Note: I am back here after a very long time. I saw that my last posts had nearly 3000 views. That should be encouraging but I started working full time (as in 7 days a week). I hope my thoughts provide some clicks. Have a great weekend, all.

In Berkeley, there are many copies on display of Slavoj Zizek's "In Defense of Lost Causes." After his debate with Jordan Peterson, it was the book put up in Berkeley to promote him. The book is fantastic and Zizek's analysis is incredible - his writing on Mao, on artificial intelligence, even on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein novel, is all stellar. All of it was clearly written in the 2000s, however, as there are a bunch of references to George W. Bush or Hugo Chavez.

Since then, he has mostly become known online in videos on YouTube. His persona is being built through various interviews on Russia Today, at college seminars, Vice documentaries, etc. Unlike a lot of people today, he doesn't seem to produce the videos himself, which I guess makes him kind of an outlier.

Back in the early 2000s, a lot of people were worried about the future of music due to the internet. Napster was terrifying musicians. You were able to run a program, which eventually went defunct and attempted to go legal in a bunch of formats, that allowed you to download whatever song you could think of to your computer!! Scandalous!

It seems like music got figured out on the internet, however. Through legal and profitable means, you are now able to stream an epic library of music without taking up space on your computer through Spotify. Getting started on services like Audible and iTunes, the format of the podcast grew to a format that everyone has wanted to jump on to.

Barack and Michelle Obama have signed a deal to produce several for Spotify (former presidents now sign deals to start podcasts), and columnists Ross Douthat and Jonah Goldberg are now podcast personalities more than columnists. An actual book by former president Obama has yet to be released. David Pakman, Joe Rogan, the Young Turks, Dave Rubin and a host of others of left, right, and other varieties have all jumped on to YouTube and podcasts to produce content. Presidential candidate Andrew Yang showed podcasts a level of validity they certainly did not have in the 2000s by going on several as a guest.

These hosts are hardly producing a new concept with their content. Pakman seems like a Nation columnist of old, with a show that would have been aired on college radio or NPR before the internet. Joe Rogan might be the one doing something the most inventive, with his 3 hour plus marathon interviews of an extremely diverse range of guests.

Is print over? Many podcast hosts, like Daniele Bolelli of "History on Fire" fame, produce books but the books seem like tie-ins for their podcast, the way that movies used to produce novel tie-ins. It is a secondary effort and not a first as books once were. One article memorializing Christopher Hitchens in the American Conservative wondered aloud if "America even still has the infrastructure for a public intellectual." That magazine has fantastic articles but hardly any of the writers are superstars the way that Hitchens was.

It may be a somewhat pessimistic observation but it's possible that journalism became a casualty (or at least severely wounded) because the medium wasn't quite that valued. Newspapers may largely have been purchased so that people could read gossip news, sports, or get coupons and movie times. Scholarly journals were written for fellow scholars. News magazines were sold to keep people going at the airport.