Jesse Singal and the Woes of Unchecked Hubris

He’s singing his yesmen a powerful tune they can’t resist, and his curiosity loses out in the process.

Logo courtesy of Substack. Photograph courtesy of Jesse Singal on Twitter.

To have a mediation layer between a writer and their audience does have its advantages, but it’s one that early proponents of the blogosphere didn’t think was enough to warrant giving away what little power they had to media organizations–Jesse Singal was one such figure, and his writing well-after seven years at New York Magazine still comprises the hallmarks of a tentative, but mutually-beneficial relationship with an industry coming under increasingly-heavier fire for coddling his kind. It’s clear over the years that Singal places less faith in any semblance of viability at the very institutions he was once defiant of, and so it is on his Substack and a Patreon podcast he co-hosts that bets of future discursive relevance are currently being hedged.

Singal’s career is so wide-spanning that it’s impossible to glean a consistent theme across it, but one thing that remains constant is his penchant for ruffling the feathers of those he perceives as lesser-than actors in the media–in Singal’s imaginative, he is the Corey Robin of every opinion piece and everyone to his contrary is but a mere intern with no idea on how to work the cogs of journalism, be it investigative or…