This week we hear from Jo Livingstone, the culture staff writer at The New Republic and a recent PhD in English at New York University.
I mention Jo Livingstone’s PhD because that’s a major topic of our conversation. Livingstone’s writing at The New Republic has the kind of agile, supple thinking and prose you’d want from a critic who has her thumb on the pulse of culture, but she blends that style of criticism with the erudition, the specialized knowledge, of a scholar. You can spot this blend in Livingstone’s recent writing on white nationalists, whose attempt to reach back into a kind of imagined and popularized medieval past Livingstone is eager and more than able to critique.
Throughout our conversation, Jo and I discuss what it took for her to make the jump from the academy to the world of cultural criticism and magazine writing. We talk a lot about what makes a good academic writer and a good cultural critic. We talk, as well, about the plight of adjunct faculty and the ways in which the distinction between scholarship and cultural criticism seems to be blurring.