The end of the hot-take

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On Friday I had coffee with Leah Pickett, a lovely and thoughtful young (Aargh--I hate saying that but compared to me, it's true!) writer here in Chicago who used to blog at WBEZ the same time I did. We talked about the types of writing that we think we've grown out of and one is the "hot take."

You probably know what a hot take is but just in case, it's a blog post fired off in response to a larger issue--not a thoughtful reported article that gets to the bottom of it but more like I HAVE AN OPINION!! ASK ME WHAT I THINK. NO TIME FOR NUANCE OR GRAY AREAS.

I've written hot takes. I've gotten paid for hot takes! Hot takes can be fun.

But I've realized lately as I've gotten offers to write hot takes I'm more reluctant to take them on. One of reasons why is that I don't always see why I'm qualified to speak on a subject matter. For instance, an editor asked me if I'd be willing to write about Joan Rivers and/or Robin Williams after they died. Now, I was shocked and saddened like everyone else when they died, but those are the operating words--like everyone else. I didn't have a thoughtful story locked and loaded about how Joan Rivers once told me to be a strong woman or how Robin Williams' comedy helped me during a dark time. I passed.

Other times, I have discovered inconvenient empathy. I was asked to do a hot take on a woman in Chicago who was putting together a rather ridiculous campaign to treat babies as special-needs people on public transport. But as ridiculous as she was being, I knew she was no less of a real person than I was. She had already been embarrassed by the "reposts with commentary" that were not very flattering: she didn't deserve extra piling-on. (I did write the piece but tried to make it more about transportation etiquette instead of "Get a load of this jerk over here.")

It's odd to purposefully turn down work. But it's a strangely empowering feeling, as a writer, to sometimes think, "Who cares what I think?"

[I wrote this Friday afternoon, incidentally, before I became aware of what happened in Paris and Beirut, and the topic still feels appropriate. I must just be getting older but I find myself growing more frustrated with the way social media, especially Twitter, seems to funnel people into very stark--and loud--camps, defined not so much by what we think but by our reactions to what we see or perceive other people thinking -- more reaction than anything else: liberals think conservatives want to gleefully wipe out all Muslims; conservatives think liberals will mollycoddle our nation out of existence. Don't get me wrong: there is an amazing democracy at work with social media, giving people voice who might not have otherwise had one. But I still maintain, the hot take can only take us so far.]