experiences. So I don't
think that I would tell her anything except keep doing
(16:55):
what you're doing. Hmmm.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
I like that because teenagers love to hear doing what
you're doing.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
It's funny, a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Have a lot of things that they would tell their
teenager to change, because I think that they're maybe not
even the people who are happy with how things turned out,
they still think their teenager could have done a better job.
Kind of getting them to that adulthood point. But it's
interesting that you wouldn't want to change anything.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Where did you grow up?
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Upstate New York? A little town called Koksaki?
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Okay, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
I know upstate pretty well, but not there.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
The jokes that I always tell, the joke I always
tell about Koksaki is that unless you know somebody in
prison or you are a dairy farmer, I know might
have not heard of it.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Interesting, I actually know some prisons upstate, just not New York.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Kuksak.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
I guess, yeah, that's there too.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
There.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
That is, it is the part of upstate New York
that's rural enough, but also I guess close enough to
whatever necessary infrastructure that they do have correctional facilities up there.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Well, I've loved this conversation.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
I've always thought your writing was so interesting and just unusual,
and you're a fantastic writer. But I love the way
you cover topics, and I love the perspective that you have.
Leave us here with your best tip for my listeners
on how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 4 (18:25):
Oh my goodness, I mean, I want to riff on
the thing that I was previously saying and just encourage
them to kind of make make things beautiful where they can.
This has ended up being the most wu woo conversation.
I've never had one like it.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
It's all right, we accept all here on the show.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
I mean, I'm in a little bit of a weird
woo woo place, but I you know, I really want
to encourage people to rediscover, like I kind of embodied
in sensory pleasures, including you know, making the space around
them beautiful, including you know, things like looking at your
full r or you know, experiencing the kind of tactile
(19:04):
pleasures of the world like enjoy your food, Smell the
rose that you pass on your walk, like go outside
and take a walk, touch grass, be.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
Normal grass, Yeah, be normal.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Don't cut the peonies. Yeah she is Kat Rosenfield. Check
her out at the Free Press and look for her
new book, How to Survive in the Woods, coming next spring.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Thanks so much for coming on.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Kat, Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
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