 |
| Lenny Bruce declining to read the room |
Long-term readers of my newspaper stuff may remember that back in 2023, I called for the immediate abolition of the phrase “read the room.” It pains me to say that two years later, my call still hasn’t been heeded. Our culture’s self-appointed moral guardians continue to bandy this smug catchphrase around quite freely, almost as if I hadn’t gone to the trouble of mathematically proving, more than two years ago, that it’s a sinister piece of verbal garbage that sorely needs to be put out of its misery. I’ll admit that the phrase once meant something useful, in its original context. But the wowsers and wokesters of today have irretrievably corrupted its meaning. It’s become a mantra for groupthinkers — the mating cry of people who think with the herd, and want you to think with the herd too … or else.
I struck an amusing example of this last week, while listening to “Blood Relatives”, the latest season of The New Yorker’s true-crime podcast In the Dark. “Blood Relatives” deals with the notorious White House Farm murders, which happened in England in 1985 ...
Read the rest of this piece for free here, over at my Substack.
