Monday? Monday.

Hello. We seldom talk on Mondays, and this will be appropriately brief. I’m here to solicit questions / comments for tomorrow, a Gene Pool that will focus on humiliating personal stories — mine and yours. Got any? These have to be true, things that happened to you. As always, this is entirely anonymous, but it must be real. Also as always, you are more than welcome to submit other types of questions or comments — it’s always smart to do this in advance of a Gene Pool, so I get a chance to assess, reflect, and then react without discipline or maturity.

Please send your stuff here:

When I started The Gene Pool I vowed to myself that I’d never ask anything of you without giving something in return, so here are some things:

First, we welcome a barrage of new subscribers — felicitously, all from the Chicago area — reacting to this piece by the uber-excellent Neil Steinberg, city columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, in his uber-excellent blog EveryGoddamnDay. I am cutting and pasting this item for your convenience. It is embarrassingly complimentary of me, but I have gotten over that due to acute ego poisoning. It also contains a humiliating anecdote, by me, about my first job, and about the birth of this very feature:

     Gene Weingarten is a humorist at heart, and as such is profoundly in touch with the inherent tragedy of life.  As a longtime columnist at the Washington Post, he won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for "The Fiddler in the Subway," where he put world class violinist Joshua Bell into the Washington Metro with his case open for change. What would have been a stunt in the hands of a lesser writer, like me, turned into a profound meditation on beauty, time and how we choose to live our lives. If you haven't read his collection, "The Fiddler in the Subway," you should buy it right now here.  The book contains some of the best-rendered, most heartbreaking, thought-provoking and worthwhile columns ever written. Reading it is awe-inspiring, like looking at the stars at night. I could never come anywhere close, but it made me proud to belong to the same profession, to be part of the same cosmos.       

     Besides being a professional inspiration second only to, perhaps, John McPhee, Gene has lately been a cautionary tale that has steeled me to meet whatever professional doom is hurtling toward me.  At the end of 2021, he tripped over his humor — fall-out from an offhand joke he made about Indian food that ran afoul of our exquisite cultural sensitivities. The Washington Post unceremoniously showed him the gate, a shocking coda that sadly encapsulates our moment in professional journalism.  Though it brought me both sadness and a strange kind of reassurance, almost comfort: if Gene Weingarten could be cashiered over a crack about curry, then I can be burnt at the stake and have no reason to complain nor feel fate had been unusually severe to me. In fact, I will lower my head, accepting my due, thanks to him. If he can take it, so can I.
     Not that Weingarten has surrendered quietly. Not his way. He launched a vibrant substack, "The Gene Pool." I signed up, and hope you do too. I asked him to tell us a little about it, and he honored EGD by agreeing to say a few words. Take it away, Gene:

     On my 21st birthday, when I was just out of college, where I was editor of the newspaper, I began my first day on the job as city hall reporter for a small afternoon daily in Albany, New York. The newsroom was dingy, the manual typewriters ancient and balky. The walls of the city room were faded to a wan yellow-orangish-green color that resembled the interior of one of those 1950s movie hotel rooms with a blinking neon sign outside the window ("Eats"), peopled by unshaven men in ribbed undershirts chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes down to the smallest stub, and looking nervously toward the street. Let's call the color "you'll-never-take-me-alive copper"
     Then the city editor told me what I was going to make: Just $72 a week. My jaw dropped. I was gobsmacked. These idiots were going to actually pay me for something I would have done for free.
     The Earth wheeled fifty times around the sun. I began earning a lot more money with jobs that had a lot more prestige at a succession of larger newspapers, until I arrived at The Washington Post in 1991 and nailed a great gig that gave me international prestige and rewarded me with significant prizes. And then, last year, when I turned 70, they jettisoned me.
     It's not easy getting a new position at 70;. A book proposal went nowhere. But the folks at Substack, a new online site that delivers publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure asked, would I be interested in starting a newsletter? It's a grueling endeavor that usually is not terribly lucrative.
     "Yes," I said, immediately. And I did. It's a blog-like thing and reader interactive chat called "The Gene Pool." It's doing pretty well. It has subscribers in 49 states and 72 countries. I am earning about a third of what I did at The Post. People have asked me why I did it. Why not just take a victory lap and retire? Here's why:
     These Substack idiots are going to actually pay me for doing something I'd have done for free.

—

Finally, an observation, which I deliver to you here, for free, exclusively in The Gene Pool: Some weeks ago, the egregious Elon Musk announced that to get or retain a “blue checkmark” on Twitter one would have to pay him $8 a month by subscribing to “Twitter Blue.” This ended the old system, which was that you had to be kind of famous — it was an effort to assure people they were actually talking to who they thought they were talking to (I had a blue check), but it was also inarguably elitist. Clearly some adjustment was in order. The problem is, what Musk did by monetizing the thing was to establish the current ethos, in which everyone knows that anyone who still has a blue check is a schmuck. A poseur. A social climber. A dickhead. A pathetic, no-good wannabe. The sort of idiot who buys followers. A maggot on a stinkwagon. Some dork willing to pay $100 bucks a year for moronic, meaningless validation on Twitter. No one I know who had a blue check mark retained it. My friend Laura Lippman, the detective novelist, changed her Twitter handle to Laura Lippman Has Not Paid Anyone Eight Dollars.

So, congratulations, Elon, you horse’s ass.

Okay, I have delivered and now can ask again. Am looking for stories / questions for tomorrow’s Gene Pool. All types will do but I am particularly hungry for personal stories in which you suffered embarrassment and humiliation. Please send them here:

See you all tomorrow.

(Both go to the same place, but I don’t trust technology. It hates me.