Latest news with #TomWolfe
Spectator
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Let straight white men write novels!
About 15 years ago, I tried to interest my literary agent in a state-of-the-nation novel set in 21st-century London. My model was Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe's masterpiece about New York in the 1980s. I'd read Wolfe's essay in Harper's magazine called 'Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast' in which he urges ambitious young authors to dispense with namby-pamby, post-modernist experimental nonsense and follow in the footsteps of Balzac, Zola and Dickens – write realistic novels documenting every aspect of contemporary society in granular detail. I wrote a 10,000-word proposal summarising the story, which began with a black teenage drug dealer coming to the rescue of a posh teenage girl in Shepherd's Bush by fighting off a group of roadmen trying to steal her puppy. They gradually get enmeshed in each other's lives, with predictable tragi-comic results. It was basically Romeo and Juliet but with race and class dividing the lovers. I was quite pleased with it and so was my agent. That is, until she ran it past a recent Cambridge graduate she'd just hired as an in-house sensitivity reader, who declared it an absolute 'no-no'. How dare I, as a straight white man, presume to create a young female character and – worse – a young black man? Talk about cultural appropriation! If the agency sent this proposal out to publishers and they commissioned it, it would be denying a voice to the very people I was proposing to speak on behalf of. Didn't I realise the literary phallocracy was in its death throes? The 'litbros' must make way for girlboss authors such as Zadie Smith and Rachel Cusk. I talked it over with my agent and she said this probably reflected the prevailing attitude in the publishing trade, which is largely made up of young female graduates. And so it proved to be. These days, novels written by straight white men – particularly young men – are as rare as hen's teeth. No white British man under 40 has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize since 2011. The closest is Douglas Stuart, a 49-year-old Scot, who won it in 2020. This isn't just true of the UK obviously. A recent article in Compact revealed that not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in the New Yorker. The dearth of young male novelists has reached such a pass that various literary lions are taking steps to address the problem. Unfortunately, their pleas for young men to submit manuscripts are nearly always prefaced by the usual throat-clearing about the insufferable privilege enjoyed by straight white males. For instance, a novelist and critic called Jude Cook announced in April that he was launching an independent literary press called Conduit Books that would focus on overlooked male writers. 'We believe there is ambitious, funny, political and cerebral fiction by men that is being passed by,' he said. He then spoilt it by denouncing the male-dominated literary scene of the 1980s and 1990s as 'toxic' and described the 'excitement and energy around new and adventurous fiction' by female authors like Sally Rooney as a 'timely corrective'. Not sure I'll be sending my proposal to him. Another bat signal appeared in the New York Times at the end of last year, entitled 'The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone'. The author, who teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada, urged men to start writing novels again, not because he thought they might have something to say but because it might get other men reading again and that would be therapeutic. 'Reading fiction is an excellent way to improve one's emotional IQ,' he said. That, in turn, would be good for women. Literature helped men 'transgress patriarchal boundaries', he added, and that meant the lives of women 'fundamentally changed for the better'. When will these self-appointed champions of male novelists stop apologising for being men? The literary agent Matthew Hamilton told me an anecdote that illustrated the point: 'Last week I heard a story of a prominent agent submitting a novel by a straight white male and apologising it was by a straight white male in the accompanying letter. Needless to say, he's a straight white male.' Happily, there's light at the end of the tunnel. Hachette has folded its Dialogue division, which was set up to publish more 'diverse' authors, into another subsidiary, and a literary agency set up to find 'new voices' (i.e. anyone apart from straight white men) has just closed its doors. Perhaps I should set up an imprint myself: Toxic Books. It would just publish novels by people like me for people like me. I might make a mint.
Business Wire
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Wire
LG Ad Solutions Integrates with Viant to Advance Addressability in CTV
IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Viant Technology Inc. (NASDAQ: DSP), a leader in CTV and AI-powered programmatic advertising, today announced a strategic integration with LG Ad Solutions designed to accelerate addressable advertising in the connected TV (CTV) ecosystem, introducing a new way of advertising designed for the industry-wide shift from linear TV to streaming. 'This integration with LG Ad Solutions demonstrates how OEM data and identity-first technology can transform CTV advertising,' said Tom Wolfe, SVP of Business Development at Viant. Through this integration, LG's premium smart TV inventory—spanning 45 million connected devices across the U.S.—is now fully addressable via the Viant DSP. Advertisers gain seamless access to high-performing campaigns on the most-watched screens in the home, backed by Viant's leading identity infrastructure. LG Ad Solutions and Viant will jointly improve signal quality, data matching, and performance—empowering advertisers to engage streaming audiences with greater precision, scale, and transparency. 'Identity is the backbone of effective advertising in a fragmented ecosystem,' said Kelly McMahon, SVP Global Operations, LG Ad Solutions. 'By integrating the Viant Household ID into our platform, we're empowering buyers to scale Viant-driven audiences across the LG Smart TV environment—unlocking greater precision, reach, and performance while keeping privacy at the core.' A New Era of Addressable CTV Advertising This integration is part of Viant's Direct Access program, which strengthens connections between advertisers and the world's leading CTV platforms. Together, LG Ad Solutions and Viant are expanding addressable capabilities in CTV while unlocking new benefits for advertisers: Precision Targeting with Data Match: Viant's identity solutions enable large-scale addressable reach and precise audience targeting, frequency control, and attribution through a powerful data match. Direct-to-Glass Access to LG Smart TVs: Advertisers can now programmatically reach LG's premium global CTV inventory via Viant's DSP through targeted audience precision to drive impactful outcomes. Content-Level Contextual Targeting: With Viant's acquisition of advertisers gain content-level contextual targeting on LG Ads to access standardized classification via IRIS_ID for greater relevance and transparency. Boosted Performance and ROI: This integration unifies premium CTV supply, identity resolution, and contextual intelligence to reduce waste, improve efficiency, and maximize campaign ROI. 'This integration with LG Ad Solutions demonstrates how OEM data and identity-first technology can transform CTV advertising,' said Tom Wolfe, SVP of Business Development at Viant. 'Together, we're empowering advertisers to reach the right audiences, in the right context, with precision and scale that reflects the streaming era.' About Viant Viant Technology Inc. (NASDAQ: DSP) is a leader in AI-powered programmatic advertising, dedicated to driving innovation in digital marketing. Viant's omnichannel platform built for CTV allows marketers to plan, execute and measure their campaigns with unmatched precision and efficiency. With the launch of ViantAI, Viant is building the future of fully autonomous advertising solutions, empowering advertisers to achieve their boldest goals. Viant was recently awarded Best Demand-Side Platform by MarTech Breakthrough, Great Place to Work® certification and received the Business Intelligence Group's AI Excellence Award. Learn more at About LG Ad Solutions LG Ad Solutions is a global leader in connected TV and cross-screen advertising, driven by our mission to create meaningful connections between brands and their audiences. With a vast network of award-winning LG Smart TVs worldwide, we offer advertisers and content creators unparalleled scale, reach, and personalized precision on the largest screen in the home.
Scroll.in
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘Sucker Punch': Scaachi Koul's writings are unable to move beyond the trappings of ‘internet essays'
There are many essayists, but no group with a style as recognisable as that of BuzzFeed essayists. The New Journalism practitioners were discernible too, but only because they make the journalistic novelistic. Even then, where Tom Wolfe is flamboyant, Joan Didion is stone cold, precise like a surgeon. They followed no cult of regularised style. They were not siblings at the same dinner table. They were not canvassers on the Internet. A child of the internet 'I picked a career that's preternaturally suited to getting into arguments on the internet,' writes Scaachi Koul in her latest offering, Sucker Punch, a collection of essays about, of all things, fighting. Not pugilism in the ring as much as the banal sparring with yourself, your parents, your partner, your friends, and your fans. Koul owes her present reputation to her stint as a culture writer at Buzzfeed Canada, where she wrote essays with titles like ' I Went To A Summer Camp For Adults And It Was Weird ', ' There's No Recipe For Growing Up ', and ' Can TV Make Us Not Hate Ourselves? ' It's a background that places them squarely within a certain type of online writing, that of the BuzzFeed essayist. The standard BuzzFeed essayist is a child of the internet. They have known no other home. Only their devices, a reliable data plan, and a penchant for living a narratable life keep them company. To them, the journalistic is the memoiristic. In BuzzFeed, it hardly matters where you come from. Just one caveat. You can never shed the skin of the BuzzFeed essayist. With a beast of an internet to feed, what else will the BuzzFeed essayist write about if not themselves? While recognisability as an essayist is desirable, being recognisable as a specific type of essayist is perhaps not. An essayist is only as good as their personality. When in history have good writers ever wanted to sound like regular ones? Ever since the internet, apparently. 'I know how to write these stories because they're all the same,' writes Koul about writing profiles that follow women falling from the grace of their television producers, '…but the readership rarely tires of them and neither do I.' The readership rarely seems to tire of the internet essay, either. Although not to be confused with the personal essay, the internet essay owes much to its compatriot. It shares its vanity, vapidity, virility, verity, and variety, not to mention vitriol. Even fiction has been the target of rants against the personal essay, as this piece points out. Where the personal essay seeks to enlighten, the internet essay entertains. 'The internet made the personal essay worse, as it does for most things,' writes essayist Jia Tolentino in her 2017 New Yorker article, 'The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over'. Tolentino narrates the noiseless abandonment of personal essays in favour of good old reporting; one of the missteps of our time was to confuse the two. What is the internet essay, though? Like the personal essay, it is where the writer fidgets with the question of whether they have something to say. Except, the writer (as well as the editor) shelves the question immediately. It's too demanding. Content begs quick production (cumbersome questions get in the way like a pestering co-worker). Where the internet essay breaks away from the personal essay is when it becomes conversational, digressive, and sometimes fragmented. It is a work-in-progress impersonating a completed draft, strewn with hackneyed cultural criticism and memes, often structured for skimming. Mobile-optimised. I could've read Sucker Punch on my phone, and it wouldn't have made a difference. As a Brown writer in America, Koul can't not talk about race, but she goes the extra mile and whisks in religion. Even her index follows the pattern of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth in Hinduism. She writes, 'It was boring to talk about God,' before slinging out an extended metaphor comparing herself to Parvati: 'Parvati wanted to marry Shiva; her parents, however, didn't approve.' Koul married an older white man, which seems inevitable, considering how even the deities have 'white skin'. '(Why were they always white?)' she asks in parentheses. There are many other such considerations relegated to these brackets: '(I'm sure there's a joke in here somewhere about the white man in my life getting his visa during a Trump administration in about five minutes while mine took more than a year, but I'm too tired from living through that administration in real time to mine for the punchline. Later, when Trump becomes our cyborg king, I'm sure I'll be able to make sense of those heady early years).' That titbit is from an essay titled 'Lolita, Later,' which is perhaps the most vulnerable of the lot, which questions the trouble of embodying the character of Lolita the way Humbert Humbert intended, as a girl who has agency. In the essay, Koul struggles to reach a point, bringing together morsels from her age-gap marriage that ended in divorce, the experience of dating an emotionally unavailable man after the fact, and her reasonable distrust of men. The Trump joke has no room unless Koul wants to stick to narrating her deliberations at a cocktail party. Perhaps that's what she desires. As millennials like her might say, she's too 'lit' to write a book, y'all. A Brown woman in America The tedious digressions are inescapable in the internet essay, a form that desires a clear political leaning. No ambiguity allowed. Depending on the country you're from, there is a checklist of things you must have an opinion on to be worthy of writing on the Internet. In America, it's trans issues, Trump, and vaccination. In India, it's Modi, minorities and Hindutva. A self-diagnosis is also mandatory, obliged by an internet nibbling on the scraps of psychoanalytic theory: Falling in love with someone older, protective, and angry was a response to him assaulting me. Running away from Toronto was another attempt to avoid reckoning with the kind of girl who would 'let something like this happen' to herself. And, ironically, kick-starting some gupshup with Jeff during lockdown was my own way of avoiding the more urgent fight happening inside my marriage. In this essay, squarely titled A Close Read, Koul examines her fraught relationship with a man named Jeff, who sexually assaulted her when they were at university. Before his passing, she had contacted him; their conversations were lukewarm, inviting no apology and only derision from her husband when he found out. Going by these pieces, nothing in Koul's life appears to exist independently of everything else, and life imitates the structure of the book, where its claim to being a collection of essays seems propelled by a desire to stand out in an American market buffeted with divorce books. Perhaps the difference, to labour my point as Koul often does, is that hers is a Brown woman's perspective. If I had to think prototypically, internet essays by 'a Brown woman in America' can produce prattling platitudes on identity, belonging, cultural duality, generational conflict, burdening expectations, and defiant joy – to name just a few – and Sucker Punch delivers. In the soliloquy on her relationship with her body, 'Chocolate, Lime Juice, Ice Cream', Koul chatters about her lifelong struggle with body image and self-esteem, the cradle of which she, as you might guess, owes to her mother ('I was at my thinnest at that wedding; I knew, because my mom told me I was. She was proud. I was hungry.'). Somewhere along her essay, Koul writes: 'It's rote for a woman to blame her issues with food on her mother, but clichés exist for a reason.' After her divorce from an ex-husband who 'was always feeding' her, Koul's mother had a persistent question: 'Did you eat?' ('Did you eat?' she'd say. 'You have to eat. Eat everything. Eat whatever you want. Eat now.') The essay paddles the same ideas that float in its sisters: Koul loved her husband, forgot for a whole hot minute that she was a complete person in her own right, left him, and is now discovering herself, recuperating all the while. Since she's a writer, a book is a part of that process. The internet essayist has to get to a point. She doesn't have the privilege of mere deliberations, even if the process of self-discovery guarantees simply that. Here's how Koul arrives at hers: But I don't need to hide from myself, or hide myself from other people. Besides, I cannot hide because no one will let me. Even if I try to slink away to an invisible place, someone will come and get me. It's nice in the light if you can stand in it long enough to feel the warmth. Looking at my body with my own gaze is a light unto itself. I try to stay there as much as I possibly can. My mother told me to eat, and so I did. On arriving here, Koul sounds like anyone else. I won't deny that she's a good writer, but in Sucker Punch, Koul becomes the quintessential internet essayist, best read to escape the sludge of perpetually streaming 'content' but close enough to it that there are no withdrawal symptoms.
Times
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
My father, Tom Wolfe: I wonder what he would think now
T here are giants of the written word, and there are giants. Tom Wolfe was the man in the white suit who bestrode journalism and fiction, and qualified as a colossus in both. Not only did he revolutionise magazine writing, he established the term 'New Journalism' to define a movement in his own image. As for his novels, a young Margaret Atwood once drily remarked: 'It looks as if Tom Wolfe said to the other male American novelists: 'Mine is bigger than yours.'' And it was, not least in the guise of 1987's 700-page, zeitgeist-defining The Bonfire of the Vanities, anatomising the New York he had made home. But no one is a legend to their offspring. Wolfe's daughter, the writer Alexandra Wolfe, 44, recalls: 'As a child I just remember thinking it was magical that he worked from home. Everybody else's fathers went to work in a suit but mine worked from home in his. I knew that I wasn't supposed to go into his office when I heard the typewriter. He would write ten pages a day, triple-spaced. And when he was done with the ten pages, he would go about his day. But often he was writing after dinner too. So it wasn't like he finished by noon and then went golfing.'
Forbes
26-06-2025
- General
- Forbes
Improve Your Communication By Improving Your Language
If you were to look up the word 'secretive' (meaning, disposed to secrecy) in an old analog paper dictionary, you would find that the preferred pronunciation was with the accent on the second syllable. Although you might think that that made the word sound biological, it was correct—at the time. Language. Open book with language hand drawn doodles and lettering on white background. Education ... More vector illustration. Flash forward to any digital dictionary today and you'll find that the preferred pronunciation is with the accent on the first syllable, while the accent on the second syllable has been relegated to merely acceptable—a vivid demonstration that language is dynamic and constantly evolving. John McWhorter, an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University and the author of numerous bestselling books, as well as podcasts, blogs, and newsletters, described the continuous evolution of language in his New York Times column: 'we all know language inevitably changes; it's the way we got from Latin to French or from Beowulf to Tom Wolfe. But while that change is happening, we tend to see it as decay, sloth, maybe even a scourge.' So to culminate June as Effective Communication Month, which is 'dedicated to highlighting the importance of good communication in our personal and professional lives,' this blog will focus on how you can improve your communication by eliminating one slothful word that has become overly popular in today's language and by adding a word that deserves to become more popular. The slothful word in question is 'literally.' Sound familiar? I hear it used repeatedly as an intensifier, such as in, 'I literally ate the whole pizza.'The word is intended to mean in a literal sense rather than figurative, but the usage in previous sentence is to add emphasis. Merriam-Webster derides that usage, 'It is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary.' I derided the word, too, in my prior Forbes post but it continues to be overused, if not abused, prompting Taiwo Sotikare to write on Medium, 'Language evolves, I get it. Words change meaning over time, slang infiltrates the mainstream, and sometimes, a little creative license is acceptable. But the rampant, egregious, and utterly baffling misuse of the word 'literally' has pushed me to the brink.' Steve Eighinger agrees in a post on Muddy River News, 'Do we really need to put an emphasis on what happened? I would argue that if it's a genuinely interesting event, there isn't a need for an extra word – especially that one. So, challenge yourself this week, month or forever not to use 'literally' anymore.' Three other words have become pervasive in our business language: 'believe,' 'think,' and 'feel,' as in 'We believe/think/feel that our new product/service will make us the market leader.' This usage has proliferated because companies want to avoid making forward-looking statements. But those words express uncertainty and imply doubt—not a useful image when a presenter is trying to be persuasive. This is not to say that you should start making forward-looking statements or forecasts in your presentations. Doing so is risky business in this day and age when corporate attorneys insist on avoiding class action suits. To avoid litigation and avoid using the weak words 'think,' 'believe,' and 'feel,' replace them with one word: 'confident.' One powerful word with two big benefits: you avoid being predictive and you sound far more assertive. As William Shakespeare had Hamlet say, 'Suit the action to the words, the word to the action.'
