Creators With a Conscience

I spent the majority of the previous post lamenting the downfall (my word) of a book genre that I don't even read. I decried the story because it was all about the embrace of AI, and I just struggle with the concept of art without its humanity.

I found this podcast a double (triple? quadruple?) dose of humanity though.

Pablo Torre Finds Out is a distinctly human show, but this episode filled me with a lot of hope and goodwill toward honest-to-god creators of things.

It's an interview with The New Yorker's David Remnick and documentarian Ezra Edelman of O.J.: Made in America fame.

They talk about the newsroom-destroying firing spree by Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post. They talk about the farce that is the Melania Trump documentary. They talk about the diminishment in unmoderated access to celebrities and athletes for stories amid the rise of social media and paid "documentaries."

It was just heartening to hear them talk about these topics with a clear sense of ethics and morality, not in a preachy way but in a way that could make you feel proud when consuming their content. Here's a personal ethos that I believe in and it filters down through everything I touch, they seemed to say.

After listening to it, I came back to it about an hour later, and I listened to it all over again.