![]() Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character. But it is something else entirely to despise the act in principle. It is one thing in practice not to read books, or not to read them as much as one might wish. ![]() Read: Sam Bankman-Fried got what he wanted All of this happened just as SBF’s crypto scam was crashing, obliterating tens of billions of dollars of other peoples’ wealth in the process. McElwee’s reputation would be ruined after the midterms, principally for producing error-ridden polling data and even allegedly pressuring at least one employee to break campaign-finance law and participate in a straw-donor scheme (a federal crime that SBF has also been charged with). “Cool” is one way to describe these confident young men’s fiscal and political interventions abysmally ill-informed, maliciously incompetent, and morally bankrupt also come to mind. “It was ‘cool as hell,’ McElwee told associates, to be advising one of the richest people in the world before he turned 30.” Shortly after meeting SBF-who spent some $40 million on Democratic causes in 2020 and pledged to give a mind-boggling $1 billion before 2024-McElwee, also an effective-altruism evangelist, would become one of his trusted advisers, “telling him how best to direct a river of cash,” David Freedlander writes. In a feature reconstructing the undoing of Sean McElwee, the 30-year-old founder of Data for Progress, New York Magazine noted, as McElwee “would put it, books are dumb-they only tell you what people want you to know.” I confess, I don’t really understand what that means, let alone why McElwee thinks it’s profound. There’s an expression in journalism: “Three is a trend.” Unfortunately, I have a third example of a prominent book skeptic. The title of that profile: “Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex-And Maybe You Should Too.” He is a supposedly serious young man who was celebrated in the corridors of power not only as a financial savant but also-through his highly publicized philanthropy and conspicuous association with the “effective altruism” movement-as a moral genius. It’s a galling sentiment, every bit as ignorant and arrogant as Ye’s but even more worrisome because SBF is not an entertainer whose debut album was called The College Dropout. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.” “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. “I’m very skeptical of books,” he expands. In an ill-conceived profile from September, published on the Sequoia Capital website, the 30-year-old SBF rails against literature of any kind, lecturing a journalist on why he would “never” read a book. If one person managed to outdo Ye in that season of high-end self-sabotage marking the end of 2022, it was the erstwhile techno-wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried. Yair Rosenberg: Kanye West destroys himself Toss in a decades-long decline in the humanities, and we get our superficial culture in which even the elite will openly disparage as pointless our main repositories for the very best that has been thought. The ease with which we can know things and communicate them to one another, as well as launder success in one realm into pseudo-authority in countless others, has combined with a traditional American tendency toward anti-intellectualism and celebrity worship. This much is widely understood and discussed. Much of it is fleetingly interesting but ultimately inconsequential-not to be confused with expertise, let alone wisdom. We have never before had access to so many perspectives, ideas, and information. But his anti-book stance is disturbing because it says something about not only Ye’s character but the smugly solipsistic tenor of this cultural moment. Ye’s patently reprehensible anti-Semitic tirades rightly drew the world’s scorn. That statement strikes me as one of the more disturbing things he’s ever said. “I am a proud non-reader of books,” he continued. One such example was “ I am not a fan of books,” which Ye told an interviewer upon the publication of his own book, Thank You and You’re Welcome. And we would send around clips of what were, in hindsight, terribly suspect comments he’d previously made. ET on January 25, 2023.ĭuring Kanye West’s spectacular plummet last fall, my friends and I would often marvel at the latest outrageous thing he’d said. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
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