I couldn’t tell you when I started listening to podcasts. Or why. Or what podcast came first. I can ignore them as easily as I can consume them, according to a new book. Last year, the author-turned-teacher Ben Ratliff published Run the Song. Ostensibly, he wrote the book to explain the experience of running while listening to music. He unlocked a new appreciation for the band Dry Cleaning by listening during a run.
“To run with this Dry Cleaning Bandcamp studio session is a rare pleasure,” Ratliff writes. “It integrates material and commentary, outward rocking and a version of the inward mental chatter I might be carrying on anyway.”
In this regard, Ratliff mostly succeeds. He convinced me to queue up a double album during Wednesday’s run, instead of running in silence. He's telling a believable story about headphone listening.
However, Ratliff reveals even more about digital media by withholding key details about his career. For two decades, Ratliff worked as the jazz and pop critic for The New York Times. For the last four of those years, he also hosted Popcast, the paper’s podcast about popular music. By 2016, he’d become disillusioned, resigned from the paper, and took up running. In the book, he’s cagey about his work on the podcast.
“When I doubted some aspects of my job in a serious way—wondering if criticism as I had learned it was doomed to be inadequate, and whether its vantage point needed a shift I couldn’t easily make—running redeemed each day,” Ratliff explains. “When I went through the disarray of leaving the job and building a different way to make a living, running reminded me of who I was and what I was up to.”
As a writer, I’d be disillusioned, too. The critic Jon Caramanica succeeded Ratliff as the host of Popcast. Caramanica has impressed me with his sharp, cerebral writing, but he’s writing less frequently. Since inheriting Popcast, he's presided over the show’s transition to weekly episodes. Since February, he's released more vertical videos than written columns.
Caramanica’s announced a book, and he may be focusing his energies there. Some journalists join the Times more for the reporting, researching, and interviewing than for the writing.
“I’m much more motivated by understanding stories and arguments and narrative,” Rollin Hu, a former colleague at my college newspaper and a current researcher for The Ezra Klein Show at the Times, told me over the phone. “Writing is just a means to that end.”
But some of us write to hone the craft. Ratliff’s most explicitly stated influence, the novelist Haruki Murakami, once wrote, “Writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike. Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn’t seek validation in the outwardly visible. For me, running is both an exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself.”
Filmmakers continued making two-hour movies even during the era of Peak TV, because they cared about the form. Writers are still writing despite the literacy crisis, because we care about the form.
Since leaving the paper, Ratliff’s improved as a writer. He's outgrown the list-like outline of his previous book, and allows each chapter to reinforce the others.
Unlike his successor at the Times, Ratliff has distanced himself from new media. In the book, he omits any mention of podcasts, even when recounting his days at the Times and when discussing his students’ listening habits. He neglects to use the word “podcast” in the book at all.
Ratliff has opted out of new, algorithmically-curated media like podcasts and vertical videos. He finished his argument about headphone listening without mentioning podcasts. When Ratliff stopped podcasting 10 years ago, he hardly looked back. If Ratliff stopped writing tomorrow, he’d lose a craft.
In Run the Song, Ratliff demonstrates how to ignore new media.