The Hedgehog Review

There are dozens of little intellectual journals that publish three or four times a year and are meant for a small, but non-specialized audience: I’m talking about The Yale Review, The Drift, The Baffler, The Believer, Liberties, and The Point, for example. The number and variety of these journals is quite overwhelming—it’s very hard to get a feeling for which ones are actually worth reading. I generally only come across these journals when a piece breaks containment and gets discussed on the wider internet, or if a writer I know from Substack publishes in one of these journals and I click through.

When I wrote about effort-posting, I said that writing for these journals was a decent credential, but it wasn’t a great way to reach readers. This drew the response that you write for these journals if you want to reach the right readers—the subset of readers who want to explore big ideas in some depth.

I wondered if maybe there was something to this critique, so I ordered stacks and stacks of journals (including at least four issues from all the journals named above).

The first stack that arrived was from The Hedgehog Review. I picked this journal because Phil Christman often writes in it, and whenever I click through to his writing, it’s really good. He is a classic essayist—a bit like Montaigne—he picks a topic, and then he tells you a bunch of information related to that topic, but he cycles through the information in a very orderly, logical way. For instance, I read a piece of his in a recent issue that was about college towns, and he described the two types of college towns that he understood, liberal arts college towns and big public university towns. And then he talked about how town vs. gown tensions tended to be worse in the latter, and why that might be, and it was all told mostly from the townie perspective—which he seemed able to inhabit very believably. I was quite entertained. With Phil Christman you’re in good hands.

I guess going into The Hedgehog Review, I was guided by the name, which is from that saying about how the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. I assumed this journal would be full of people who only know one thing—people who are obsessed with something, and who would expound upon that thing in a slightly wide-eyed, insane way.

And the best articles were actually like that. For instance, there was an article about architects. Basically this author, Witold Rybczynski, had read a book about the effect of time on an art form, and he applied the lessons of this book to architecture. And he described how various architects suffered because they were born at the wrong time or somehow didn’t change the time:

It makes a difference when an architect appears: Is it during the early days of a movement, at its full-blown height, or closer to its fizzling-out demise? The early days are tolerant, finesse is not yet required; at its height, a style demands more, more sophistication and more expertise; and in the final stage, a practitioner risks being left behind as the most ambitious talents are already onto the next new thing.

The article was a beautiful series of anecdotes about how various architects either adapted to changing times or refused to adapt, and the ways that their natural temperaments either allows them to succeed or got in the way of their success. The lesson was...there is no lesson. To succeed, you need to be aligned with the spirit of the age: sometimes that means fostering new styles, other times it means aligning yourself with the reigning style.

Another great article was this one by Colin Wells about how the Ancient Greeks were superior because they were the first culture to develop an alphabet. The author claimed that the alphabet led to the development of abstract thought and to the efflorescence of philosophy and science in Ancient Greece. Wells also said, “tracing the slow development of abstract language and thought in what remains of Greek and Latin literature is the true task of classics.”

Basically, the author really wants to argue, in some scientific way, for the preeminence of Ancient Greek culture, but without being accused of cultural chauvinism or scientific racism, so he’s like—the Greeks weren’t inherently superior, but they’re still noteworthy as the first people in history to use this groundbreaking cognitive technology and the reason we study them is in order to study the effect of this technology.

This article doesn’t really hold up because…the Greeks didn’t invent the alphabet—the Phoenicians did. And the Phoenicians did have a literature, so why didn’t they come up with all this great philosophy and science that Greece did? Secondly, it seems to ignore China. They didn’t use an alphabet. And this author tries to argue that as a result, they were mired in orality: “Despite the variety, sophistication, and complexity of, say, Chinese...traditions, those traditions, even when written, express themselves in oral patterns of language and thought.” I didn’t really buy it. China seems like they have some pretty complex, abstract thoughts.

But at least it was interesting!

A third article, not as crackpot but still weird, was this one by Adam Garfinkle about how Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald mentioned, in their fiction, a certain father-son pair. The father was an educator who’d travel America with a 19th-century slide projector, delivering lectures about his travels to the Holy Land. The son wrote books about the inherent superiority of the white race. And it was all mixed up in some complicated way with Wharton and Fitzgerald. I loved it.

I feel like I am making this journal sound incredible right now. The journal I am describing is just so good! Can you imagine? What if every piece in this journal was wacky stuff about slide-projector guys and weird, incorrect theories about the cognitive effects of developing an alphabet. That would be a journal that I could proudly recommend to you.

The themed sections were underwhelming

Unfortunately, all these incredible articles (with the exception of the Christman piece) were in the back half of the journal, where they stick the miscellany.

The front half, the bulk of the journal, was devoted to these themed sections. Every issue had a theme. In one issue, the theme was “Lessons of Babel” (i.e. it was about translation). In another issue, the theme was “Humanism In A Posthumanist Age.” And these themed sections were disappointing.

Basically, for these sections, they asked their regular contributors—the kind of people who’d ordinarily be writing the wild-eyed stuff in the back of the book—to write about some topic of pressing importance. And you can tell that a lot of these people felt constrained by the need to make their personal obsession fit somehow with the theme.

Sometimes, the person would just talk about their pet peeve, and that was almost always fine, like Gary Saul Morson had a piece that was essentially about why the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations (of Russian literature) suck and are horrible. I personally don’t think the various translations differ that much, but he had very strong opinions, and he really felt like translators shouldn’t try to capture the rhythms of the original language, because then all their translations end up sounding the same. You should instead translate them into regular English, and try to capture whatever made that particular author unique—what made them stand out from other authors. It’s an understandable point.

Other times, it felt like people were really straining to make their thing fit with the theme. For instance, Catherine Moon really wanted to be telling me about Edith Stein, this fascinating nun and Catholic saint who also studied with Edmund Husserl. After she became a nun, she tried somehow to reconcile Husserl’s teachings and Catholicism, but...here the article became confused, because it started to be about translation and Stein’s thoughts about translation, and it just didn’t really fit with the Husserl stuff! It didn’t cohere, and I got quite confused .

The themed essays were full of platitudes

But the bulk of the themed contributions weren’t even as good as those two. Most of the themed essays felt insubstantial, as if the authors were reaching for big ideas and finding only the conventional wisdom.

For instance, Richard Hughes Gibson talked about AI and machine-translation, producing one of these articles about how AI is going to destroy our ability to think. It ended with the lines:

Automatic machine translation is being marketed as a means to expand our little worlds. It may just as easily render the world back to us on even more narrow terms.

I mean come on. This is not good! Like...surely there is something more interesting to say about the fact that now, with AI, we can translate easily foreign text easily and rapidly in a way that wasn’t possible before—something that goes beyond the idea that this is somehow scary and bad.

Even if you genuinely think machine translation is scary and bad, it’s not useful to write an article about it, because we’re all capable of having those thoughts. I also am like, “What if this machine translation isn’t accurate!? What then?”

This style of article felt a bit disrespectful to the reader. It felt...ponderous and pretentious. Like, just because you’re a professor you somehow have a privileged insight into a reality that we all, as human beings, are experiencing at the same time.

The “Humanism in a Post-human Age” themed section was particularly bad. Antón Barba-Kay was generally one of the best contributors to The Hedgehog Review (he usually writes about how technology is affecting our culture and institutions), but in this case he tried to make some point about how social media was affecting empathy. He seemed to be saying that social media somehow heightened our empathy, by exposing us to many more images of suffering, and from very diverse places. But that this heightened empathy resulted in fatigue and backlash.

Normally in Barba-Kay’s articles there is evidence of some deep thinking. Like he had a great one in a different issue about how social media undermined democracy. And in that article, he made some great points, which is that by democracy, we really mean these democratic institutions that’re used to channel public opinion and turn it into something actionable. Anger that gets whipped up through social media then gets turned on those institutions, weakening them, but that anger can’t be turned into direct action on its own. He had clearly thought very hard about the relationship between social media and democracy.

But this social media and empathy article was just...musings. It wasn’t well-thought out. And that was the best of the “humanism in the post-human age” articles.

Geoff Shullenberger had one where he claimed that “antihumanism” has prevailed in late-20th-century academia. But the article was all over the place. There’s one anecdote about something called ‘Queer Chemical Studies’, where people apparently study how chemicals ‘queer’ the body. And then some stuff about Nick Land. And it’s like...this isn’t really gelling. You’re trying to say that the academic humanities somehow hates humanity? Except he doesn’t even say that—he doesn’t say anything you can pin down—it’s all just sly, sneering talk that never actually makes any points you can hold onto (a typical example: he says “various forms of antihumanism…prevailed in late-twentieth-century academia, which, even as they repudiated the human, valorized a certain human subject position: that of the critic of humanism.”) It’s just words—a waste of time.

Same with David Polansky’s “The Human Condition or the Conditional Human?“ This one is about how humanism can provide a counter-balance to the ‘antihuman’ tendencies of the modern era—various technologies are mentioned that seem ‘antihuman’ (genetic engineering, euthanasia, generative AI). Then there’s some talk about what humanism means, but the opposition between technological progress and humanism didn’t ring true. It involves drawing some opposition between Scott Alexander, a thinker who is interested in the effects, on humanity, of high technology, and a classical humanist like Cicero who, Polansky claims, “described philosophy as learning how to die.”

This, again, seems to lack substance. You’re making an assertion about the beliefs of people who believe in technological progress, saying that they are avoiding reality. But the reality is that certain things are (or might be) possible, and Scott Alexander does much more to examine those possibilities, and their effects on human existence, than this article does. I don’t think it does credit to the humanist tradition to simply assert that proponents of technological progress are living in denial.

Out of the four themed sections that I read, the strongest was “After Neoliberalism”. I could quibble with this section—its two centerpiece essays, by Blake Smith and by James Block, covered the same ground. Smith’s was much stronger, which highlighted the weakness of Block’s piece (Smith’s piece cited actual thinkers on the subject, while Block made a bunch of sweeping assertions about the nature of neoliberalism, making me wonder if these were generally accepted ideas or merely his own notions). But with this section, it felt like the authors were doing more than merely phoning it in.

(Idea articles also tended to be better if they had a narrower scope. For instance, this piece by Sam Gee has the same “humanism is under threat” tone as many of the other pieces, but it focuses narrowly on Lionel Trilling and how he defended humanism in the wake of World War II, when many liberals became disillusioned with it. Similarly, I enjoyed and was edified by Tara Isabella Burton’s piece on right-wing vitalism and Antón Barba-Key’s piece on Curtis Yarvin.)

The journal has muddled aims

Probably I am being too hard on this journal. Not every article can be a slam-dunk. God knows I have written some pretty tendentious stuff in my time. And some of these writers are really good.

But the journal’s aims are muddled, which is why they can’t pull together a good themed section.

The journal is published by the Institute for Advanced Cultural Study at UVA. This is an institute dedicated to humanism. They seem have a bit of a religious bent—not too much—but they’re the kind of humanists who believe that there exists some telos, some purpose to humanity, that we can derive using our reason. (As they put it, the Institute operates from the “assumption that all humans are normatively ordered creatures that seek to flourish.”)

I’m also this kind of humanist, by the way. I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m a Hindu. I believe in dharma. I believe that the universe is underpinned by some principles of cosmic justice, and it’s possible for human beings to understand and to bring our society into line with these principles.

The institute also operates from the belief that this humanism is under threat. It says in academic life—particularly in the humanities and social sciences—there is “a pervasive skepticism toward the very possibility of truths capable of establishing the ennobling ideals of human dignity, standards of decency, codes of personal character, and public moral obligation.”

But it’s not just academia that’s got it wrong. The Institute’s mission statement also says: “For the most part, our major institutions—including the market, political liberalism, medicine, science, even education and law—either deny or are unable to acknowledge the normative foundations that underpin them.”

Basically, everyone is in denial about the fact that there is such a thing as goodness, and that human institutions ought to pursue goodness.

I personally don’t agree with this assessment. From my perspective, I hear a lot of talk about goodness from people in the humanities, from medicine, from science, even from judges, lawyers and politicians. Everyone seems very concerned with doing what is right!

The problem is that they often disagree with me about what is right.

It’s true there are also a few nihilists, people who think might makes right (I am thinking now of Peter Thiel and Stephen Miller). But these people mostly only have power in certain parts of the tech sector and the Republican party and aren’t a majority even in those places.

However, I accept that the folks behind The Hedgehog Review see things differently. They see a pervasive sickness in all of our institutions. Everything, from academia to medicine to the law, has lost its way.

That’s their perspective. Great.

But…then…if that’s the case, you need big changes, right?

Here’s where the journal starts to seem muddled. Because usually when someone thinks our society is sick, they want a regime change. They want a completely different set of people to be in charge. Some people would like the post-liberal right-wing types to be in charge; others would like some sort of undefined leftist socialist regime.

But The Hedgehog Review doesn’t want either of those things. It generally seems pretty critical of the illiberal right. And there’s nary a mention of socialism anywhere in its pages.

What it wants is a return to an older sort of liberalism. This is what I got mostly from the Trilling article and from the “After Neoliberalism” article. Right now, we have this society that has a public and a private sphere. And the private sphere, which was once occupied by church, by civil society organizations, by small businesses and local ties, now seems increasingly dominated by large corporations. And the vision, I think, is for some sort of localism.

But this is the same thing that the illiberal right wants too! And I don’t think socialists are against this either. Everyone wants the same thing: local autonomy, as expressed through strong non-governmental community organizations (although, for socialists, the community organizations wouldn’t be churches, they’d be unions and co-ops). We’ve all been hearing this same rhetoric for so many years now.

It’s an essentially nostalgic, conservative vision. And I think it’s great. I love this vision. I love imagining a world that’s just like the present day, but minus the huge corporations that seem to be ruining everything. And what I also like is that The Hedgehog Review is attempting to tell me that our institutions can be rejuvenated without the massive social upheaval that the far-right and far-left both seem to want.

The major problem is that it’s hard to spin this vision in a believable way.

Right now the journal keeps saying that we need a revival of ‘humanism’. That if people accept that human beings are ‘normatively ordered’ (i.e. that there is purpose to human existence that we can derive from reason) then our institutions can be re-organized in a more sustainable way.

But…this is exactly what the post-liberal right believes. It’s the exact same rhetoric. So…obviously there is a lot of disagreement about what ‘humanism’ really entails. Now maybe The Hedgehog Review actually does believe in Orbanism—in some right-populist takeover of liberal institutions—but if so then they ought to say that.

If they don’t believe in that, then it’s hard to really see what they want. All this mealy-mouthed stuff about how everybody else is ‘antihumanist’ is just cope. It’s saying, ‘Oh, these other people don’t actually want human flourishing, and if they wanted human flourishing then they would agree with me’. But you yourself haven’t really articulated what you actually want or believe!

It is so frustrating to read pages and pages of these critiques of other people, but there’s no sense of how the author would actually do it differently.

Terror of AI

The strongest feeling I got from this journal was that the editors and the authors are absolutely terrified of AI. They think it’s bad. They want it to go away.

Great! I am also terrified of AI.

But…if you really think AI is bad, then that raises some questions about society as a whole. Because AI is basically capitalism run amok. It’s private industry, releasing this revolutionary product with no government regulation, no safeguards. And our system of government, and our society, is really based on allowing capitalism to run amok. Even Democrats were never really able to regulate big tech companies; Republicans don’t even try. So...if you don’t want government control of the economy, then I don’t know how you’re gonna stop this incredibly powerful corporate force. Like, our society is built on this engine—capitalism—which requires the government to use its power to protect the property rights of private companies. And AI, if you really think it’s an existential threat, means that our system of government—and the whole organization of our society—is bad, and that it has to change.

But The Hedgehog Review would never say, so openly, that a major principle of our society is bad or needs to be rethought in a substantial way. Instead it just insists that our institutions need to somehow be more humanist.

The Hedgehog Review probably can’t be different

Obviously, it’s their magazine. They can print whatever they want. In order to keep publishing this magazine, they need to make sure that UVA and their own donors are happy. And I imagine that the university and the donors would be substantially less happy if this magazine started taking strong political stances. Their ambiguous, indecipherable approach is probably necessary for their own long-term stability.

But from my perspective as a reader, the result is depressing. It feels like intellectual exhaustion and makes it hard to fully recommend the magazine.¹

Whenever The Hedgehog Review writes about little ideas, it is great. Very playful, energetic, and interesting. But they obviously have larger ambitions. They want to make big statements about the nature of things and how we should move forward as a society. But to make those big statements, you need to take risks. You need to say something that’s provocative, which might upset somebody.

And you also need to respect your readers more. Anyone who’s reading The Hedgehog Review has probably encountered the idea that technology is bad, that AI could destroy the human soul, and that maybe there’s something messed-up about our universities. At this point, these are mainstream, majority opinions. To really make an impact, you need to either undercut them or take them as a baseline. You can’t just repeat the majority opinion as if it’s somehow controversial.

The good thing about The Hedgehog Review is that the magazine’s political and philosophical inclinations (to the extent they have any) are pretty similar to my own. I enjoyed a lot of the miscellaneous articles, and I have high respect for the accessible, jargon-free writing style. It’s rare to see so many humanities professors writing in a way that a non-specialist can actually understand. There’s a lot here that I like, and maybe after I read the other intellectual journals I’ll come back and decide The Hedgehog Review was the best after all.

My nonfiction book, What’s So Great About The Great Books? is out May 26th! Preorder a copy from Amazon or from Bookshop or buy a copy at my events in NYC (May 27) or in SF (May 30).

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Elsewhere on the Internet…

• Oliver Bateman Does the Work had me on his podcast recently. Covered a lot of topics, including whether writers ought to read the Great Books.

  The more that stuff takes you away from the mainstream of what people are writing now, the harder it is to find a market for the writing. You see this a lot with people who really enjoy the great modernist works, like Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow. They’re like, yeah, this is what I want to do. But who’s going to read that? From the perspective of making a career as a writer, it could be better to not read those things!

• I was also on the “A Small Good Thing” podcast talking about the New Yorker story. This recording came out really well! The host, Andrea Marzocchi, is an excellent interview and great at keeping things short. If you want the precis of my New Yorker article, this is a good place to get it.

1. You could rightfully say, “Where do you, Naomi, stand on the current state of things?” And my answer is that I’m basically a Democrat. I thought Biden was a great president. He was my guy. This perspective is much more unpopular and provocative than anything you’re likely to read in The Hedgehog Review.