Volume 4, Issue 42: J.D. Drew

"The former phenom met with struggles as his career continued."

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Two weeks ago, the writer Julie Powell died suddenly in the upstate New York home she shared with her husband. Powell was most famous for her book Julia and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, which was a chronicle of her attempts to make every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking from her small apartment in over the span of a year, a book that was ultimately made into a charming Nora Ephron movie starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. But when I thought of Julie Powell in the days after her death, I didn’t think about her book, or her movie. I thought about the first time I’d heard about Julie Powell. I thought about Salon.com.

Powell’s “Julie & Julia” project—a title she hated, for what it’s worth—originally ran on Salon, which was the best possible place for it. Salon was the first Website I truly loved, the one I felt special, almost secret, to even know about. I read Dave Eggers’ book reviews there, Jake Tapper’s incredible coverage of the 2000 election there, Amy Reiter’s breezy and hilarious entertainment roundup there, Dave Cullen’s staggering Columbine coverage there. Salon—which, remarkably, is still publishing—made me fall in love with the world of online journalism: Its voice, its scope, its experimentations, its possibilities. It was one of the reasons we founded our own online journalism site Ironminds, when I was still working for The Sporting News in St. Louis in 1999, which would begat The Black Table, which would begat Deadspin, which would begat everything. I actually had one piece published on Salon, back in February 2001 (about briefly living in the We Live In Public house, actually), and it was unquestionably my career highlight at the time: Booking a Salon piece meant you made it.

And there’s where Powell wrote. Whenever people talk about Julie and Julia, they talk about Powell “blogging” her daily recipes, which is technically true but not exactly correct to the spirit of the thing. Powell was writing for Salon. Which meant everyone was reading her. Which, long before Julie and Julia hit bookstores, in the eyes of me and everyone I knew, made her a star. I never met Powell and was not a reader of her work, which had nothing to do with her quality; eating, like sex, exercise and fantasy baseball, has always been a topic I’d rather experience than read about. But I knew who she was. Of course I knew who she was. How did you not know who Julie Powell was? Every young writer in New York City in the early aughts wanted to be Dave Eggers, Candance Bushnell, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Matt Taibbi or Julie Powell. Those were the stars.

The Internet has long fostered, and then summarily destroyed, stars like Powell from the beginning: Even before Twitter, the Internet loved its main characters, a role Powell loved playing, often to her admitted self-detriment. Heck: At least Powell was a writer. When I was at Deadspin, Gawker was always creating these pseudo-stars and then blowing them apart, most famously Julia Allison, a woman they derisively referred to as a “fameball” while writing about her constantly. (This was briefly leveraged into a short-lived Bravo reality series, which was probably the goal all along.) The disconnect between one’s performative online life and their often far more mundane real life has always been a fundamental attribute of the Internet as well, and obviously remains one to this day, from how we portray ourselves on social media to how we follow the news to, theoretically, how we write our Saturday morning newsletters. But the thing about Powell, and Allison after her, and now just about everyone involved in our social media landscape today, is how she became a star, how everyone turned on her and she still, regardless, kept on living.

Julie and Julia was a massive hit, obviously, but Powell’s next book, Cleaving, which was about working in a butcher shop while carrying on a sadomasochistic affair in full view of her husband, was by all accounts a disaster: Hated by longtime fans, ripped apart by critics and bought by almost no one. The complaints about the second book seemed inextricably linked to everyone’s enjoyment of the first one; people liked hearing about this Julie and Julia person, but they wanted nothing to do with the Cleaving one. While writing Cleaving, Powell was regularly blogging for a Blogspot site—and you should know that my heart warms with nostalgia every time I see a Blogspot site; Grierson, God bless him, still has his—where every update and missive was greeted with hundreds of comments and questions about what she was doing, who she was visiting, where she was going to eat. Powell’s style is conversational, relaxed, almost too much so; she regularly ends posts with things like, “What about you guys? How's you thinkin' about this new decade?” Powell writes like she had thousands of people just desperate to hear every single thought she might have, and why wouldn’t she? She was a star.

Until she wasn’t. With Cleaving, the public turned on her. Powell lived her life in public, until the public decided it had had enough and moved onto someone else. At one point she was the hottest online writer on the planet, having her life dramatized by movie stars and having a willing audience desperate for her every word. Then it stopped. I am sure most people stopped thinking about Powell right about then. I essentially did too.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a commonly misinterpreted line, famously wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives.” But of course there are second acts in American lives, because there are second acts in everyone’s lives. It’s just that we all stop paying attention after the first. The second act of American lives is “living.” The third act, apparently, is dying.

Powell still had to keep on living. So she did. She moved out of New York City and headed upstate with her husband. She struggled with depression. She Tweeted a lot about her pets and politics. She never wrote another book, but she still wrote, retaining that specific voice of hers—her last pieces were apparently recaps of “The Julia Child Challenge” television show … for Salon, no less. Just because she was no longer the main character on the Internet does not mean she vanished. Salon just kept going. So did she. She was 49 years old. She still had so much ahead of her.

When we put something out into the world, whether it’s a social media post or a newsletter or a book or just a drawing we made that we put on the fridge in the office break room, we want people to see it. Otherwise we would just keep it to ourselves. That forges a connection with those people. That connection, no matter how it’s scaled, isn’t always healthy, for us or the people seeing what we wanted to show them. It changes the work, and it changes everyone involved in it. And as the years have gone on, I find myself focussing a lot more on the work itself and less on the audience. When Deadspin exploded, I immediately found myself in the spotlight in a way I found uncomfortable: I liked people reading my work, but I didn’t like the way it foregrounded me, as a person and a personality, made me some sort of “voice of the blogs.” I didn’t like that responsibility, and I also didn’t like that praise played tricks on my brain, made me feel like my work is more “important” than it really was. But what I really didn’t like was that it changed the work. I started worrying more about what people would like me to say rather than I actually wanted to say; in the online world, if you are not careful, you will do whatever you can to make those numbers next to your work go up, and go up fast. It was the reason I left Deadspin and decided to do just follow my own inconsistent but duly mine vane, wherever it led me. Every time I see someone from the old blog time, now in their 40s and live streaming themselves screaming hot takes about the Lakers or woke agendas into their phone, I’m even more certain I made the right call. You only get to be the young hot thing once. Then you’re just an old fart still trying to hang onto something that left you a long time ago. It’ll eat you alive if you let it.

Julie Powell was 49 years old when she died, the age Dale Earnhardt was when he died, the age Phil Hartman was, the age Joey Ramone was. But when I suspect when most think of her, they think of that young, hungry and profane twentysomething Gen X blogger, or Amy Adams. But that was just a snapshot of her, like everything always is. You are a snapshot today; you’ll be a different snapshot tomorrow. Attention always fades; people move on; stars are only stars for so long. You just keep on living, on your own, surrounded only by the people who have known you long enough to still care. That sounds sad. But I don’t think it is. I think it’s probably the goal: To just keep making stuff, to keep moving forward, to not worry about the outside world and just take care of what’s in front of you. I hope Julie Powell found that near the end. I hope I do. I hope we all do.

GO MILLER GO

I’m in Charleston, South Carolina this weekend for the first Go Miller Go since the pandemic began. Miller, one of my son William’s best friends, has Spinal Muscular Atrophy, the same disease that Daniel, the hero and narrator of my book How Lucky, has; as mentioned in the acknowledgments to that book, Miller, and many of the other people and families who have lived with SMA, was the direct inspiration for the book. (I imagined Travis, Daniel’s best friend, to be the sort of friend to Daniel that I hope William and Miller will be to each other. Though I do hope William makes healthier life choices than Travis does.) The initial spark of an idea for How Lucky came from attending the 2018 Go Miller Go run, which I spent talking to people with SMA and their families, about their challenges, their successes, their views on the world and how people see them. The book’s existence is in many ways entire because of the people I met at Go Miller Go four years ago, and I am beyond excited to see so many of them for the first time since then, today. Then we’re all going over to Miller’s place and just smoke him in Madden.

Also, here’s a periodic reminder that Cure SMA is a terrific organization that is very much worthy of any charitable givings.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Daniel Snyder Will Get the Last Laugh, NBC News. Oh no, the bad man will be punished with a $6 billion windfall.

2. College Basketball Is About to Be Broken Forever, New York. The one thing they can’t do is mess with the tournament. Guess what they’re doing.

3. Who’s the Team That Wants a World Series Next Most? MLB.com. An offshoot of the old Sports On Earth Tortured Fanbase rankings.

4. Election Night Recap, Medium. People just want normal people in charge.

5. The Last Normal Election Was 2012, Medium. Seems like a billion years ago.

6. The Thirty: Every Team’s Best Award Candidate, MLB.com.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “The Banshees of Inishirin,” “Causeway” and “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.”

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we reviewed the awesome Georgia-Tennessee game and previewed the Georgia-Mississippi State game.

Seeing Red, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Herschel Walker Just Can’t Stop,” Joel Anderson, Slate. This is a very smart deep dive into the guy who still might be my state’s next Senator.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Hard to Explain,” The Strokes. I watched my friend the documentary of my friend Wendy Goodman’s book “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” which is about the New York indie rock boom that exploded right before I moved there. When I think of, oh, 2002, this, along with maybe Soma, is the song my brain lands on first, along with some White Stripes, Andrew W.K. and Rilo Kiley.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Hey, you know, that election … it was downright encouraging, wasn’t it? I’ve honestly slept better all week.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will