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Anyone can point at something and say it’s broken, corrupt, or destined to fail. The real challenge? Building something better. The cynic sees a proposal for change and immediately lists why it won’t work. They’re usually right about specific failure modes — systems are complex, and failure has many mothers. But being right about potential problems differs from being right about the whole.

The cynical position feels sophisticated. It signals worldliness, experience, and a certain battle-hardened wisdom. “Oh, you sweet summer child,” the cynic says, “I’ve seen how these things really work.” But what if this sophistication is itself a form of naïveté?

Cynicism comes with hidden taxes. Every time we default to assuming the worst, we pay in missed opportunities, reduced social trust, and diminished creative capacity. These costs compound over time, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which cynical expectations shape cynical realities.

Pattern recognition is valuable — we should learn from history and past failures. But pattern recognition becomes pattern imprisonment when it blinds us to genuinely new possibilities.

Why spend years building something that could fail when you could spend an afternoon critiquing others’ attempts and look just as smart? The cynical stance is intellectually rewarding but culturally corrosive.

The alternative to cynicism isn’t unquestioning optimism. It’s more nuanced: a clear-eyed recognition of problems coupled with the conviction that improvement is possible. Call it pragmatic meliorism — the belief that while perfect solutions may not exist, better ones do.

things are broken, AND they can be fixed; people are flawed AND capable of growth; systems are complex AND can be improved.

Here’s a more charitable reading of cynicism: it’s not an intellectual position. It’s an emotional defense mechanism. If you expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed. If you assume everything is corrupt, you can’t be betrayed. But this protection comes at a terrible price. The cynic builds emotional armor that also functions as a prison, keeping out not just pain but also possibility, connection, and growth.

Not all domains benefit equally from cynical analysis. Some areas — scientific investigation, financial planning, and security systems — benefit from rigorous skepticism. Others — creative endeavors, relationship building, social movements — often suffer from it.

What would it look like to embrace pragmatic meliorism instead of cynicism? Acknowledging problems while focusing on solutions Learning from history without being imprisoned by it Maintaining high standards while accepting incremental progress Combining skeptical analysis with constructive action

When you feel the pull of cynicism, ask yourself: Is this helping? Is this default skepticism making you more effective or just more comfortable? Are you choosing the easy path of criticism over the harder path of creation?

Polls show that many of the policies enacted by President Biden are popular. His measures to reduce the cost of insulin and other drugs receive support from more than 80 percent of Americans. His infrastructure bill, his hawkish approach to China and his all-of-the-above energy policy, which combines expanded oil drilling with clean-energy subsidies, are popular, too. But voters obviously like some of his policies more than others. And an unusual pattern seems to be hurting Biden’s re-election campaign: Voters are less aware of his most popular policies than his more divisive ones.

Adam Green, co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a Democratic-aligned group, blames what he calls fight theory. “It’s not enough to have positive messaging,” Green said. “Voters must see drama, clash and an ongoing saga in order for our message to break through a cluttered news environment.”

fights become the subject of political fundraising emails, activist campaigns, news stories and social media posts. Conflict attracts attention. The situation with Biden’s most popular economic policies — especially the reduction of medical costs — is somewhat different.

That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other.

The most famous of Israel’s foundational claims — that it was a necessary sanctuary for one of the world’s most oppressed peoples, who may not have survived without a state of their own — is at the root of this complication and undergirds the prevailing viewpoint of the political-media-entertainment nexus. It is Israel’s unique logic of existence that has provided a quantum of justice to the Israeli project in the eyes of Americans and others around the world, and it’s what separates Jewish Israelis from the white supremacists of the Jim Crow South, who had no justice on their side at all.

“It’s kind of hard to remember, but even as late as 2014, people were talking about the Civil War as this complicated subject,” Jackson said. “Ta-Nehisi was going to plantations and hanging out at Monticello and looking at all the primary documents and reading a thousand books, and it became clear that the idea of a ‘complicated’ narrative was ridiculous.” The Civil War was, Coates concluded, solely about the South’s desire to perpetuate slavery, and the subsequent attempts over the next century and a half to hide that simple fact betrayed, he believed, a bigger lie — the lie that America was a democracy, a mass delusion that he would later call “the Dream” in Between the World and Me.

The hallmarks of The Atlantic’s coverage include variations of Israel’s seemingly limitless “right to defend itself”; an assertion that extremists on “both sides” make the conflict worse, with its corollary argument that if only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jewish-supremacist government were ousted, then progress could be made; abundant sympathy for the suffering of Israelis and a comparatively muted response to the suffering of Palestinians; a fixation on the way the issue is debated in America, particularly on college campuses; and regular warnings that antisemitism is on the rise both in America and around the world.

the overall pattern reveals a distorting worldview that pervades the industry and, as Coates writes in The Message, results in “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.” “The view of mainstream American commentators is a false equivalence between subjugator and subjugated,” said Nathan Thrall, the Jerusalem-based author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, as if the Israelis and the Palestinians were equal parties in an ancient tug-of-war.

For Coates, the problem for the industry at large partly stems from the perennial problem of inadequate representation. “It is extremely rare to see Palestinians and Arabs writing the coverage or doing the book reviews,” he said. “I would be interested if you took the New York Times and the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and looked at how many of those correspondents are Palestinian, I wonder what you would find.” (It’s a testament to just how polarizing the issue is that many Jewish Americans believe the bias in news media works the other way around, against Israel.)

American mainstream journalism, Coates says, defers to American authority. “It’s very similar,” he told me, “to how American journalism has been deferential to the cops. We privilege the cops, we privilege the military, we privilege the politicians. The default setting is toward power.”

in the total coverage, in all of the talk of experts and the sound bites of politicians and the dispatches of credentialed reporters, a sense of ambiguity is allowed to prevail. “The fact of the matter is,” he said, “that kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb shit they’re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would use, they are more morally correct than some motherfuckers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists.”

When I asked Coates what he wanted to see happen in Israel and Palestine, he avoided the geopolitical scale and tended toward the more specific — for example, to have journalists not be “shot by army snipers.” He said that the greater question was not properly for him; it belonged to those with lived experience and those who had been studying the problem for years.

“I have a deep-seated fear,” he told me, “that the Black struggle will ultimately, at its root, really just be about narrow Black interest. And I don’t think that is in the tradition of what our most celebrated thinkers have told the world. I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide, in defense of a state that is practicing apartheid, I won’t be able to just sit here and shake my head and say, ‘Well, that is unfortunate.’ I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned.”

The function of criticism is and has always been to complicate our sense of beauty. Good criticism of music we love—or, occasionally, really hate—increases the dimensions and therefore the volume of feeling. It exercises that part of ourselves which responds to art, making it stronger.

The correction to critics’ failure to take pop music seriously is known as poptimism: the belief that pop music is just as worthy of critical consideration as genres like rock, rap or, god forbid, jazz. In my opinion, this correction was basically good. It’s fun and interesting to think seriously about music that is meant to be heard on the radio or danced to in clubs, the same way it is fun and interesting to think about crime novels or graphic design. For the critic, maybe more than for anyone else, it is important to remember that while a lot of great stuff is not popular, popular stuff can be great, too.

every good idea has a dumber version of itself on the internet. The dumb version of poptimism is the belief that anything sufficiently popular must be good. This idea is supported by certain structural forces, particularly the ability, through digitization, to count streams, pageviews, clicks, and other metrics so exactly that every artist and the music they release can be assigned a numerical value representing their popularity relative to everything else. The answer to the question “What do people like?” is right there on a chart, down to the ones digit, conclusively proving that, for example, Drake (74,706,786,894 lead streams) is more popular than The Weeknd (56,220,309,818 lead streams) on Spotify.

The question “What is good?” remains a matter of disagreement, but in the face of such precise numbers, how could you argue that the Weeknd was better? You would have to appeal to subjective aesthetic assessments (e.g. Drake’s combination of brand-checking and self-pity recreates neurasthenic consumer culture without transcending it) or socioeconomic context (e.g. Drake is a former child actor who raps about street life for listeners who want to romanticize black poverty without hearing from anyone actually affected by it, plus he’s Canadian) in a way that would ultimately just be your opinion. And who needs one jerk’s opinion when democracy is right there in the numbers?

This attitude is how you get criticism like “Why Normal Music Reviews No Longer Make Sense for Taylor Swift,” which cites streaming data (The Tortured Poets Department’s 314.5 million release-day streams versus Cowboy Carter’s 76.6 million) to argue that Swift is better understood not as a singer-songwriter but as an area of brand activity, along the lines of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars. “The tepid music reviews often miss the fact that ‘music’ is something that Swift stopped selling long ago,” New Yorker contributor Sinéad O’Sullivan writes. “Instead, she has spent two decades building the foundation of a fan universe, filled with complex, in-sequence narratives that have been contextualized through multiple perspectives across eleven blockbuster installments. She is not creating standalone albums but, rather, a musical franchise.”

The fact that most cognitively normal adults regard these bands as children’s music is what makes their fan bases not just ticket-buyers but subcultures.

The power of the antagonist-subculture dynamic was realized by major record labels in the early 1990s, when the most popular music in America was called “alternative.”

For the person who is not into music—the person who just happens to be rapturously committed to the artists whose music you hear everywhere whether you want to or not, whose new albums are like iPhone releases and whose shows are like Disneyland—the critic is a foil.

This is all build-up to my proposal for what Musk — or any other bidder for Twitter, for that matter — ought to do with a newly private Twitter. First, Twitter’s current fully integrated model is a financial failure. Second, Twitter’s social graph is extremely valuable. Third, Twitter’s cultural impact is very large, and very controversial. Given this, Musk (who I will use as a stand-in for any future CEO of Twitter) should start by splitting Twitter into two companies. One company would be the core Twitter service, including the social graph. The other company would be all of the Twitter apps and the advertising business.

TwitterServiceCo would open up its API to any other company that might be interested in building their own client experience; each company would: Pay for the right to get access to the Twitter service and social graph. Monetize in whatever way they see fit (i.e. they could pursue a subscription model). Implement their own moderation policy. This last point would cut a whole host of Gordian Knots:

A truly open TwitterServiceCo has the potential to be a new protocol for the Internet — the notifications and identity protocol; unlike every other protocol, though, this one would be owned by a private company. That would be insanely valuable, but it is a value that will never be realized as long as Twitter is a public company led by a weak CEO and ineffective board driving an integrated business predicated on a business model that doesn’t work. Twitter’s Reluctance

Every platform has its royalty. On Instagram it's influencers, foodies, and photographers. Twitter belongs to the founders, journalists, celebrities, and comedians. On LinkedIn, it’s hiring managers, recruiters, and business owners who hold power on the platform and have the ear of the people.

On a job site, they’re the provisioners of positions and never miss the chance to regale their audience with their professional deeds: hiring a teenager with no experience, giving a stressed single mother a chance to provide for her family, or seeing past a candidate’s imperfections to give them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. These stories are relayed dramatically in what’s now recognizable as LinkedIn-style storytelling, one spaced sentence at a time, told by job-givers with a savior complex.