The Monday Media Diet with W. David Marx

W. David Marx (WDM) is a pal and the Tokyo-based author of one of my favorite books, Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. His new book Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change is a comprehensive look at how status creates most cultural phenomenon. We did a longer, book-specific interview with him in August, but I also wanted to see what was on his reading list. Have a good week -Colin (CJN) 

Tell us about yourself.

My name is W. David Marx, and I am the author of two books: Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change (Viking Books, 2022) and Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style (Basic Books, 2015). I grew up in the American South, but now live in Tokyo.  

Describe your media diet. 

Despite living in Japan for almost two decades, I still spend an excessive amount of time trying to follow U.S. political news. To reduce my anxiety, I decided to curb this habit a bit in 2021, and my weekly political podcast consumption is now limited to Brooks and Capehart on PBS Newshour. Otherwise I get my daily news from Twitter, which I read in backwards-chronological order, because I don’t trust the algorithmic setting to show me everything. But with the time zone difference, I often wake up to everyone making jokes about news events from a few hours prior, and I have to scroll down for a while until I can piece together what is being mocked. Even when Twitter provides my main links, my reading tends to cluster around the usual: The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Magazine (especially Vulture), and Vox’s The Goods.

I am a bit overwhelmed by newsletters because they arrive into an already overflowing inbox, but I try to read Benedict Evans, Garbage Day, Blackbird Spyplane, and Dirt (which I sometimes write for). I enjoy balancing those with more personal newsletters from Craig Mod, The Melt by Jason Diamond, A Continuous Lean, and David Coggins’ The Contender to name a few.

I try hard to limit my internet reading to small bursts in the morning and evening, and use my train time, afternoon breaks, and bedtime to read physical books. Some of this is that I have a very hard time reading longform on computer screens, but also internet-based short media formats are not very good for engaging with more complicated ideas. 

What’s the last great book you read?

When writing Status and Culture, I read a very specific set of books about the mechanisms of society and culture, and the last mind-blowing one I squeaked in before deadline was Leonard B Meyer’s Music, the Arts, and Ideas from 1967 which uses information theory to explain what our brains are doing when they listen to music. Aesthetics are so complicated that we tend to think they’re “magical” and maybe even irrational, but Meyer does a good job of explaining the concrete, logic-based underpinnings (and why our brains could never absorb serial composition like we did classical Western harmony). 

What are you reading now?

I generally read two or three books simultaneously (one non-fiction for research, one fiction in my 14-year project of going through the most famous 20th century novels in chronological order, and maybe a lighter one “for fun”), but I ended up starting a few very long books this year that have made me want to simultaneously dip in and out of other things. This has resulted in me having major page-debt to Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, Richard Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death, Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Benjamin Nathans’s Beyond the Pale on Eastern European Jews in the 19th century, and the upcoming book Merchants of Style by Natasha Degen on art and fashion post-Warhol. I’m going to try hard not to start any new books this year until I finish these up.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I tend to quickly go through from cover to cover to see what’s included, and then I go back to read whatever looked most interesting.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

We are in a golden age of smart writing on contemporary pop culture and how it works, and I’m a big fan of Amanda Mull (The Atlantic), Rebecca Jennings (VOX), Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker), and Ryan Broderick and Allegra Rosenberg (Garbage Day) to name a few, but I feel like they’re quite popular, so maybe I’m not suggesting anything new here.

I also recommend people return to mid-century nonfiction and cultural theory, as these books are always more subtle and complicated than how they are summarized in passing. And writers like Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, and Arthur Danto predicted our current cultural moment better than you’d imagine. 

I also recommend reading books that posit theories you don’t agree with. I strongly believe that aesthetics are fully social constructs and not related to evolutionary psychology, but I thought David Rothenberg’s Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Beauty was very interesting and gave me a deeper perspective on the entire subject. 

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone? 

BPMTap, an extremely primitive app where you tap out rhythms and you get the beats per minute. I am not sure the code has been changed in a decade, but it gets the job done.

Plane or train?

Train, most definitely, but in Japan it’s often more expensive to take the high-speed shinkansen than fly. 

What is one place everyone should visit? 

I think Kobe is Japan’s most underappreciated city. It’s extremely compact, so you can get anywhere in town within about 15 minutes, and there’s a nice breeze in the summer that flows between the harbor and mountains. Kobe has preserved its many majestic historical buildings much better than Tokyo, and there is a relaxed vibrancy that I haven’t felt in the other Japanese cities. Tokyo often feels like it’s dominated by out-of-towners and tourists, whereas Kobe restaurants and bars seem to be exclusively filled with locals. If you’re new to Japan, Kobe’s appeal may not be very obvious, but it’s a great place to check out for a day trip if you’re in Osaka or Kyoto. 

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into. 

My paternal great-grandfather Max moved from Minsk to rural Louisiana in the early 20th century. He came to America with no siblings, and said almost nothing about his background to his children. I had spent the last decade trying to figure out his origins through DNA matches and making very little progress, when someone pointed me to a tranche of translated Belarussian records online. These helped me make a major breakthrough that suggests Max was the grandson of the top Talmudic authority in Minsk during the mid-19th century. (I know it’s very common to fall into these delusions of grandeur in family histories, but the DNA, circumstantial, and record-based evidence all point to this direction quite clearly.) With genealogical research, it’s easy to go extremely deep into rabbit holes, because the entire exercise is searching for needles in haystacks, and when you run out of haystacks, you start getting tempted to do things like learning to read 18th century Lithuanian handwriting… (WDM)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & David (WDM)

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