Bret Devereaux

But I suppose the more serious-sounding rejoinder is then 'why not write for the public but in a more rigorous, hard-nosed sort of way? Why not write a book on the topic with enough pages and footnotes to really be very complete and break new ground and so on?' 11/21

And my answer is: Yes, I am doing that. I am working on my narrowly tailored, extensively over-footed book project (very, very slowly). I also write academic articles (also slowly). But the reach of that sort of thing is narrow, too slow to come out and we all know it. 12/21

So you want to write the 'traditional media' article because that is a way (not the only one) of at least engaging the broader chattering classes instead of just other academics (convenient, since the chattering classes control both our funding and most broader policy) 13/21

But the demands of such writing are tricky: on the one hand you need to supply all of the necessary background information because you simply cannot be sure that your audience knows any of it. On the other hand, you have tight word limits (1200 is common). 14/21

Which in practice means you can develop one example to a moderate depth, or name-check a few examples at almost no depth. There isn't generally the option of writing a rigorous 15,000 word essay, but in only 1,200 words. 15/21

But the alternative, it seems to me, is to abandon the battlefield entirely to folks without our training or knowledge. I'd rather it be trained historians trying to package a useful historical argument in 1,200 words than the writers at Buzzfeed or Cracked. 16/21

Because the fact is, someone is going to write about <topic> in any case. The question is if they come to that topic with any historical exemplars (exemplars here taken very broadly) in mind and the degree to which they actually understand those exemplars deeply. 17/21

After all the original point of doing history was the (correct) supposition both that 1) learning the methods of historical analysis can improve an individual's thinking and that 2) historical exemplars offer a sound basis for thinking about the future. 18/21