The Point

My guest on the show today is Jeffrey Lawrence, Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, which I believe is the main flagship Rutgers campus, though if it's not, uh, no shade for the satellite campuses either.

Jeff is the author, and this is why he's on the show, of an excellent essay in the most recent issue of The Point magazine.

The essay is titled "We Were the 99%." It's an unusually thoughtful reflection on the legacy of Occupy Wall Street, which Jeff was a participant in and observer of from the very beginning.

I asked Jeff to come on the show because I enjoyed the essay, which genuinely altered my perspective on a movement that I had thought, in retrospect inaccurately, I more or less understood, but also because he was somebody who I'd noticed popping up in my Substack feed recently and in a way that felt suddenly.

Um, and it was striking to me that he'd gone in the space of a month or two from someone I'd never heard of at all to someone I now knew from both Substack and The Point, which are two of the key ingredients in my personal intellectual diet.

And, and I should say there's nothing magical about this.

Jeff and I overlap in terms of background in all sorts of ways, and it is, as someone once said to me, "A big world, but a small tax bracket." Nonetheless, I like to pay attention to signals like this, like suddenly noticing someone, feeling like you're seeing someone everywhere whom you didn't even, uh, know about or of just a short while before.

And I, I found that these signals often end up meaning something, signifying something.