We share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives. Today, we're really excited to be speaking with Eric Kleinenberg, who is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He's the author of several books, including Palaces for the People, How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life, Going Solo, The Extraordinary Rise, and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, and and Heat Wave, A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. He's also the editor of Cultural Production in a Digital Age, co-editor of Anti-Democracy in America, and co-author with Aziz Ansari of the New York Times' number one bestseller, Modern Romance. And most recently is his book, 2020, One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed. 
So we're going to talk a little bit about that book, but we wanted to speak with Eric because he's done so much different kinds of writing, academic publications, more popular press, and books such as this last one that are about really recent issues. So because so many of our listeners have asked about how and when an academic comes to write more popular pieces, and let me note that you also contribute to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Magazine. I'm wondering if you can tell us when you started to write some of these non-academic kind of pieces and books. Sure. First, let me just say thank you for having me. I really like your podcast, and it's exciting to see what you're doing there. 
And I'll tell you that I started doing non-academic writing before I was officially an academic. I started in graduate school. It was a little serendipitous. I was a student at Berkeley. My dissertation advisor was French, and a friend and colleague of his worked at a magazine called Le Monde Diplomatique, which is more affiliated with Le Monde, the newspaper, at the time than it is now. But had a reputation for doing long form, serious kind of lefty journalism and was interested in intellectual debates, as French publications often are in ways that are still difficult for us to understand in the U.S., footnotes and everything. So the editor was in town and asked me about my research and I told him and he invited me to write something. 
And I started writing in English, then found my work translated into France, into French. And I suddenly had a little side gig, you know, writing about the United States for a French publication. And I did that for years, really, as I was learning to become a social scientist. And when I was working on my dissertation, you know, it became clear to me that it was a project that could get published as either a trade book or as a university press book. Actually, the first contact I had with the trade press editor was someone who was working at Norton. who read a version of a paper in Le Monde Diplomatique in French and asked me if I would be interested in potentially publishing it with Norton. 
I didn't. I published it as a university press book, but kind of the door was open and I just decided to walk through it. That sounds great. And I guess you must have noticed right away there was something exciting that you liked about doing that kind of writing. I wonder if you could tell us about how it differed from the academic writing you did. Well, first of all, it's nice to have readers. Second of all, there is an immediacy to it. Around the time that I was writing my first paper for my dissertation, which was about a heat wave in Chicago, I was working on an academic article. I sent it to a terrific journal in my field called Theorian Society, which has actually just gone through a very dramatic upheaval. 
But that's a subject for another day. But it took roughly nine months to get a response from the reviewers. And After I got my response from the reviewers, I needed another six months or so to revise it. And then it took maybe a year to get it into print or something like that. And this is a time when there are no preprints available online. You just waited for the things to come in the mail. So it's like the late 1990s. And that was a little frustrating to me. You know, I was trying to share this work and have it in the world. And the peer review process was amazing. I learned a ton and the paper got much better and the project got much better. 
But, you know, when I wrote this article in Le Monde of Matique about the same topic, I got a massive response from people all around the world, including, you know, an editor at Norton and people in policy circles and people throughout Europe who invited me to come and give lectures. And that was pretty exciting for someone in their 20s. For sure. Some of our guests have wondered if there is a negative response that we might get from other academics if we write more popularly? It probably comes a little by discipline, but yeah, what's been your experience with that? Yes, there will be. You can be sure about that there will be a negative response. I mean, I think it varies and it depends on the nature of the work. 
I don't think anyone begrudges you much if you are doing your regular scholarly work and on the side you are, you know, writing other kinds of books And I think that has become increasingly popular and acceptable and in some places even admired. So it's a bit of a mixed story. That said, if you start to turn what might be an academic monograph into a trade book, it might not be considered to be serious scholarship, even if it is serious scholarship, depending on your field. So, for instance, if you're a historian, you're really free of this conflict because it's just a norm in history that, you know, first rate works of scholarly production come out from trade presses. But if you're in English literature or, you know, sociology, your peers might wonder why, you know, Knopf is publishing you and not university of Chicago press. 
So I guess the other thing is there's only so much time in the day. So, you know, it's, incredibly time consuming to write a magazine piece for the New Yorker, like months and months and months and months and months. And occasionally I'll have colleagues who say, you know, Oh, I really want to do that kind of thing that you do. So I, you know, just tell like, how do I, like, how do I revise this thing I'm doing so that I can just, you know, dumb it down and make it a New Yorker piece. And it's like, so it's such a wrongheaded question that betrays so many misunderstandings of what goes into a good piece of, you know, non-fiction magazine writing, or let alone like a good piece of non-fiction general interest literature that, you know, it's kind of a non-starter, but there's only so much time in the day. 
So if you want to develop the skills that I think it takes to do that kind of writing, you know, you should plan on changing your career. You know, you're going to have to work differently. There's not that many people who can, you know, kind of do both of those things. And I actually have, I still have a career writing sociology articles occasionally, but I don't really do university press books at this point in my career. I contribute occasionally to scholarly journals and sociology, but not as much as I used to. I was the editor of a journal called Public Culture for five years. So I had the experience of editing an academic journal also. And just the work that goes into these different projects is different. 
And so unless you're like a Jill Lepore superhuman, it's hard to see how you can do it, especially early in your career. Right. I mean, you do hold professorship at NYU. So if someone were to ask you, Eric, so how were you able to do both of these things successfully? Was it that at one point there was more of the academic publications? Yeah. And I still, again, I still do engage in the world of professional sociology. I still write occasional journal articles, contribute to the professional organization, edit university press books. I was the editor of a journal, like I said. So it's not like I'm out of it altogether, but my, you know, the kind of that when I'm writing, I think about, you know, who is this for, which is a question I think we should all be asking all the time. 
Like, who am I writing it for? Who am I in conversation with? And it's not when I'm writing a book these days, it's not only for sociologists. I want sociologists to read my work and actually try to write books that sociologists will find serious and respectable. And the research design is, you know, serious and, rigorous and the you know, writing is responsible i you know i try not to overreach. I don't pander to the audience by telling by telling stories i think people want to hear or pushing findings that aren't really supported by the evidence but i i just i do more trade writing than i that i did earlier in my career, for sure there's there's no question about it. And I guess one really important thing to tell you is that, you know, when i was in graduate school and i did have this choice, like, do 
do I want to make my first book a trade book or a university press book that was kind of pitched as a university press trade book? I went for the latter. I definitely realized like, if I want to have an academic career, I have to credential myself, but also I really wanted to learn how to do that. You know, I wanted to, I wanted to know how to publish a really good scholarly book. And I wanted to, I wanted the peer review process. And I, you know, I wanted to, you know, I, I, probably some people listening will have this experience. Like I've been reading all these books in graduate school that were from the University of Chicago Press, and they were these great, you know, classic urban ethnographies. 
And I wanted to be part of that tradition. And it meant something to me to write something that fit into that. And I didn't want to write a trade book at that moment. So that evolved over time. And, you know, one of the things about the structure of an academic career is if you establish yourself, you know, graduate school in the first decade of your career and do kind of the conventional scholarly publishing, you get a little bit more latitude on the other side. Those are helpful reminders. I mean, both of the Jillipores of the world are few and that these are choices, you know, you might make at different stages. You did choose to do that first book as an academic book and that allowed for the academic career, which then had space further on for you to do other kinds of writing and 
I wouldn't be surprised if you have students, maybe grad students, who want to work with you and are sometimes maybe asking you for your advice about these different kinds of writing when you're talking with grad students or earlier stage academics today who are interested in doing this more popular writing. What how do you advise them? Basically, to try to do it the way that I did, whether that's good advice or not. But I mean, I think that you should have the experience. If you want to have a scholarly career. I think you should establish yourself as a scholar 1st, and that in my field means. You know, publishing journal articles and then if you're a book writer as people in my part of sociology are. 
Writing a university press book and having go through peer review, you know, making it as serious a piece of conventional scholarship is you can, and you can take risks as a conventional scholar, like, but you need to get it. Through the process, and, you know, the point I try to make to people who want to engage a larger public is that. you know, kind of establishing themselves that way will give them credibility for a long time and give them freedom later. There are occasions when, you know, there's students who have projects that really, you know, work as magazine articles or as trade books. And, you know, we have serious conversations about that. I have had students who have come to me in recent years with backgrounds in kind of high profile, long form journalism and 
curiosity about sociology and their cases are a little different because they try to straddle the two worlds from an earlier point in their careers. And that is also complicated because hiring committees don't know how to read someone who publishes in the New York or the New York Times Magazine and has a few sociology journal articles. And I think in most professional academic disciplines, the hiring committees and the departments are looking for someone who's going to proved to be very dedicated to the mission of the discipline. And that's probably fair. Occasionally, there are places that are really interested in someone who has more of a public profile. But I don't think that happens as often as we want it to in our fantasy lives about public intellectual life. 
I happen to work at NYU, which has always been very supportive of the kind of work that I want to do. Actually, it's my second job. I came here early in my career. And part of the reason for coming was I got a really clear sense from the leadership of the university that they valued the kind of scholarship and public writing that I was doing and wanted to give me support in doing that. But but not every university does that. And I think some some will really look down on you for doing it. So you have to kind of know your your situation, your employer, your field. Yeah. Thanks for being honest about that. I'm Wondering about this latest book you wrote, 2020, it's obviously about a period in recent history that some people want to block out. 
But you decided to sort of go back to it and go deep. And it is not just about the pandemic or COVID. And to me, it's a book that really proves we still have a lot to learn and process from this period we all lived through. But I'm wondering if you encountered challenges either in selling the book or even now in pitching the book. Are readers coming with you to this – back to this time that many people just want to kind of – are still trying to get past? Not really in selling the book because I started working on the project right away, you know, in April of 2020. And it kind of started with an op-ed I wrote in The Times in March of 2020 where I argued that this language of social distancing was – 
you know, mistake and that really what we needed to get through the early stage of the pandemic was physical distancing and social solidarity. And I tried to make the case that, you know, societies that will fare well in this crisis are going to have the capacity to to achieve something like solidarity and those that will not are kind of doomed to suffer. And that proved that proved to be right, actually. But what was wrong is I was thinking about a crisis. And of course, the thing about 2020 is that there are these cascading crises. The economic collapse, the abandonment of central cities, the spike in violence, the murder of George Floyd, of course, and the civil rights demonstrations that followed, the assault on democracy. 
I mean, it was quite a year, 2020, in addition to the pandemic. And so I started tracking it very early and found a set of people I wanted to tell the story of the year through. which is also not a conventional sociological research technique. We do have a tradition of having these key characters that you see in the great ethnographies, but the people I write about in 2020, they're featured in more of a kind of profile style. I just done a profile for the New Yorker of a landscape architect, and I really enjoyed writing in that style, and he tried to use that technique in this book also. So the writing and the selling of the book, Uh, were not super complicated though. 
There was a massive research project and writing is always complicated and hard. You know, I don't think that there has been huge, you know, market demand for books about the pandemic year and i i you know the book came out a few weeks ago. It's gotten a lot of media coverage, which has been great. Um, nice reviews and, you know, radio and television, all that stuff, which has been very fulfilling, but you know, it, it's, It's a topic that I think people are wary of going back to because, I mean, it's a book about a trauma. It's a book about a series of traumas. And the argument of the book is that our collective response to 2020 has been marked by what I call the will not to know. 
And the reason for writing the book is that we've been shaped by these experiences that we've effectively repressed. So I've been writing about what I call long COVID as a social condition, not just a medical one. You know, the truancy that we still see, young people, kids aren't going to school, our offices are largely empty, teachers are missing school, levels of distrust are higher than they were before. There's even more division, this kind of sense of despondency that you find throughout the United States, like a real malaise that I think is not explained by the so-called loneliness epidemic. or the other things that the Surgeon General is calling attention to. I think they have to do with the fact that we went through this horrible trauma and that we haven't processed it in any meaningful way. 
So that's the call of the book. And I think that's a tough ask of a reader. But I think it's really essential for all of us. And it's especially essential to do in an election year when there's so much at stake. Yeah, it felt to me like it joined the conversation about Bowling alone and bowling together, it really brought out to me that divide in the sort of hyper-individual American way of being and the more communitarian. I mean, there's chapters in here about the meaning of masks, you know, where you remind us how much was loaded into the mask if you chose to wear one out in public. It's what that symbolized to other Americans. Yeah, I mean... There's a chapter in the book on the meaning of masks and this question of, like, why in the U.S., but not really in other countries, the mask became so ideologically loaded. 
And also the kind of object of actual conflict. I mean, Americans, many of you remember, were, like, brawling with each other in public, like, fighting in grocery stores, on airplanes, in public. public parks, people were murdering each other over mask wearing, and that didn't happen in other places. Like in England, people also didn't like wearing masks, and they wore them about the same rate that we did here, maybe a little less even. But whether you wore a mask had very little to do with your politics, and the symbolism was just different. So what happened here, and i you know went deep into this idea that well you know what happened in the united states is the mask became a kind of totem. You know, it was like a symbol of who you are and what you believe in. 
So, you know, there's a story there. Like when Trump announced that the CDC had recommended that Americans wear masks in public places, he then said at the same press conference, like, personally, I'm not going to do it. And I don't think you should either. And suddenly everybody in Trump's orbit was refusing to wear a mask. And Mike Pence went to the Mayo Clinic and, you know, was the only person in the zip code who wasn't wearing a mask. and it became clear to everybody on the right that, you know, bearing your face was a way of showing strength and masculinity and virality and courage meant you were free. And then among liberals and progressives, the opposite was suddenly the case. Like people are wearing masks in their political advertisements. 
You know, you change your facebook page to, you know, Rachel's wearing a mascot you know, online and Eric hashtag wears a mask, Kleinberg on Twitter. And so now we're wearing masks. And when we see people wearing masks, we've had the sense of solidarity with them. Like, oh, you're on my team. Like team blue wears the mask and team red doesn't wear the mask. And suddenly like this little piece of fabric is carrying all this weight. It's really powerful stuff. And we go after each other. And I think it's important because it started with masks, but then it was like team blue takes one kind of medication and If they get sick with COVID and Team Red takes a different kind of medication, right? 
Remember all like the alternative medicine and the, you know, hydrochloroquine, you know, moment. And then vaccines, right? Like the blue team liked vaccines in 2021 and the red team didn't like vaccines anymore, even though arguably the Trump administration helped to speed the vaccines into production. But by the time they were approved by the FDA, Biden had won the election and Trump didn't want to support vaccines. you know, big public health initiative that Biden was going to get credit for. So he doesn't want to promote the vaccine. And right. So now there's like a, if you live in a blue state, your risk of getting COVID dying, COVID went way down. If you lived in a red state, it went way up after the vaccines became available. 
And then it's like the election. Like if you lived in, you know, if you one team liked the election and said it was legitimate and real and the other team didn't like the election and said it wasn't legitimate and real. And it's not exactly like it started with the mask, but it's, the debate about the mask really took us to a different place. It intensified those ideological divisions and hardened them and we're stuck there. And so the critical social scientist in me thinks like, well, you know, the one way to get unstuck is to go back and look at what happened and try to explain how it turned out this way and how unnatural, how not inevitable that was. Obviously, that's not enough to undo things, but it's a start. 
Yeah, I mean, I wanted to talk some about the content as we just did, you know, because I think it is such a rich period still for probably so many academics. And I think as part of what your book reminded us is, even though we might want to think of it as an anomalous time, you know, there's still other crises. And we might learn from that period about sort of dealing with what's going on now and what's what's coming up. I mean, a driving theory of my work has been this idea that crises reveal things. If we look closely at crises, we can learn who we are. We learn what we value. We learn whose lives matter. And so, you know, for me as a scholar, a crisis is like a resource of learning things that otherwise aren't visible. 
That was what drove the first big project, this dissertation and book I wrote about the heat wave in Chicago. It was a very similar kind of driving idea. This 2020 book, you know, takes... takes that and, you know, the book focuses on New York City. That's that's the one city. Spoiler alert. But but it also is very global because the alternate chapters that are not about the characters, you know, look at the U.S. experience in this comparative international perspective. So I think we learn so much from comparisons. Yeah. About that group biography kind of format. You know, some listeners might wonder when you do that kind of profile and it sounds like you're saying you you maybe kind of learn that a bit from the New Yorker writing profiles. 
How much does that involve in terms of really getting to know the person? To what extent are you really trying to get all the biographical details? I mean, as much as I possibly can. And again, it's work that dovetails with work that I've done ethnographically, just kind of deeply immersing myself in a world. What was different about this one is, first of all, the bulk of the reporting happened during the time of distancing. you couldn't just go hang out in some other place. And so a lot of the conversations, almost all the conversations, not all of them, but almost all the conversations were on zoom on the phone. That actually was kind of a benefit to me, to be honest, because I don't know if you remember what it felt like to be alive in 2020 or 2021, like people were just biographically available and really eager to talk and share their stories. 
Like I've been doing social science for, you know, qualitative research for 20 some years. And by far the easiest to get people to do interviews, to be revealing was during 2020 and 2021. People were just like home and a little bit bored and eager for social contact and going through something profound and like pretty excited to talk about it with someone who cared and was willing to give them a listen. And, you know, I organized with graduate students a whole series of studies, many of which have now come out in academic journals. where we did interviews and like our ability to line up an interview quickly and then get like incredible intimacy, um, incredible detail about really personal things just unmatched in my career. 
So, you know, like there are people in the bookhood profile who i talked to, you know, weekly for more than a year in like a, like, like in a therapeutic kind of relationship where we're both kind of that they're putting therapeutically helping each other. And there are also people I'd talked to just a few times, but for long periods of time, hours. And I did not want to know, just know like what people were living through in 2020. I wanted to know their life story. There's a story about this guy in the book named Daniel Presti, who's from Staten Island, which is the most conservative borough in the city. And he was a bar manager. And his story was about kind of getting radicalized on the right. 
And his story doesn't really make sense if you don't understand his biography. So, but I think that's true for everybody in the book. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's such a great way of getting the readers in bringing them into the stories of people. I feel like a lot of academics are attracted to that kind of form, but I did wonder how much time it took. And as you're saying, it was a reminder that 2020 did also offer those opportunities. You know, some people were open to going deep and being intimate in a way that, that that wasn't always the case in normal life. Yeah. There's a big concept concept in sociology called biographical availability, which, you know, we kind of conventionally apply to like people's participation in social movements. 
You know, why is it that young people get involved in social movements more than older people do? And, you know, why certain kinds of people at certain stages, like, are you available? Are you free that day uh can you go sit in uh the president's office? Can you go spend the summer in Mississippi? um you know, can you go to the protest in washington square park or wherever it is? Well, biographical availability for social research is also a real thing. And wow, are people biographically available and also just like really, really interested in processing in real time. I think for those people who didn't have that chance, which is like the overwhelming majority of us, we kind of locked it all away. Like we, you know, it's like, let's get through this year, you know, however we can. 
and then, like, put it in a box and block it in the closet and hope no one reminds me of 2020 again. And I think that's been to our, you know, collective detriment so there really is a value in going back and working through things. And I'll tell you like with the reason i have these characters driving the books is because i found that the analytic chapters i wrote, while very satisfying kind of intellectually, weren't really unlocking the personal stuff that's more experiential, that we all live through. And I thought that to make the book more affecting and challenging and deep, I could tell stories of relatively ordinary people so that readers could identify and think about their own experiences through them. In the same way that we were all doing that year watching Netflix, 
TV shows and movies, really looking for characters who could help us unlock things. And again, I'm not the first sociologist to do this. The great ethnographies typically have these key characters who are memorable people, and that's part of what makes this little niche of sociology so engrossing for people from different areas of research. But the kind of addition here was that because I'd had this experience writing the magazine Profiles, one to use those techniques also. And I love doing it. It was tremendously rewarding. It made it wonderful to read. So I'm glad you did it that way too. I'm also wondering, practically speaking, when you do those kinds of profiles, do you run them by the person after or what points do you show it to them? 
Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, they're based on lots of conversations. And so when you finally put your, when you write it up, you know, as a chapter of a book, or magazine piece, of course, whatever you've done is partial and you're not telling the person's whole story. And there are things that you have to leave on the cutting room floor. So what I did is I reached out to everyone and offered to read through all the quotes and provide context for the quotes. I wanted to make sure that everyone felt comfortable with what I was putting in and thought it was accurate. And I gave everybody the chance to change quotes, like if they want to say something differently or if they really didn't want something in, you know, I allowed them that. 
Only one person said, I need to see the whole chapter. I want to see the whole thing. One of the people I profile is an attorney and she was, you know, her view was like, I want to see everything. I need to understand the context of everything. You know, I wouldn't ordinarily do it if it was a magazine piece. You can't do that. Kind of just if you're writing journalism, you don't need, you know, you don't want to get the You don't want to put the person you're profiling in a position of being able to approve or disapprove. You want to make sure the facts are right. But it's not, you know, it's your story in a way that's different from the fact that it's their story, too. 
But, you know, you don't want, you know, to give the, you know, CEO of Boeing a chance to review your article about, you know, his management when the doors are falling off the plane because, you know, he shouldn't get to use his power that way. So so you know, so that, that was not an issue for me. I sent the chapter, you know, it was fine. There was one person, you know, the, the character Presti, um, who cut off contact with me as he got radicalized and more and more involved in, you know, the kind of what I consider to be the pretty extreme right. And he just, you know, didn't respond to countless messages and emails and phone calls. Uh, and yeah, 
The fact that he was such a public person, like he was going on Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and going to demonstrations and speaking with a megaphone and going on Twitter and making kind of big proclamations and dumping garbage on the mayor's lawn in New York City. I felt like he was enough of a public person that I needed to write about him. So I didn't have too many difficulties with that. I wanted to ask you another practical question, Eric. This period that you're in now, the book is just out pretty recently. It's getting a ton of press, positive attention, excitement, buzz. What is this period like for you? Some academics will experience something on a different scale, but they get to do some book events. 
Are you on to the next project? Is this a fruitful period in another way? Well, so I am on to another project. But that's largely because the book was finished a long time ago, right? It still takes a while for a book to come out. In fact, the publisher, Knopf, wanted to wait a while for this to come out. So it was done 14, 15 months ago. Wow. So I'm working on other things. But the occasion of the book is, you know, it's wonderful and stressful and exciting and challenging. I mean, it's, you know, I try to write a lot of pieces around the publication of the book. So I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that took a ton of work. 
Lots of edits back and forth. I wrote an excerpt from the book that I had to, you know, add a whole couple sections to for New York Magazine about the rise of mutual aid networks in New York, which is a big theme of the book. Profile of this woman, Nulo Doherty. I wrote another chapter that I adapted for Time Magazine. So there's a lot of like writing on the side and then, you know, a lot of public events. And in the early days, you're kind of figuring out how to talk about the book. Uh, which always takes some time for me. So I try to like, you know, run it by some people first, but inevitably it's like the process of actually speaking publicly that helps you learn, you know, what material really works for different audiences. 
And, you know, in my case, I was fortunate enough to, um, have a publisher that supported a book tour. And so i traveled a lot and that's thrilling and huge honor. And, uh, and you know, you feel really, I always feel really thrilled to be able to do it and I find the actual, like the time when you're with the audience and you're having the conversations to be credible. And of course, like the travel it takes to get there is not incredible. It's exhausting. And I also never complain about it because I know how fortunate I am to have that experience. So you just like, that's part of the thing. I think my family complains about it because, you know, I tend to disappear and my head gets sucked into book world and, you know, every, every, 
book writer becomes super narcissistic, you know, for those months where like your book's about to come out and it comes out and you worry about critics and you're thinking about how to say something. And what about this line in that review here? Or, you know, what about this colleague who said that kind of nasty thing? You know, whatever it is, you just get self-involved. And so you become even more difficult than you are when you're just an ordinarily self-involved academic. But fortunately, my wife is also an academic and also writes in this way. And so she's she she tolerates. Mm hmm. Yeah. A question we ask all guests, is there something you wish you had known about writing or publishing earlier in your career? 
I mean, I think one thing is that you don't get a lot of editorial feedback from most university presses. Peer review is really important. And so you get significantly more editorial feedback from trade editors, but it's a different kind of editorial feedback than you would get from scholars. So- if you want to check the ideas and the reasoning and the facts, you kind of have to do that on your own. So, like, you can organize your own peer review if you're if you're going to publish a magazine article or a trade book uh you know have you asked pay your colleagues to read your books and give you feedback or take them to a nice dinner or do it for them, you know, reciprocally. 
I hire fact checkers professionally for my book So, like, you know, fact checkers are amazing and it's so interesting, like, you think that academics would be the most concerned about getting the facts straight. But actually, we tend not to care that much about the facts. I mean, if you get called out for having bad data, that's one thing. But when you send your paper to most journals, if it's qualitative data, there's not really a fact-checking process. People who publish quantitative work increasingly have to turn over the data sets so that people can replicate the data, which is amazing advance, but we don't really have that in the same way. So, so just like sending your stuff out to fact checkers is amazing. It's super expensive to do it, by the way so it's not easy to to do but wow, fact checkers have saved me from a lot of things so so i think those are, those are a couple things and then i'd say this, you know, what i said before about the craft skill it takes, I think, to do this kind of writing, like it's, most of us don't have the ability to kind of do our academic research and writing and then kind of like, just like, 
come up naturally with a version that we can share with the New Yorker, you know, that they'd be thrilled to publish or that we could like share with Knopf and that would just work for them. Like they, there are different kinds of writing strategies and different kinds of writing skills that you need for these different outlets. And I think that a huge number of academics are really capable of doing that kind of writing if they want to develop the skill. We have amazingly talented scholars in all these different fields who are more than capable of developing the skills for this kind of public writing. But it's not like you could just kind of spit it out um you really have to develop the skills too. 
And so I, you know, I took the time early in my career to develop some of those skills. I'm not nearly as skilled as the people who really do high quality, you know, narrative non-fiction you know, I'm not like a new yorker staff writer, kind of like I, those folks are just extraordinary to me in terms of their writing skill. But I'm But I took a lot of time to do it much better than I would have been able to otherwise. And I don't think anybody should try to do that kind of writing if they're not first committed to learning the special techniques, you know, the special skills that it involves. And it's kind of arrogant for academics to think like, oh, I'll just I'll dumb down my work so that people can understand it and it will work as a trade book. 
I think that's just like not how it works. And I would say that it's really hard to do good public facing writing. It's really hard to write engaging literature and to do it in a way that people want to read. And again, I say that as someone who's like, I always feel like I'm still learning and still trying. I don't think of myself as an expert in this. But I think a lot of academics I know want to be public intellectuals and have their work read by large publics. And very few academics I know actually want to do the work that goes into that kind of writing. And I think you can't have one without the other. Yeah. I mean, as we've heard from academics who do write for the New Yorker, it sounds like you're really helped in the process of being edited by the New Yorker. 
It makes you a better writer. Oh, my God. Massively. Yeah. You're learning just the process of writing a magazine piece because because of the editing you get and you realize how much goes into it. And it's a team of people who, you know, who are working with you. And this does not happen when you're writing for an academic journal or when you're writing scholarly monograph. You don't you don't get that. And over time you develop those, those skills, but yeah, it's a, it's a real luxury to have editors. So I guess I would say to people who are thinking about, you know, writing a trade book, maybe start by figuring out if you can do a magazine piece, like a long form magazine piece on chapter and see if you enjoy that, you know, see if like, see if that style works for you. 
And if, if you enjoy the process, because it's a different process and, Yeah. The other quick question we ask all guests is if there's a writing practice or habits that's working for you. You know, I used to wake up super early in the morning and make a pot of coffee. And then I had kids and that kind of blew my whole early morning writing routine. So now it's just like, I just carry my laptop and whenever I get a minute, I, I do it. So I I'm my, my, my, my wife works in these routines where she's got, you know, 45 minute blocks and I don't have that. But it sounds like for you, the small bits of time actually do work. They do work. 
Congratulations, Eric, on this wonderful book and all the attention you're getting. And it was so great to get to talk with you today. Oh, thanks, Rachel. I really enjoyed the conversation. Take care. Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. Visit our podcast description to find out how to contact us and send us your questions about academic writing and publishing. Follow us on social media at Writing at Pod and subscribe to us so you never miss an episode.