22-05-2025
Harron Walker's New Essay Collection, ‘Aggregated Discontent,' Makes Reading About Media Fun Again
There's a lot to dislike about the current state of social media, but Harron Walker's singular voice has always made one good case for staying online. Now, Walker is reexamining her career as a digital media writer (and so much more) in Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman (Penguin Random House), an essay collection that covers everything from the freelance hustle to the state of trans healthcare in the US with a dryly confessional, comedic voice guaranteed to make you burst out laughing at your desk.
Vogue recently spoke to Walker about letting Tom Wolfe guide her expectations of present-day digital media, her favorite blog she's ever written, the ghostly specter of the girlboss, and attempting to resist universalizing in her writing. Read the interview here.
Vogue: Do you have a favorite media book or memoir?
Harron Walker: There's this anthology of New Journalism from the late '60s to the '70s or so that Tom Wolfe edited, and it has work by Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion and a bunch of other people. The introduction is my favorite; it's three stitched-together pieces of writing by Tom Wolfe that he wrote and sort of reworked into one long, 75-page essay that I always return to because it's helped clarify so much about present-day media, and how all these things that I thought were contemporary are actually deeply rooted within history.
He describes this thing where every good reporter in media spends a year proving himself, and his reward for being the best reporter at the paper is to get promoted. He leaves the paper, he goes out of the building, he reports all the news, he gets all the scoops, he talks to everyone, and his reward for all that is to get promoted to being a columnist, and then he never leaves the office again. He spends his first year as a columnist geting all his thoughts out and writing all these brilliant pieces and op-eds and columns, and after a year of that, he has nothing left, so he'll write about things he read in other newspapers or things he saw on TV. So many columnists who I find horrible are just like, 'Here's something I saw a 19-year-old say on Twitter, and their neopronouns made me confused and angry.' Like, why are you here? You two should never be in the same room, and one of you needs to leave. The essay just clarifies that this thing has always been an issue, it's just a matter of changing technology.
