Kara Swisher is pissy

And I'm here for it

Dear Writer,

If you’re an astute Dear Writer reader—and I know you are—you may have noticed that I’ve missed a few weeks here.

Don’t fret, everything’s fine. I’m just in revision. And when I’m in revision, I’m two things; cranky, and distracted.

Like, super distracted.

So for three weeks, did I forget when it was Monday? No. But it was usually Tuesday or Wednesday before I was like, “Oh, hey, I was supposed to write a Dear Writer yesterday. Well, I’ll do it next week. No one will miss me.”¹

But alongside the revision distraction is the revision crank and… hoo boy. Everything is pissing me off lately.

Which may be why I just fell in love with Kara Swisher.

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I listen to a number of podcasts (and I’m always taking recommendations, please leave them in the comments) and one of them is Hard Fork, which is a tech podcast from the New York Times hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton and honestly? One of the things I love most about it is that one of them—I am sorry to report, I’m not sure which, although I kind of think it’s Casey Newton?—has a really engaging laugh.

Here’s the thing about laughs; they are, in and of themselves, terrible sounds. When humans laugh, they sound like hyenas about to hawk up a loogey. The only good laugh is a baby laugh, and when that baby grows up, that beautiful tinkling laugh is going to go bad like cream left in the sun.

There is no such thing as a pleasant-sounding laugh, I stand by that.

However, there are laughs that are so enthusiastic, so unselfconscious, so delightful that despite the grating sound, they are in effect lovely.

That’s what I’m talking about with Casey Newton and/or Kevin Roose. One of them has the kind of infectious laugh that notably improves my mood, even when I’ve got a severe case of revision cranks.

So this morning I was listening to Hard Fork, and understanding like 70% of whatever the hell they were talking about and then, for the last half of the podcast, they had Kara Swisher on and I understood everything and it was delightful.

I’ve been a technology nerd since the early 90s. As such, I have been aware of Swisher, a tech journalist, for a long time. I’ve seen her byline on stories and every now and again, she shows up in an interview on a show I listen to and she says smart stuff.

But her interview on Hard Fork was just… different. She said “fuck” like twelve times, had absolutely no patience for anyone’s bullshit, and was pissy about technology and the people who run it, and I loved every second of it.

There is a side-effect in developing expertise in any topic, and it is severe crankiness when engaging in that topic. The more you learn about something, the more annoyed you get at the people who either refuse to understand it or willfully obfuscate it in order to make a quick buck. The older you get, the less prone you are to be quiet and polite in the face of these kinds of cynical shell game antics, and you start to speak your mind.

For me, it’s the “I’ll teach you how to be a bestseller!” bullshit. So many people make so much money telling authors they can make them bestsellers and they cannot. The bestseller lists are complicated little mofos and they mean less than you think they do with regard to sustainable success and out of the thousands of books that get published every year, a handful make the lists and these cynical bastards are telling every person who buys their stupid course that it’ll make them a bestseller?

Please.

Promise me, dear sweet writer, that you will never buy anything from anyone who promises to make you a bestseller, okay? That is the reddest of flags indicating that this person knows absolutely nothing about anything.

Or, if they actually have knowledge, it indicates that they care more about taking your ducats than they do about actually sharing that knowledge in a way that helps anyone but them.

I have a few more little annoyances like that—”there’s no such thing as a creative block,” Butt In Chair Hands on Keyboard, “beat the shit out of me” critique—but I try to keep them to myself and move forward with what I teach because I don’t want to be a crank.

But listening to Kara Swisher be pissy and honest about people in the tech industry that she outright names as she drops f-bombs and yells at Casey Newton for leaving the apartment she rented him in shambles while both hosts respond with infectious laughter and bitch didn’t apologize once.

It was delightful.

And it made me realize that maybe I do want to be a crank. Maybe I don’t want to preserve people’s comfort over being honest. Maybe the world won’t fall apart if someone gets mad at me because I said something I know to be true.

I’m working on it.

Everything,

L

1. If you did miss me, I’m sorry, but hey I’m here now, and it’s good to see you. How are the kids?