David Samuels grew up in Brooklyn in an Orthodox Jewish family whose immigrant roots gave him an outsider’s eye on American life before he ever set foot in a newsroom. He graduated from Harvard in 1989 with a degree in history, edited the Lampoon, and went on to earn an M.A. from Princeton as a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. That combination of literary temperament and historical training shapes everything he later does as a writer.
His national debut comes in 1991 with a New Republic cover story arguing that rap music’s primary audience is White suburban teenagers. The piece is controversial but widely anthologized, and it establishes his signature move: take a cultural phenomenon everyone thinks they understand, find the uncomfortable thing underneath it, and say it plainly. He spends the next two decades as a contributing editor at Harper’s and a regular presence at The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the Times Magazine, writing about jewel thieves, pigeon racers, the demolition of Las Vegas casinos, the Woodstock riot of 1999, wars in the Balkans and the Middle East, and the Pink Panthers heist ring. Critics compare his style to Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Joseph Mitchell, but to me that’s ridiculous.
Sure, Mitchell lied about facts but he committed to character and place. Wolfe pushed the truth toward its own logic. Samuels flees the truth while performing fidelity to it.
The comparison to Didion cuts deepest. Didion never pretended her reporting was objective. She told you she was there, that her perception was partial, that the story was hers as much as anyone’s. Samuels poses as the cold-eyed observer while managing what he reveals toward conclusions his coalition finds useful. That combination of editorial control and claimed neutrality is harder to defend than anything Didion ever wrote.
The method at the core of his best work is embodied rather than archival. He has said that ninety percent of what he learns about a person comes from watching how they move and speak, not from what they formally declare. This makes him a particular kind of reporter: one who goes to the place, sits with the subject, and reads the gap between performance and reality. His book The Runner (2008), expanded from a New Yorker profile, follows James Hogue, an Ivy League impostor who reinvented himself so completely that the reinvention became its own kind of truth. The book is less a crime story than a meditation on American self-invention and the credulity of institutions that want to believe the performances they are shown.
The 2016 Times Magazine profile of Ben Rhodes marks a turning point in his career and his reputation. The piece is not primarily a portrait of Rhodes as a person. It is an anatomy of how the Obama White House built what Samuels calls an echo chamber, feeding a preferred Iran deal narrative to journalists who lacked the foreign policy background to push back. Samuels names names, including Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, which produces a fierce backlash from within prestige media. The piece lands because it does not just describe a communications strategy. It argues that journalism was a coordination system, a relay station for institutional power rather than an independent check on it. Many insiders recognize the phenomenon even as they resent the exposure.
This is where Samuels transitions from field reporter to a narrative decoder. He is no longer satisfied showing how a particular actor shapes perception. He wants to show how entire institutions generate and enforce shared stories. His treatment of Barack Obama develops this further. Drawing heavily on David Garrow’s meticulous biography Rising Star, Samuels argues that Obama is best understood as a literary construction, a character the man invented on the page and then proceeded to inhabit in public life. The critique is not that Obama is fraudulent in some simple sense. It is that modern political identity is mediated through narrative craft, and that craft can outrun the underlying person. Garrow’s excavations of Obama’s early relationships, his fictionalized memoir, his suppression of inconvenient biographical facts, all support Samuels’s larger claim that the celebrated journalists who covered Obama were participants in the construction rather than reporters on it.
His treatment of Jewish identity and its place in American life runs throughout his career but becomes more central in his work at Tablet, where his wife Alana Newhouse serves as editor-in-chief. He argues that progressive hierarchies of victimhood treat Jewish success as a conceptual problem, since Jewish historical experience as victims of ghettos and concentration camps does not fit the theological grammar of White privilege. His particularism on this question puts him against both universalist progressivism and the assimilationist drift of much of American Jewish life. His 2020 interview with Kevin MacDonald, the White identitarian psychologist, is characteristic: Samuels goes to Medford, Oregon, sits with MacDonald, challenges him spontaneously on music, intelligence, and Israel, but fails to do the research that might advance the story.
The break with elite media becomes institutional rather than just temperamental with his 2023 long interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Tablet. Here he presents RFK Jr.’s vaccine safety arguments as standing on the same evidentiary ground as his environmental litigation against chemical companies. He frames the “conspiracy theory” label as a rhetorical weapon used to suppress inconvenient claims rather than a description of logical failure. And he argues that COVID-era censorship, the lab leak suppression, the Twitter Files revelations, and the Cochrane mask review outcomes have vindicated heterodox skeptics more than mainstream outlets will acknowledge. This crosses a line that most prestige journalists treat as load-bearing. His former colleagues respond with something between contempt and studied silence.
The tension at the center of his career is between two capacities that usually travel together but can come apart. The first is detecting when powerful actors shape narratives for strategic reasons. The second is determining what is true once you recognize that shaping. Samuels possesses the first at a high level. His best work makes readers newly aware of how stories are built and sold. But once he withdraws institutional trust, the second capacity becomes less stable. Skepticism stops functioning as a filter and starts functioning as a generator. The man who exposed the Iran deal echo chamber can sound, in his weakest moments, like someone building his own.
What Samuels exemplifies is not just laziness, but the habitus of the literary intellectual who treats the performance of seriousness as a substitute for its substance. His pieces exist to demonstrate that the writer has been in the room, has purportedly read the relevant books, has a sensibility refined enough to notice what others miss. Whether the facts check out, whether the sources are tested, whether the argument survives scrutiny, these are secondary concerns. The primary product is the writer’s mind on display.
This habitus runs deep in humanities culture because the humanities reward a particular kind of impressionistic authority. You advance by demonstrating taste, range, and interpretive confidence. Verification is for journalists who lack imagination. Precision is for social scientists who lack style. The literary intellectual moves by assertion and atmosphere, and the institution that trained him never seriously demanded anything else.
Samuels is a clean case because the gap is visible. He signals awareness of what rigorous work would require, which means he cannot claim ignorance of the standard. He knows what a real reckoning with uncomfortable material looks like. He gestures toward it and then retreats to the managed version, the version that performs depth without incurring its costs.
This is different from, say, a writer who simply does not care about rigor. Samuels cares about being seen as rigorous. That is what makes the habit revealing. The commitment is to the reputation for seriousness rather than to seriousness. That distinction is what Turner’s convenient beliefs framework captures so well: the belief that one is a truth-teller functions as a coalition credential, not as a genuine epistemic commitment. Holding it costs nothing and signals everything.
The founding of County Highway with Walter Kirn gives this trajectory an institutional form. The print-only broadsheet, styled on a 19th-century American newspaper, argues in object form that the digital information ecosystem cannot produce trustworthy knowledge, and that returning to a model rooted in place, observation, and direct readership might recover something lost. Two cranks making this argument together does not strengthen it. Samuels has spent his career prioritizing atmosphere over verification and the performance of rigor over its practice. Kirn is a genuine literary talent, a novelist with real range, but his skepticism toward coastal institutions slides regularly into conspiracy thinking that owes more to grievance than observation. Each man’s weaknesses mirror the other’s. Samuels supplies the intellectual credentialing. Kirn supplies the populist anti-establishment energy. What neither supplies is the epistemic discipline the project claims to champion.
The charitable reading is that Samuels sees in Kirn a fellow traveler for this specific venture, someone whose distrust of captured digital media is visceral rather than merely theoretical, and whose literary instincts might anchor the broadsheet’s voice in something other than think-piece abstraction. You can see the logic. Kirn’s suspicion of institutions sometimes comes from genuine observation rather than paranoia, and his willingness to say unfashionable things has occasional value. But the partnership also reveals something about Samuels’ own epistemic standards. A writer serious about recovering trustworthy knowledge would regard Kirn’s conspiracy habits as disqualifying rather than as a tolerable quirk in an otherwise useful colleague. That Samuels does not suggests his commitment to epistemics is, as usual, more performance than conviction.
Samuels has one powerful tool, which is detecting performance and narrative coordination, and he applies it everywhere, including domains where it cannot do the work he asks of it. Detecting that Ben Rhodes built an echo chamber requires access, scene-reading, and knowledge of how Washington communications operates. Samuels has all of that. Determining whether thimerosal causes neurological damage in children requires epidemiology, toxicology, and the ability to evaluate competing studies. Samuels has none of that, and shows no sign of noticing the difference.
The RFK Jr. interview makes this plain. He treats Kennedy’s vaccine arguments as standing on the same evidentiary ground as environmental litigation against Monsanto because the rhetorical structure looks similar. A corporation hid damaging data. Regulators were captured. Whistleblowers were suppressed. But rhetorical structure is not evidence. The actual science on thimerosal and autism has been examined in multiple large independent studies across different countries and the link does not hold. Samuels never engages with any of that. He treats the suppression of the claim as evidence for the claim, which is the epistemological move that collapses the distinction between heterodox and wrong.
The rural Oregon claim about Kevin MacDonald is almost comic in its brazenness. He asserts that rural Oregon resembles American inner cities and provides nothing. No crime data, no income figures, no out-of-wedlock birth rates. You caught him on this in real time and the numbers flatly contradict him.
What connects these failures is that Samuels trusts his read of a room more than he trusts data. That works when the room is all you need.
2016 Times Magazine profile of Ben Rhodes
Given the general lack of rigor in Samuels’ work, were questions raised about his most celebrated piece?
Yes. Critics noted that Samuels misrepresented how journalists functioned in relation to the White House. Laura Rozen, for instance, was described in the piece as essentially an RSS feed for a Rhodes deputy, implying she simply amplified administration messaging, when critics argued she was gathering information from sources across multiple countries and feeding it to American readers and officials alike. NPR
NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik raised the undisclosed conflict issue: Samuels had publicly argued for bombing Iran in a 2009 Slate piece, a position that went unrevealed to readers of a profile whose central charge was that the Obama administration had deceived the public about the Iran deal.
Rhodes later told an interviewer that Samuels made him sound edgy in the Times piece, and that he regarded the aftermath as a two-year information campaign against him. Rhodes said he believed Samuels intended that result.
The Slate critic Fred Kaplan argued that Samuels had an ideological agenda he concealed, and that specific factual claims in the piece were overstated, including the assertion that Rhodes’s name had rarely appeared in news stories, which Kaplan called flatly false given that Rhodes had been quoted in hundreds of news stories about Obama’s foreign policy.
The Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein stood behind the piece, saying it had been fact-checked and re-reviewed after publication with no corrections required. That defense, given the weight of specific disputes, reads more as institutional self-protection than a serious rebuttal.
What the episode illustrates is Samuels’s characteristic mode. The piece’s central argument, that Rhodes manipulated a credulous press, was constructed through atmosphere, selective quotation, and implication rather than documentation. It worked rhetorically. Some of it fell apart under scrutiny. That is his pattern.
If Samuels was substantially right in his 2016 Rhodes profile, did it spawn follow-ups by other reporters? Did it reshape narratives? Did prestigious publications including the NYT keep publishing Samuels?
On whether the Rhodes piece was substantially right: the core claim, that the Obama administration built an echo chamber of think tank experts and credulous young reporters to sell the Iran deal, came from Rhodes’s own mouth. Critics at Brookings and elsewhere acknowledged that Rhodes ran a formidable messaging operation, while arguing that the same was true of opponents of the deal, and that this was the normal stuff of politics rather than a unique scandal. The piece landed a genuine hit. The “echo chamber” phrase entered the political vocabulary and stuck. On the narrow factual question of whether the White House manipulated coverage, Samuels had the goods, largely because Rhodes handed them to him.
On whether it spawned serious follow-up journalism: a Politico reporter, Josh Meyer, published investigative work in late 2017 detailing how the Obama administration reportedly spiked a DEA investigation into a Hezbollah-linked drug and weapons network to protect the Iran negotiations, which built on the broader atmosphere the Rhodes piece helped create. But mainstream outlets largely did not pursue it. The story remained a right-of-center talking point more than a sustained investigative thread.
On Samuels’ publishing record afterward: he continued as a contributing writer at the Times Magazine, publishing a 2019 personal essay about his son and Neil Young, and his County Highway biography describes a long career at the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic, and the Times Magazine County Highway. But the trajectory is revealing. His Harper’s contributing editorship ran from 1996 to 2018, after which his major institutional home became Tablet, which his wife runs. The Times has published him since, but sporadically.
A writer who had produced a genuinely transformative piece of reporting, whose central claims held up and reshaped the conversation, would find the market for his work expanding. What happened looks more like a writer who landed one noisy, heavily contested piece and then drifted toward the outlet where his wife is editor and his reputation faces the least scrutiny. That is not the career arc of someone the broader magazine world regards as having proved his worth.
Samuels has spun a narrative that he flew too close to the sun, said uncomfortable things that Power hated, and so his career went down due to his pursuit of truth. It is a self-serving narrative that does not survive examination.
The flew-too-close-to-the-sun story requires that the Rhodes piece cost him something. But the piece was published in the Times Magazine, the most prestigious long-form venue in American journalism, and the Times kept publishing him afterward. Harper’s dropped him in 2018, two years after the Rhodes piece, but Harper’s had been his home since 1996 and editorial relationships of that vintage end for many reasons. There is no clear evidence the Rhodes piece caused it. The Atlantic and the New Yorker had already become occasional rather than regular venues for him well before 2016.
The narrative also requires that what Power hated was truth-telling. But the Rhodes piece drew its most serious criticism not from people defending the Iran deal on its merits but from journalists and analysts who argued Samuels had overstated his case, concealed his own prior position on Iran, and mischaracterized how specific reporters functioned. The Brookings critic argued that the piece’s central charges about deception were undermined by shoddy journalism, and that it was an unfortunate irony that the White House’s master of spin and one of his accomplishments had been undercut by the very piece attacking him. That is not Power crushing a truth-teller. That is the press corps pushing back on a piece with genuine methodological problems.
The deeper issue is that the martyr-to-truth narrative is itself a coalition credential, and a particularly useful one for someone whose career has drifted toward outlets that reward contrarianism over rigor. It reframes the retreat from mainstream venues as a principled withdrawal rather than a market judgment. Tablet and County Highway become not the places that would have him but the places he chose, because he refused to compromise. The narrative converts a career outcome that demands honest accounting into evidence of the writer’s integrity.
Samuels is a talented atmosphericist who occasionally lands on something real. The Rhodes piece landed on something real. But landing on something real while handling the surrounding material carelessly, concealing your own prior position, and misrepresenting specific facts is not the same as truth-telling that Power could not tolerate. It is the kind of journalism that generates noise, survives partial scrutiny, and then gets mythologized by the writer as martyrdom when the noise fades.
Hugo Mercier’s argument in Not Born Yesterday is that we did not evolve to be gullible regarding our vital interests. We are not passive recipients of whatever narrative authority figures push at us. We evaluate source reliability, check for coherence, look for corroborating signals, and resist conclusions that seem to serve the interests of the communicator rather than our own. Gullibility, on Mercier’s account, is mostly a myth propagated by intellectuals who want to explain why ordinary people believe things the intellectuals disapprove of.
Applied to the Rhodes piece, this creates a serious problem. Samuels built his portrait around the idea that Rhodes and a small team of narrative engineers could manufacture expert consensus, feed it to credulous young reporters, and thereby move public opinion on a major foreign policy question. The “echo chamber” frame treats the press corps and ultimately the public as essentially passive, waiting to receive whatever story the White House chose to tell.
But if Mercier is right, that picture is wrong at almost every level. Reporters, whatever their youth and inexperience, had professional incentives to break from the administration narrative, not follow it. Their careers advance by finding angles their competitors missed, not by repeating what the White House communications team fed them. Readers evaluating the Iran deal had access to opposing voices who spent enormous sums arguing against it. Opponents of the deal massively outspent proponents in advertising, and polling showed appreciable increases in opposition over the summer of 2015 despite the White House messaging campaign. The deal passed not because Rhodes hypnotized a gullible public but because they assembled enough votes.
This means the Rhodes piece, to the extent it rested on a manipulation thesis, rested on a folk psychology that serious cognitive science rejects. The drama of the piece, Rhodes as puppet-master ventriloquizing a credulous press, depended on a model of human cognition that Mercier’s work dismantles. People are not that easy to fool on questions they care about, which means the story Samuels told was more atmospheric than analytical. It felt true because it flattered everyone who already distrusted the Obama administration and already believed journalists were lapdogs. It confirmed what that coalition wanted to believe about how power works.
That is exactly what Alliance Theory would predict about a piece written by someone with Samuels’ prior commitments on Iran, published without disclosure of those commitments, for an audience primed to receive it.
Convenient Beliefs
His most convenient belief is that institutional consensus is coordinated suppression. This explains his marginalization without requiring him to consider whether any of his claims failed on their merits. It elevates his outsider position into a sign of integrity rather than a consequence of choices. It makes every critic an agent of the machine rather than someone with a legitimate objection. And it allows him to treat the absence of mainstream validation as confirmation rather than disconfirmation. A belief that makes you unfalsifiable to yourself is a belief Turner would regard with maximum suspicion.
His second convenient belief is that embodied observation, his particular skill, is epistemically superior to quantitative or scientific evidence. This is convenient because he is very good at reading rooms and very bad at evaluating studies. If scene-reading is the gold standard of knowledge, Samuels is a genius. If epidemiology matters, he is out of his depth. He has constructed a hierarchy of evidence that places his own method at the top.
His third convenient belief is Jewish particularism as epistemological resistance. His insistence that Jewish historical specificity resists progressive universalism is not wrong as a claim, but it is also remarkably convenient. It positions him as a defender of his community against a hostile coalition, which is a high-status role within his actual social world, Tablet, the New York intellectual right, the heterodox Jewish commentariat. It costs him nothing within that world and earns him significant credit. Turner would ask: would Samuels hold this belief with equal conviction if it made him unpopular with everyone he knows? There is no way to know, but the convenience should register.
Samuels argues, at length, that the conspiracy theory label is now used primarily to suppress inconvenient truths rather than to describe genuine logical failures. This belief is convenient in the extreme because it immunizes every claim he wants to make from the most common form of social sanction. Once you accept that “conspiracy theory” is just a power move, you have no external check on which heterodox claims deserve uptake and which do not. The belief that the label is always weaponized is itself a belief whose convenience should make us ask whether Samuels reached it through evidence or through need.
Samuels probably cannot feel the difference between his genuine insights, which are real and sometimes important, and his convenient constructions, which protect his position and self-image. The tragic version of this is that his best work, the Ben Rhodes piece, the Obama literary construction argument, the institutional capture analysis, required exactly the kind of critical distance from convenience that his later work abandons. He once turned that tool on power. He now uses it selectively, sparing himself and his allies.
The Four Questions
On what coalition Samuels depends on for status and income: Tablet, which his wife edits and which has become his primary institutional home. County Highway, which he co-founded with Kirn and which depends on a readership that wants its suspicion of mainstream media validated in literary form. The broader dissident right-of-center intellectual culture, centered on outlets like the Free Press, Compact, and First Things, that rewards contrarian takes on liberal institutional failure. His reputation rests substantially on a small number of high-profile pieces, the Rhodes profile above all, whose continued citation value depends on that coalition treating them as landmark journalism rather than contested work. He also retains a nominal relationship with the Times Magazine, but the frequency of his appearances there has declined, and the institutional weight of that relationship no longer anchors his career the way it once might have.
On who he risks angering if he speaks plainly: The dissident coalition that currently sustains him would be the first casualty of genuine plain speaking. That coalition needs Samuels to be the journalist who told uncomfortable truths about the liberal establishment and paid a price for it. Plain speaking about his own epistemic habits, his undisclosed prior position on Iran during the Rhodes piece, the gap between his ambitions and his execution on the Carto piece, the degree to which County Highway is a vehicle for grievance aestheticized as localism, would dissolve the martyr narrative his current position depends on. He also risks angering Alana Newhouse, whose editorial judgment and institutional standing are entangled with his reputation in ways neither of them can fully separate. A Samuels who publicly acknowledged the weaknesses in his own work would create problems for Tablet that go beyond his personal career.
On who benefits if his framing wins: The framing that benefits Samuels most is the one in which mainstream media is irredeemably corrupt, digital information ecosystems cannot produce trustworthy knowledge, and a return to place-based observation and print forms recovers something the current moment has lost. If that framing wins, County Highway is vindicated as a serious institutional response rather than a vanity project. The people who benefit alongside him are the broader coalition of writers and thinkers who have staked their identities on being outside the mainstream, who need the mainstream to be as corrupt as they say it is to justify the costs of their positioning. Walter Kirn benefits. The readers who have organized their media consumption around distrust of institutions benefit from having that distrust given literary form and historical precedent.
On what truths would cost him his position: The mildest costly truth is that the Rhodes piece, whatever it got right about the echo chamber, rested on an undisclosed conflict of interest and overstated its central claims in ways that serious journalism should not. Acknowledging this would not destroy him but would require surrendering the piece’s status as his career-defining achievement and replacing it with something more ambiguous.
A more costly truth is that his retreat from Harper’s, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker reflects market judgment about the reliability and rigor of his work rather than those institutions’ unwillingness to publish uncomfortable things. Those outlets publish uncomfortable things constantly. What they are less willing to publish is atmospheric work that generates controversy without being able to withstand scrutiny. Samuels has never said this plainly, and saying it would collapse the narrative of exile that his current positioning requires.
The truth that would cost him most is that County Highway, framed as a principled withdrawal from captured media toward trustworthy place-based observation, is edited by a man whose own epistemic habits make him a poor custodian of the trustworthiness the project claims to restore. The project’s credibility depends on its founder being the kind of journalist who genuinely cares about getting things right. Samuels cares about getting things to feel right, which is a different commitment and one that his career has demonstrated consistently. Saying so plainly would not merely undermine County Highway. It would require him to account for what kind of writer he is, which is a talented atmosphericist with weak truth-tracking instincts who has built an institutional identity around the claim that truth-tracking is what he does.
The Tacit
Stephen Turner against the idea that tacit knowledge is a shared substance transmitted through training, a kind of common mental content that experts possess and novices lack. He treats tacit knowledge instead as individual habituation. People acquire skills through practice, and those skills produce reliable performances in familiar settings. What looks like collective expertise is many individuals with overlapping but distinct habits, coordinating through feedback rather than through shared internal content. The expert reader of a room has trained intuitions. He does not have privileged access to truth.
The entire epistemic self-presentation of Samuels rests on an inflated account of what embodied observation delivers. He says ninety percent of what he learns about a person comes from watching movement and speech. Turner would not deny that scene-reading produces real knowledge. He would deny that it scales to the claims Samuels makes with it. Reading Ben Rhodes in a room gives you information about Ben Rhodes in a room. It does not give you information about epidemiology, about vaccine safety, about rural Oregon demographics, about what the Iran deal’s opponents were funding. Samuels treats his trained intuition as a general-purpose truth detector. Turner’s framework exposes this as a category error. Tacit skill is domain-specific. Transferring it across domains is the move of someone who does not understand what his skill actually is.
Turner argues that experts often claim a kind of knowledge they cannot fully articulate, which makes their claims hard to audit from outside. The Rhodes piece trades on this. Samuels cannot show his work because the work happened in a room, in the texture of a conversation, in the gap between what Rhodes said and how he said it. The reader is asked to trust the writer’s sensibility. Turner would say this is the same authority move that captured institutions make, just wearing a literary costume rather than a scientific one. Samuels attacks expert authority when it comes from credentialed institutions and invokes his own version of it when he needs the reader to accept conclusions he cannot document.
Samuels and Kirn present their shared sensibility as the residue of genuine independent observation, two men who have looked at the same institutional rot and reached the same conclusions. Turner would ask whether the convergence reflects parallel seeing or coalition fit. The test is whether they disagree in public about anything that matters to their shared audience. If the disagreements are absent, the convergence is probably coordination rather than discovery.
Saying you read rooms is a status move inside certain literary cultures. It positions you as the kind of observer who sees what others miss. It also cannot be checked. The claim itself is the credential. Samuels’s career has rewarded this credential heavily, and his retreat from venues that demand documentary backup toward venues that accept atmospheric authority follows the path Turner’s framework predicts. A writer whose skill is literary intuition gravitates toward audiences who treat literary intuition as sufficient proof.
If Samuels’s knowledge is tacit skill, it should produce predictions that come true more often than chance, and those predictions should hold up in domains where verification is possible. Where the claim can be checked, does it check out? On Rhodes, partially. On rural Oregon, no. On vaccines, no. On his own career arc, no. A trained intuition that fails its checkable cases is not trained intuition. It is a style performing trained intuition. Turner gives you the vocabulary to say this without sounding like you are just calling him wrong. His skill is real but narrower than he claims, and that the larger claims he builds on it are coalition credentials rather than knowledge.
If we go deeper, the room often functions as the alibi. The Samuels production often happens somewhere the reader cannot follow, and that is the place that has no external referent at all.
Turner’s framework distinguishes between tacit knowledge that tracks something real in the world and tacit performance that tracks only the writer’s internal state. A carpenter’s feel for wood corresponds to wood. His hands know things his mouth cannot articulate, but the knowledge answers to the grain, the joint, the load. When the carpenter is wrong, the chair breaks. The feedback loop disciplines the skill. Samuels has no equivalent loop. His intuitions about Rhodes, about Obama as literary construction, about rural Oregon, about what the Iran deal opponents were doing, face no material test. He writes the sentence, the sentence feels right, the sentence goes to print. The chair never breaks because there is no chair.
The rural Oregon claim is the clean case. He did not misread a room. There was no room. He was in Medford for MacDonald, and then he wrote sentences about rural Oregon resembling inner cities that came from nowhere except his own need for the sentences to land. The embodied-observer pose covers for a writer who is often just making things up that feel plausible inside his own head. The room gives him deniability. He can always claim the real knowledge was tacit, atmospheric, in the texture. But the rural Oregon passage had no texture he could have read. He was generating.
What Samuels has habituated is not observation but composition. He has trained himself to produce sentences that sound like they come from close observation, whether or not close observation occurred. The skill is literary, and it is real, but it is a skill of voice rather than a skill of perception. The voice persuades the reader that seeing happened. The seeing may or may not have happened. There is no way to tell from inside the prose, which is why his weakest passages read exactly like his strongest ones. The confidence is identical because the confidence comes from the writer’s relationship to his own sentences, not from the sentences’ relationship to the world.
This also explains the pattern of his errors better than the embodied-observer frame does. If his skill were scene-reading, his errors would cluster at the edges of scenes, in cases where he had insufficient access or rushed the encounter. Instead his errors cluster wherever the claim requires something other than scene-reading, which suggests the scene-reading was never doing the work in the first place. The work was being done by whatever process generates confident sentences inside his head, and that process runs the same whether he has been in the room, has been near the room, or has only imagined what the room might contain.
Samuels’s readers want the embodied-observer frame to be true because it gives them a writer who can deliver verdicts they trust without having to check his work. The frame is load-bearing for the whole arrangement. If readers accepted that Samuels is often composing rather than observing, they would have to start auditing his claims, and auditing defeats the purpose of reading him. The transaction depends on the pose. Which means the pose gets maintained by both sides, writer and readers, each of them benefiting from treating the inside of Samuels’s head as if it were a reliable instrument pointed at the world.
Samuels is not a reporter who occasionally confabulates. He is a confabulator with reporting gestures. The Rhodes piece worked partly because Rhodes purportedly handed him enough real material that the confabulation stayed within hailing distance of the facts. When the real material is absent, as with MacDonald or Kennedy or the vaccine claims, the same process runs and produces the same confident prose, but now the prose has nothing underneath it. The reader cannot tell the difference from inside the sentences. Only checking can tell the difference, and checking is what the whole literary-intellectual habitus is built to discourage.
Alliance Theory
The self-narrative presents a writer who follows the truth and suffers for it. The Pinsof reading is simpler. Samuels writes what his current coalition rewards and avoids saying what his current coalition might punish.
In the 2000s Samuels wrote for the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine. His 2016 Rhodes profile landed in the Times Magazine because Samuels still moved inside the liberal-hawkish foreign policy coalition that opposed the Iran deal and still had institutional standing to place its arguments in prestige venues. Fred Kaplan and David Folkenflik did not miss the piece’s defects. They noted the undisclosed prior hawkish position, the unsupported claims about Rhodes’s origins, the quotes Rhodes contested, and said so in writing.
Over the next decade the liberal-hawkish center lost the venues it had controlled. The progressive left captured parts of the Atlantic and the New Yorker. The Trumpist right built its own press. The neoconservative-adjacent hawks Samuels had traveled with had nowhere to place long-form writing at scale. Samuels migrated. At Tablet he became literary editor. County Highway, which he co-founded with Walter Kirn, runs as a print magazine styled after the 1970s-80s alternative press. The Free Press, Compact, and a rotating cast of Substacks completed the new infrastructure.
The claimed reason for the migration is that the mainstream corrupted. The Pinsof reading is that Samuels’s coalition lost its institutional standing and he followed the surviving infrastructure. Writers do not migrate from well-resourced to poorly-resourced venues out of independence. They migrate because the well-resourced venues stop printing them.
Similarity, transitivity, interdependence, stochasticity
Pinsof’s four criteria for ally choice describe Samuels’s current coalition.
Similarity. Samuels’s current allies share a cultural style: literary rather than scholarly, suspicious of institutional authority, fluent in the New Journalism register, hostile to progressive identity language, sympathetic to Jewish particularism, drawn to the long-form essay. Tablet writers, County Highway contributors, Free Press columnists, and Compact editors trade members across these venues because they share the similarity tags Pinsof identifies: vocabulary, reference set, aesthetic disposition, grievance structure.
Transitivity. The coalition shares allies and rivals. Samuels’s allies are allies with Bari Weiss, Weiss’s allies are allies with Niall Ferguson, Ferguson’s allies are allies with the Hoover-adjacent heterodox academy, and the chain continues. Everyone in the chain treats the same rivals as rivals: the New York Times as currently constituted, the progressive academy, public health officialdom, corporate DEI infrastructure. Transitivity produces clustering, and the clustering here is tight.
Interdependence. Members supply benefits to one another. Samuels platforms Kirn on America This Week. Kirn platforms Samuels. Tablet runs Free Press writers. Free Press runs Tablet writers. County Highway sells to the audience Tablet built. The interdependence is direct and measurable: salaries, book deals, podcast audience share, Substack subscription flows.
Stochasticity. The specific coalition did not have to form. Had the Iran deal not polarized the foreign policy center, had the Atlantic not lurched progressive in 2018-2020, had Substack not supplied distribution to writers cut off from prestige venues, had Kirn not needed a podcast partner, Samuels’s current alliance might not exist at all. Small initial conditions snowballed into the configuration that looks natural to members and arbitrary to outsiders.
Perpetrator biases
Pinsof’s first propagandistic bias: allies’ transgressions get rationalized.
Kirn supplies the test case. Kirn has aired claims about COVID origins, vaccine harms, federal agency malfeasance, and political violence that range from contested to false. A Samuels who applied his Rhodes-piece scrutiny to Kirn might produce a devastating audit. No audit comes. Kirn gets the protective frame: he is a thinking man, an original, willing to go where others will not. When mainstream journalists make smaller errors, Samuels treats those errors as coalition behavior, revealing of captured institutions. When Kirn makes larger errors, Samuels treats those errors as the honest missteps of a truth-seeker.
Samuels’s own earlier Iran-hawk commitments get the same treatment. The undisclosed prior position in the Rhodes piece was a methodological violation by any journalistic standard Samuels himself applies to his rivals. No acknowledgment has come in the decade since. The piece stands in Samuels’s self-presentation as his finest work. The same man who rationalizes Kirn rationalizes his own 2016 conduct through the same operation.
The bias also protects against internal coalition pressure. If Samuels conceded the Rhodes piece had the defects his critics named, he would set precedent that coalition members can be held to the standards the coalition applies to outsiders. Nobody in the coalition wants that precedent set. The unspoken arrangement is that members do not apply their critical tools to each other.
Pinsof’s second propagandistic bias: allies’ grievances get embellished, and the embellishment mobilizes support.
The dissident-center coalition runs on a victim narrative. Its members are the ones who told uncomfortable truths and paid career costs. The mainstream’s hostility confirms integrity rather than indicting quality. The marginalization is not market judgment. It is punishment.
Samuels narrates his career this way. His exclusion from the Atlantic and the New Yorker becomes censorship rather than editorial judgment. His shift to Tablet becomes principled relocation rather than the natural home for a writer whose remaining audience sits in that ideological neighborhood. The Rhodes piece becomes a prophetic warning about what the press had become, not a piece that had specific defects his critics named.
Pinsof observes that victim biases function poorly as self-image maintenance because they emphasize disadvantage. They function well as support mobilization. The dissident-center victim narrative produces the mobilization: Substack subscriptions, print magazine funding, podcast audiences, book sales. The narrative works because it activates the allies’ defensive instinct on behalf of a man they view as a wrongly-marginalized peer.
Competitive victimhood operates here too. The progressive left narrates its marginalization by right-wing capture of the Supreme Court and state legislatures. The Trumpist right narrates its marginalization by liberal media and prosecutorial weaponization. The dissident center narrates its marginalization by both. All three coalitions run the same tactic with different content.
Pinsof’s third propagandistic bias: insider successes get internal attributions, insider failures get external ones. Outsider successes get external attributions, outsider failures get internal ones.
The Rhodes piece succeeded because Samuels was willing to see what others would not. Critics missed what he caught because they had been captured. His subsequent pieces that failed to land, or that turned out to rest on weak reporting, failed because the environment had grown hostile to his kind of writing. His successes come from his character. His failures come from circumstance.
Mainstream journalists who produce strong work get credited to institutional support, editing, resources, the pipeline. Mainstream journalists who produce weak work get credited to ideological capture of their character. Samuels and his allies who produce strong work get credited to character. Samuels and his allies who produce weak work get credited to circumstance. The asymmetry runs through his prose and through the broader coalition’s commentary without ever needing to be named.
The same asymmetry governs his treatment of public health. When Anthony Fauci’s team produced guidance that later revised, the revision reflected Fauci’s character: arrogant, captured by institutional loyalties, hostile to dissent. When RFK Jr. produces vaccine claims that do not survive epidemiological review, the claims reflect external pressure: the difficulty of truth-telling in a captured information environment, the regulatory capture by pharma. Same category of failure. Opposite attributional treatment.
Pinsof’s central prediction: alliance structures produce belief combinations that look coherent from inside and incoherent from outside.
The coalition around Samuels displays the predicted strangeness. It celebrates Jewish particularism against progressive universalism and celebrates white Southern cultural particularism against coastal liberal condescension. Neither particularism rests on any shared principle. Both rest on a shared enemy. The coalition can include Hasidic writers in Brooklyn and Appalachian essayists in print magazines because the allies are chosen by transitivity rather than by content compatibility.
The same coalition defends free speech against progressive speech codes and produces elaborate justifications for why RFK Jr.’s purging of CDC advisory committees represents accountability rather than censorship. It opposes epistemic closure at Harvard and practices the equivalent around vaccine skepticism. It calls out progressive credentialism while staffing itself with Ivy-credentialed writers who cannot stop mentioning their own credentials.
The same coalition holds that institutions should be subjected to rigorous external scrutiny and holds that its own institutional products, Tablet, County Highway, the Free Press, should be read charitably and defended against hostile scrutiny from outside.
These combinations look obviously inconsistent from any coalition that opposes this one. They look principled from inside because the coalition supplies a narrative frame that renders the inconsistency invisible to members.
The Samuels-Kirn partnership illustrates what Pinsof’s framework implies about coalition support at close range. Two writers with characteristic methodological weaknesses have paired up. Samuels does not audit Kirn. Kirn does not audit Samuels. Neither applies to the other the scrutiny each applies to mainstream targets.
The partnership holds because the non-audit pays both men. If Samuels audited Kirn, Samuels might lose Kirn’s audience and Kirn’s platforming. If Kirn audited Samuels, Kirn might lose Samuels’s credibility-by-association and Samuels’s platforming. The coalition pays each man to stay silent about the other. The silence is not explicit. It is the operating condition of the alliance.
Pinsof generalizes this pattern across coalitions: members function through mutual non-audit. The rigorous tools get deployed outward. The shared story is that the coalition applies higher standards than its rivals. The shared practice is that members exempt themselves from the standards they articulate.
County Highway’s stated mission is recovering trustworthy knowledge outside the captured mainstream. The project’s operating condition is that trustworthiness does not get applied to the project’s own methods. The mission supplies the moral vocabulary. The non-audit supplies the coalition’s stability.
Inside his current alliance, Samuels can say almost anything about mainstream journalism, public health authorities, progressive academia, the Biden administration, the Democratic Party establishment, coastal cultural elites. These speech acts cost nothing. They earn him standing.
What costs him standing is the set of claims that damage coalition credibility. That some mainstream journalists produce more careful work than most dissident journalists. That the marginalization of dissident writers sometimes reflects quality concerns rather than ideological punishment. That County Highway’s suspicion of institutions shades into the same credulity toward alternative narratives it criticizes in the mainstream. That RFK Jr.’s vaccine claims fail standard epidemiological review. That Kirn’s conspiracy habits damage the project. That his own 2016 Rhodes piece had the undisclosed prior position his critics identified.
These are the costly truths. Writers do not tell the costly truths about the coalitions they depend on. Samuels’s self-image as an independent thinker does not change this. It makes the pattern harder to see, which follows from the Trivers self-deception finding Pinsof cites: the propaganda works better when the propagandist believes it.
The Rhodes piece reads differently under Alliance Theory. The standard treatment is that Samuels exposed administration manipulation of the press. The Alliance Theory treatment is that Samuels, holding a prior hawkish position on Iran he chose not to disclose, produced a piece whose function was to damage a coalition he opposed on behalf of a coalition he favored. The undisclosed conflict is not a journalistic lapse. It is the piece’s coalitional purpose surfacing in the reporting.
Rhodes worked for a coalition that wanted the deal and built the communications apparatus to sell it. Samuels worked for a coalition that opposed the deal and built the journalistic apparatus to damage it. Both men performed their coalition’s labor while claiming to do something else, Rhodes claiming policy communication, Samuels claiming independent journalism. The piece lands its blow not because Samuels caught Rhodes doing anything unusual but because Samuels caught Rhodes doing the normal work of coalition maintenance and named it as scandal. The same description fits Samuels’s own work. He cannot say so without dismantling his self-understanding and his professional position at the same moment.
The Codevilla Tapes (2019) and The Authority Blob (2021)
David Samuels opens “The Codevilla Tapes” with a thousand-word essay before Codevilla speaks a word. The essay is a theory of empire collapse, delivered with total assurance, featuring no data, no citations, no engagement with any of the scholars who have spent careers on exactly this question. Peter Turchin has written multiple books trying to formalize elite overproduction and imperial decline using actual data. Samuels does not mention him. Niall Ferguson, Walter Scheidel, Barbara Tuchman, Joseph Tainter, each has a serious account of how empires come apart. Samuels does not engage any of them. He gives the reader his theory as though the theory were self-evidently correct because he has the literary standing to deliver it. This is the habitus move exactly: atmosphere substitutes for argument, and the sentences perform the work that documentation should do.
Then he finds his man. Codevilla is not someone Samuels tests. He is someone Samuels uses. The interview format gives Samuels a structure where he can pose the ruling-class positions he wants to attack, watch Codevilla knock them down, and credit himself with intellectual courage for having hosted the exchange. Notice what never happens in the interview. Samuels never pushes back on Codevilla’s weakest claims. When Codevilla says surveillance bureaucrats are “very few” in number and the woke believers “exist but they’re very few,” Samuels does not ask how this squares with Codevilla’s larger claim that the ruling class is pervasive and coordinated. When Codevilla claims the CIA had a “pro-Saddam Hussein” orientation that drove the Pollard sentencing, Samuels does not ask for evidence beyond Codevilla’s recollection of a meeting. When Codevilla announces that Christians are Jews’ best friends in America because Christians root for Israel in the Bible, Samuels treats this as wisdom rather than as the sentimental oversimplification it is. The pushback moves are theater. Samuels sets up positions he can afford to lose.
“The Authority Blob” piece compounds this. Samuels opens with another thousand-word essay, this one even more confident. He declares that Baby Boomers are “truly the worst generation.” He asserts that American elites cannot “read or speak other languages or do basic math.” He claims that American elite men “can’t do basic home repairs, shoot a gun, read a map, or pick up a girl at a bar.” None of this is sourced. None of it could survive contact with evidence. Language acquisition rates, math scores, firearm ownership, these are all measurable, and a writer serious about the claim would check before making it. Samuels writes as though literary flair is a substitute for knowing what he is talking about, and his audience reads as though it agrees.
Then he assembles his roundtable. Look at who he picks. Codevilla, Gitlin, Lind, Redstone, Yang. Four of the five occupy roughly the same coalition space Samuels does, the heterodox-right-of-center intellectual culture that treats progressive institutional capture as the central political fact of the moment. Gitlin is the token liberal, and his function in the piece is to get steamrolled. Redstone dismisses his “white supremacist redoubt” characterization of the Republican Party. Codevilla dismisses it more harshly. Lind’s answers overwhelm Gitlin’s in length and conceptual ambition. The structure lets Samuels say he included a liberal voice while arranging the piece so the liberal voice loses every round. Pinsof’s framework would call this exactly what it is. The token opposition is the coalition credentialing. It allows the piece to claim balance while delivering the conclusions the coalition wants.
The factual errors and unsupported assertions are constant once you start counting. Codevilla claims the Time magazine article of February 2021 was “effectively an admission of manipulation of the 2020 election.” The article did not say this. It described a coordination effort to protect election infrastructure, which is almost the opposite claim. Samuels does not push back. Lind claims the American managerial elite “is grossly incompetent” and “has presided over one domestic and foreign policy disaster after another for the last generation.” Samuels does not ask him to distinguish between elite failures and the ordinary difficulty of governing complex societies. Yang describes the Russia investigation as a “campaign of leaks and innuendo” that “failed to dislodge Trump from power.” He does not mention that Mueller’s investigation produced thirty-four indictments, seven guilty pleas, and a report documenting specific Russian interference operations. Samuels does not prompt him to acknowledge this.
The Jewish particularism pattern shows up clearly too. Codevilla tells Samuels that “the more Christian you are, the more let us say pro-Jewish we tend to be” and that American Jews have been “politically stupid” for aligning with liberals against conservatives. Samuels makes mild Jewish jokes in response, the matzo bit, the mulligan on New Testament quotes, and lets the larger claim stand without examination. A writer who cared about testing the claim might note that American Jewish voting patterns have been remarkably stable across a century of Christian political coalitions, that Jewish voters have had close looks at what Christian conservative politics actually delivers, and that the stability of Jewish Democratic voting is a datum requiring explanation rather than an error to be corrected. Samuels treats it as an error.
The Trump passage is where the performance slips most visibly. Samuels constructs his “demon emperor” frame, a figure from “some Chinese chronicle” with “the head of a pig and the body of man” who rapes virgins and defiles scrolls but defeats the Mongols. This is not a reference to anything. There is no such figure in Chinese imperial chronicles. The Chinese tradition has complex emperors, flawed emperors, tyrannical emperors, but the pig-headed virgin-raping scroll-defiler who defeats Mongols is Samuels’s invention, delivered in a register that implies he is drawing on actual historical knowledge. Codevilla, to his credit, steers him toward the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is a real text. Samuels admits he has not read it. The whole passage exemplifies what the earlier analysis called the mind-of-Samuels problem. The writing generates plausible-sounding historical reference from nothing, and the prose style carries it past readers who assume the reference is real.
The deeper pattern across both pieces is what Turner’s framework calls coalition enforcement dressed as independent inquiry. Samuels is not interviewing Codevilla to find out whether Codevilla’s theory holds up. He is interviewing Codevilla to give the theory a platform and to borrow Codevilla’s credentials as a scholar to authorize claims Samuels already wants to make. The roundtable is not a gathering of diverse perspectives on elite formation. It is a coordinated performance by writers who share a basic account, with one writer included to lose the argument. Both pieces are long, both are erudite in register, both are confident in tone, and both are what the coalition wanted before the first sentence was written.
The Pinsof reading would note one thing further. Samuels presents these pieces as journalism recovering uncomfortable truths that the mainstream will not touch. But the truths in these pieces are the ones his coalition most wants to hear. The ruling class is contemptible. The woke religion is a fraud. Jewish voters have been manipulated into voting against their interests. Trump, whatever his flaws, was a useful disruptor. COVID policy was oligarchic overreach. Every one of these conclusions tracks exactly what Tablet’s readership pays to have confirmed. The writing is not heterodox within its actual audience. It is orthodox within its coalition while styling itself as heterodox within an imagined larger one. This is the move Pinsof calls out. You get the coalition’s social rewards for saying what the coalition already believes while claiming the credit of a truth-teller whose positions cost him something. The cost never arrives because the coalition is the only audience that matters, and the coalition is cheering.
What makes these pieces useful for the larger analysis of Samuels is that they show the Rhodes-piece method stripped of its best material. The Rhodes piece at least had Rhodes talking, at least had specific named journalists whose work could be checked, at least had a documentable White House communications operation to describe. These pieces have none of that. They are pure atmosphere. And the atmosphere comes out exactly where the writer’s coalition wants it to come out, every time, on every question.
The Editor
A serious editor does not publish a confabulator. Not in the news pages, not in the magazine, not in the long-form verticals. The category of work Samuels produces is incompatible with any publication that tells its readers it is giving them the world as it is rather than the world as the writer found it convenient to imagine.
The reason this matters more than the usual talk about bias or ideology is that confabulation is a different problem from tendentiousness. A tendentious writer has a view and selects evidence for it. You can disagree with him, argue with him, check his sources, and publish a counter-piece. The intellectual transaction is intact. A confabulator breaks the transaction. What he gives you is not evidence plus interpretation but interpretation plus the performance of evidence, and the performance is convincing enough that readers treat it as the thing itself. Rural Oregon resembles inner cities. The demon emperor appears in Chinese chronicles. American elites cannot read maps. These are not tendentious framings of real data. They are sentences generated inside the writer’s head and delivered with the confidence of reporting. A reader who accepts them has been given something other than what the form promised.
In a personal essay the writer is the subject. What he thinks, what he felt, what he imagined in Medford, these are legitimate material because the essay’s claim is about the writer’s mind and not about the world beyond it. Samuels has a sensibility, a voice, a capacity to make his own reactions interesting. If the contract with the reader is that the writer’s perception is the thing on offer, Samuels delivers. The problem arrives the moment the work purports to be about anything other than Samuels. The same sensibility that makes the personal essay compelling becomes a liability the moment it is pointed at Ben Rhodes, at Kevin MacDonald’s neighbors, at RFK Jr.’s vaccine claims, at the inner life of American institutions. The sensibility keeps generating confident sentences. It does not acquire, along the way, any new commitment to checking whether the sentences correspond to external facts.
An editor committed to truth and rigor has to make this distinction visible in the assignment structure. Samuels on his own marriage, his own son, his own religious reflections, his own memories of Brooklyn: publishable with ordinary editing. Samuels profiling a political figure, investigating an institution, adjudicating a scientific controversy, characterizing a community he visited for three days: not publishable without the fact-checking infrastructure that would catch the confabulations, and even then, the deeper problem remains that the writer’s instincts cannot be trusted to tell him when he is reporting and when he is generating. The fact-checker can catch discrete errors. The fact-checker cannot catch the larger habit, which is that the prose composes scenes and details the writer never witnessed and delivers them in a register indistinguishable from the scenes and details he did witness.
The Tablet situation is what happens when this discipline collapses. Alana Newhouse edits the magazine. Samuels writes for it. The conflict of interest is obvious enough to name but it goes deeper than the simple nepotism point. An editor who is married to a writer cannot apply to him the skepticism the work requires. The relationship itself forecloses the editorial posture. And the magazine’s identity, organized around heterodoxy and skepticism of mainstream institutions, makes Samuels’s habits read inside the institution as features rather than as defects. The confabulations confirm what the readership already believes. The writer is unchecked because checking him would threaten the marriage and the magazine’s commercial position. County Highway extends the same arrangement into a second venue. Kirn provides the same non-audit Newhouse does, for the same coalition reasons.
A brutal editor would say something that the polite discourse around Samuels cannot say. The work’s persuasiveness is not a sign of its quality. It is the mark of the problem. Samuels’s sentences convince because they are built to convince, not because they correspond to something he checked. The more confident the prose, the more suspicious an editor should be, because the confidence is generated inside the writer rather than earned from the material. An editor trained to read for signs of reporting, specifics that could only come from the scene, quotes that sound like the person actually speaking, details that would be hard to invent, will find less of this in Samuels than in a competent beat reporter at a regional paper. What Samuels gives instead is atmospheric density, literary voice, and the reader’s own desire to believe he has been somewhere real.
The commercial problem is that Samuels is valuable precisely because of the confabulatory gift. The sentences sing. The pieces generate attention. The reputation brings prestige to whatever venue publishes him. An editor who declined to publish him on rigor grounds would be giving up something real in exchange for something invisible, because the readers who would be saved from being misled mostly do not know they were being misled. The costs of confabulation are diffuse, spread across a readership that absorbs wrong impressions about Iran deal journalism, rural Oregon, American institutions, and the epidemiology of vaccines. The benefits of publishing Samuels are concentrated in the venue’s bottom line and cultural standing. The incentive structure argues for publishing him, which is why he keeps getting published, and why the editorial discipline that would refuse him exists only as a thought experiment.
The social structure of elite journalism does not reward the editor who says no to the gifted confabulator. It rewards the editor who says yes and shares the credit when the piece lands. The standards that would catch Samuels exist in professional lore but not in professional practice, because applying them costs more than the career of any single editor is worth. An editor committed to truth would have to be willing to damage his own career to hold the line. Such editors exist. They are rare. They tend not to last.
Samuels belongs in the first person and stays there. The moment the byline promises reporting, the arrangement with the reader has been falsified, because what the reader will receive under that byline is reporting’s shape without reporting’s substance. The pieces will be absorbing. They will also be, in specific and checkable ways, not true. An editor who publishes them anyway is not publishing journalism. He is publishing a literary product styled as journalism, and the gap between what the product is and what it presents itself as doing is the gap a rigorous editorial practice exists to close.
Interaction Rituals Chains by Randall Collins
Randall Collins argues that careers in intellectual and artistic life run on emotional energy generated through interaction rituals. The ritual needs bodies in physical co-presence, shared focus on an object, and emotional entrainment that produces group solidarity and charges the participants with the feeling that what they are doing matters. The successful intellectual does not simply produce good work. He positions himself at the nodes where high-intensity rituals happen, and he converts that positioning into the status, access, and energy that let him produce more work. Collins calls this interaction ritual chains because each ritual charges the participant for the next one, and the chain either compounds or decays.
Samuels began his career inside the most ritually dense intellectual environment America had to offer. Harvard in the late 1980s, Harvard Lampoon, then Princeton for a Mellon in history. These are not merely credentialing institutions. They are ritual factories. The Lampoon in particular generates the dense emotional entrainment Collins describes: small group, physical clubhouse, shared comic vocabulary, sustained mutual focus on craft, and a direct pipeline to New York magazines through alumni networks. He emerged from that formation with the tacit skills and the ritual connections that let him enter the top tier of American magazine journalism almost immediately.
His early career at Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine placed him at what Collins would call the high ritual density nodes of late twentieth century print culture. These magazines were not just publications. They were sites of ongoing ritual interaction: editorial offices, long lunches, closing dinners, story conferences, reading series, awards ceremonies. The apprenticeship he got working under editors at Harper’s and The New Yorker is precisely the kind of tacit transmission Collins says cannot be captured by reading alone. He was present at the rituals that taught him how to do what he does. His prose style, which critics compared to Joseph Mitchell, carries the imprint of that formation.
Collins would note that Samuels reached what he calls the attention space of American letters early. Every generation has a limited number of slots for serious literary journalists, and Samuels filled one of them. The Rap on Rap piece in 1991 and the Arafat profile in 2005 and the Ben Rhodes piece in 2016 are the kind of work that gets cited, anthologized, and argued about inside the ritual community. Each one charged him for the next one. The chain compounded for roughly twenty-five years.
What is interesting is the shift. Somewhere around the Ben Rhodes profile, Samuels began visibly reconsidering his relationship to the ritual community that had made him. The Rhodes piece itself is part of this shift. It was a hostile portrait of an Obama administration figure, published in a venue coded as friendly to that administration, and it produced the kind of backlash that marks a ritual boundary violation. Collins would say Samuels was testing the limits of what his ritual community would tolerate. Jeffrey Goldberg’s response, attributing the piece to a personal grudge, is coalition maintenance language. The community tried to metabolize the violation by attributing it to individual pathology rather than engaging the substance.
After that, the migration accelerates. Samuels moved his primary ritual home to Tablet, which Collins would read as a move from a high-density, high-prestige ritual community to a smaller, more ideologically coherent one. Tablet is not The New Yorker. The ritual density is lower, the prestige narrower, the audience smaller. But the ritual intensity within the community is higher, and more important for Collins, the community does not punish the statements that his previous community was beginning to punish. He traded breadth of ritual access for depth of ritual alignment.
County Highway is the further step. Founding a print magazine in 2023, with Walter Kirn, in the form of a nineteenth century broadsheet, is the kind of move Collins finds recurrent in his histories of intellectual decline and renewal. When the dominant ritual institutions have become hostile or depleted, serious workers build new ones at the margins. Collins has a category for this: creative workers exit exhausted attention spaces and found new ones that will not be recognized as legitimate for some time. The ritual density is low at first because the new institution has to build its own audience, its own conferences, its own readers. But the ritual intensity can be high because the participants are there by conviction rather than by default.
Samuels himself has articulated something close to this sociology in his own prose. The passage about writers no longer being able to afford New York, about the magazines becoming ghost ships, about the end of the gatekeeper institutions, is not just cultural complaint. It is Collins-style analysis of a ritual community in decay. He sees that the interaction ritual chains of American literary culture have thinned, that the conferences and dinners and closing rooms no longer generate the emotional energy they once did, that the participants are mostly going through motions they learned from a world that no longer exists. His founding of County Highway is an attempt to solve the problem he has described.
What Collins adds that Samuels himself does not articulate is the emotional cost of this kind of migration. The person who exits an exhausted attention space does not simply walk into a new one. He carries with him the ritual training of the old space, including his sense of what quality work looks like, what response it deserves, who the relevant peers are, what constitutes success. Those internal standards were formed by the old rituals. They do not automatically recalibrate to the new environment. The result is often a kind of double consciousness in which the worker is doing serious work in the new space while still partly measuring it against the standards of the old space and finding both spaces wanting. The Tablet essays have some of this quality. They are written with the polish of a New Yorker writer and the ideological freedom of an outlet that does not punish heterodox positions, and the combination produces prose that is more pointed than it would have been in the old venue and more prestige-haunted than it would be if he had never been in the old venue.
Collins would also note the generational feature. Samuels is nearly 60. He entered the magazine world at the tail end of its high ritual density phase. Writers a decade younger did not have access to the same formation because the rituals were already thinning when they arrived. Writers a decade older retired before the decay set in. Samuels is in the cohort that got the full formation and then watched the institutions that provided it hollow out during his working life. That experience is ritually specific. It produces a particular kind of writer, one who has internalized standards the current environment no longer supports, and who has to decide whether to keep performing those standards for diminished audiences, exit to less prestigious but more congenial venues, or build new institutions. Samuels has done all three.
Samuels and Kirn are each more productive and more distinctive in their collaboration than they would be alone. Collins would read this as the emotional energy of a focused ritual community of two or three or four people generating the charge that larger institutions used to supply. The same pattern shows up in the Tablet core group: Leibovitz, Newhouse, Samuels, a handful of others, producing in concert the kind of ritual density that The New Yorker at scale can no longer generate.
The Collins prediction for where Samuels goes next is not optimistic but not tragic either. Writers who successfully migrate out of decaying attention spaces into smaller, more coherent ones often do their best late work there, because they combine mature craft with ritual alignment and reduced status anxiety. The constraint is that the audience remains smaller. The compensation is that the work gets written and read by people who care about it in the way Collins says all serious intellectual work requires. Samuels at County Highway in 2026 is doing something structurally similar to what a nineteenth century essayist did in a small literary review: producing for a limited readership within a coherent ritual community that sustains the work even as the broader culture moves on.
Ritual community at the margins cannot fully replace the ritual community at the center. The audience is smaller. The peer group is narrower. The rewards are more ideologically constrained. The writer gets to keep writing, but he does so knowing that the full scale of recognition his earlier work received is no longer available and will not return. Whether this registers as liberation or loss depends on the writer’s disposition. Samuels’s public prose reads as a writer who has resolved the question mostly in favor of liberation, while still carrying enough of the old standards to produce work that exceeds what the new venue would otherwise attract.
‘A Big Misunderstanding’
Samuels’s public account of his own trajectory leans heavily on the misunderstanding myth in a particular form. He writes as though the decline of American literary culture is a story of cowardice, careerism, and the capture of gatekeeper institutions by people who no longer value serious work. The implicit claim is that the old rituals could be restored if the participants would simply remember what the work was for, face the facts about what has happened to the institutions, and stop pretending that the current arrangements produce anything of value. The Tablet piece about the nonexistence of the New York literary scene, the passage about writers in creative writing departments selling the coffin odors of a dead culture to provincials, all of this runs on the premise that the people sustaining the current arrangements are fooling themselves or fooling others, and that naming the fraud clearly enough might break the spell.
This assumes that the target audience, the writers and editors and readers still operating inside the depleted institutions, have failed to understand what has happened, and that clear statement can change their behavior. The alternative reading Pinsof would press is that those people understand fine. They occupy coalition positions that require them to sustain the current arrangements, and no amount of clear statement will move them, because the statement is not addressing the force that holds them in place. Their salary, their peer group, their sense of professional identity, their access to the remaining prestige, all depend on continued participation in the ritual community Samuels describes as dead. They cannot exit even if they privately agree with his diagnosis, because exit would cost them more than staying does. Samuels treats their continued participation as a kind of blindness. Pinsof would treat it as coalition rationality.
If the problem is misunderstanding, then the solution is better writing, clearer analysis, louder and more honest description of what has happened. Samuels’s output is consistent with that theory of change. He writes extensively, polemically, in prose designed to shock the reader into seeing what the reader has been avoiding. The work assumes that seeing is the obstacle. If the problem is coalition, then writing better is not the solution, because the people who need to see already see, and what stops them is not cognitive but structural. No essay can dissolve the incentives holding a writer inside a dying institution. Only the institution dying completely, or the writer finding a viable alternative, can produce the shift.
Samuels himself exited the dying institutions and built viable alternatives. His own migration is not driven by misunderstanding dissolved but by coalition realignment completed. He found that County Highway and Tablet could sustain him, materially and ritually, and he moved. The writers who have not made his move are not necessarily trapped in false consciousness. Many of them have coalition positions Samuels does not have access to and never did. Someone deep inside The New Yorker or The New York Times has access to social ties, editorial support, institutional protections, and career trajectories that Samuels either opted out of or was never offered. Their refusal to exit is not misunderstanding. It is a rational response to their actual situation, which is different from his.
When Samuels describes the anti-woke world as nearly as depressing as the woke world, full of careerist maneuvering and pleas for elite approval, he is making a more sophisticated Pinsof point than he fully acknowledges. He is noticing that the heterodox coalition runs its own coalition games, its own status economies, its own demands for signal sending and orthodoxy enforcement. But he frames this as muddled thinking and bad faith, which is misunderstanding language. Pinsof would say the heterodox coalition behaves that way because coalitions behave that way. The problem is not that the anti-woke writers have failed to achieve the clarity Samuels has achieved. The problem is that coalition life imposes its own pressures on any participant, including the one doing the observing.
County Highway is a coalition. Tablet is a coalition. The writers and readers who sustain his current work have their own expectations, their own orthodoxies, their own demands for signal sending. The Hitler piece, the Bernard Henri Levy interview, the ongoing commentary on the corruption of the American cultural scene, all of this plays inside a ritual community that has its own rules about what can be said and what cannot. Samuels has more latitude than he had at The New Yorker. He does not have unlimited latitude. The coalition that sustains him would also punish certain moves. Samuels cannot see his own coalition constraints as clearly as he sees the constraints operating on his former colleagues, because he lives inside them and they feel like freedom rather than constraint.
Writers who have migrated to smaller ritual communities often develop a theory that their readers are the honest people, the ones who see what others cannot see, the remnant who kept their vision intact. Pinsof would say this is a standard coalition move. The audience is not selected for epistemic virtue. It is selected for coalition fit. The readers who follow Samuels from The New Yorker to Tablet to County Highway are not the people who see more clearly than others. They are the people whose own coalition commitments overlap enough with his that his work continues to produce emotional energy for them. Treating that alignment as shared truth rather than shared position is the same move Samuels diagnoses in his former peers, directed the other way.
Samuels presents his essays as descriptions of reality that might correct the record or move readers to action. Most of what the essays accomplish is coalition maintenance. They signal to the people in his ritual community that he remains uncaptured by the opposing coalition, that he sees what they see, that his credentials from the old world have not softened his judgment in a way the new world would find suspicious.
At each stage of his career, Samuels has explained his position as the one the audience does not yet see clearly. At Harper’s and The Atlantic, he wrote immersive pieces that assumed the reader had not yet encountered the subculture or the contradiction he was revealing. At Tablet, he writes as though the readers have not yet understood the depth of institutional collapse. At County Highway, he writes as though the American cultural and political situation can still be corrected by better seeing. The consistent theory across all three venues is that clarity can move people. Pinsof would say this theory is almost certainly wrong, but it is the theory the essay form requires. Essayists cannot write from the premise that their writing changes nothing. They have to assume the reader might see something after reading that the reader did not see before. The misunderstanding myth is not just a cognitive error. It is the operating assumption of the essayist’s craft. Samuels cannot write without it, even though the trajectory of his career suggests he increasingly suspects it is false.
Hybrid Vigor
Samuels came out of the elite literary journalism pipeline in its late classical form. The generation that included him, late Gen X writers who came of age professionally in the 1990s, inherited the niche that Talese, Didion, Wolfe, and the New Journalists had constructed. The niche valued the long-form magazine feature as a literary form, treated the writer’s sensibility as a primary instrument, and operated with the assumption that the major magazines would continue to support the form indefinitely. Samuels trained for this niche at Princeton and at Harvard, where he took a PhD in English. The combination of literary training and journalistic practice produced the hybrid that the niche’s flagship writers all embodied. The hybrid had vigor. His early magazine work demonstrated it. He could turn any subject into literature: the Unabomber, the Miami drug trade, the college admissions racket, high-end strip clubs, Brooklyn Hasidic communities, the Dylan archive. The range was the signature.
The niche that trained him began collapsing in the mid-2000s. Magazine budgets contracted. The long-form feature shrank or disappeared at most outlets. The business model that had sustained the niche depended on advertising rates that the internet was destroying. Writers trained for the niche faced a declining habitat. The response patterns the biology predicts for organisms facing habitat loss include migration to adjacent niches, specialization within the shrinking niche, and construction of new niches from available materials. Samuels attempted all three in succession across the following fifteen years.
The migration attempt went toward the remaining outlets that could still pay for long-form work. The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Tablet. Each assignment required different calibrations. The mainstream outlets required countershading that muted the political registers his work could have occupied. The specialized outlets like Tablet permitted the registers. His work across this period developed a split quality: the pieces he placed in mainstream outlets showed one set of sensibilities, the pieces he placed in Tablet showed a sharper and more politically articulate set. This is the crypsis pattern operating with multiple coloration registers, each calibrated to the detection systems of the venue hosting the work. The writer remained the same organism. The coloration shifted across venues.
The specialization within the shrinking niche took the form of long Dylan essays and interviews. Dylan became a subject Samuels returned to repeatedly across fifteen years, culminating in extensive interview projects and a Dylan archive relationship. Specialization of this kind serves a specific function for an organism whose general habitat is contracting. The organism identifies a sub-habitat where it has accumulated unique capacities and establishes effective monopoly in that sub-habitat. Samuels is not the only writer on Dylan, but he is among the few writers who combine literary training, direct access, and long-term commitment to the subject. The Dylan sub-niche is sustainable for him as long as Dylan remains a subject of cultural interest and as long as the archives continue producing new material to write about. The sub-niche cannot sustain an entire career. It can supplement other sources of income and position.
The niche construction effort took the form of Tablet, where Samuels has been literary editor since roughly 2010. Tablet was founded in 2009 by Alana Newhouse as a digital Jewish magazine, and moved across the following fifteen years from a generally liberal Jewish cultural publication to something sharper and more distinct. Samuels’s role in that transformation has been substantial. The magazine now occupies a position in American Jewish intellectual life that did not exist before. It is neither the liberal establishment Jewish press nor the Orthodox Jewish press nor the neoconservative Commentary tradition. It is a hybrid that brings elite literary sensibility to topics the mainstream Jewish press handles either timidly or not at all: Jewish institutional failures, the Ivy League’s collapse of its historic relationship with American Jews, Zionism after October 7, the transformation of progressive politics into something many Jewish liberals recognize as hostile, the intellectual history of postwar American Jewish thought. The niche the magazine now occupies is the one Samuels and Newhouse constructed over fifteen years.
Samuels did not perform the single large crossing that Alter performed or the multi-decade crossing Paul Bloom managed. He combined material from several intellectual traditions the mainstream press and the Jewish press had both failed to integrate. Elite literary sensibility from the New Yorker tradition. Jewish textual seriousness from the postwar intellectual culture he inherited. Political heterodoxy developed through his reporting work. Skepticism of institutional authority learned from his Russiagate investigation and from his broader experience with how establishment narratives get produced. The combination is not standard for any existing outlet. Tablet hosts it because Tablet was built to host it. No prior venue existed where this particular combination of capacities could be deployed at full intensity. The magazine is the niche constructed to fit the capacities its core writers had developed elsewhere and could not fully deploy in their original habitats.
The costly signaling frame captures what the Russiagate work purchased and what it cost. The 2018 piece with Lee Smith, published in Tablet, was among the earliest substantive critiques of the Steele dossier in a mainstream-adjacent venue. The piece argued that the dossier’s provenance and contents did not support the claims the mainstream press was building around it. The claim turned out to be largely vindicated by subsequent investigations, though the vindication came slowly and never fully registered in the outlets that had promoted the dossier’s importance. The cost of publishing the piece was immediate. Samuels lost standing with former colleagues at mainstream outlets. The assignments from those outlets slowed. What the piece purchased was credibility with an audience that valued exactly the willingness to publish evidence-based heterodoxy against coalition consensus. The audience grew across subsequent years as the coalition’s consensus on Russiagate eroded and as Samuels’s early call looked increasingly prescient.
The endosymbiotic relationship Samuels has with Tablet differs from the relationships Baker has with the Times or Halperin had with ABC. Samuels is not fully incorporated into Tablet the way a staff writer is incorporated into a legacy magazine. He has a role, a title, and a continuing relationship, but he also writes for other outlets, maintains his book projects, and operates with substantial independence. The relationship is closer to the way an established writer might have related to The New Yorker under Shawn or Gottlieb, embedded in the institution without being fully owned by it. The institution needs his work to maintain its character. He needs the institution for a particular kind of distribution and for the editorial collaboration that Newhouse provides. Each party gains from the relationship without either being fully captured by it.
The antagonistic pleiotropy question runs in an unusual direction for Samuels. The traits that served him in the literary journalism habitat of the 1990s and early 2000s, patience, omnivorous curiosity, willingness to spend months on a single piece, literary prose in the essayistic register, continue to serve him now. The environment has changed around him in ways that would have disabled a writer without his specific adaptations. The reading audience for long pieces has fragmented. The payment structures for such pieces have collapsed. Most writers trained for the niche have either left it or accepted reduced standing within it. Samuels has preserved his standing by finding a venue that values what he produces at roughly the level the legacy magazines once did. Tablet cannot pay what The New Yorker once paid for comparable work, but it can host comparable work without the editorial constraints that would now apply at The New Yorker. The trade is favorable enough that his traits remain adaptive in the venue he now primarily inhabits.
The Red Queen race he runs differs from the one Peter Baker runs. Baker races against other prestige-publication political journalists to hold his share of the prestige hierarchy. Samuels races against the attention economy itself to keep the long-form essay viable as a reading format. The competing organisms in his race are not other long-form essayists but Substack writers, podcasts, Twitter threads, and short-form digital content. The race is harder than Baker’s in one respect: the institutional substrate that supported Baker’s niche still exists in recognizable form, while the institutional substrate that supported Samuels’s original niche has largely disappeared. The race is easier in another respect: the audience for long literary journalism is smaller but more devoted, and the writers capable of producing it are fewer, so the competition for the remaining audience within that specific product category is less intense than the competition Baker faces within his.
The crypsis question takes a specific form in Samuels’s case. He is not Steve Sailer, who refuses crypsis entirely and lives with the consequences. He is not Baker, who performs crypsis so completely that his positions on most questions remain unreadable. He is somewhere between: he performs enough crypsis to function in mainstream venues when he wishes to, but he increasingly chooses venues where the crypsis is not required. The trajectory across the last decade has been toward reducing the crypsis. The early Harper’s and New Yorker pieces are more politically opaque than the recent Tablet work. He has moved toward outlets where he can state positions directly, and he has reduced his participation in outlets where positions must be softened.
The October 7 aftermath and the subsequent year and a half have clarified the framework’s reading of his career. Tablet’s response to October 7 was immediate, substantial, and among the sharpest in American Jewish intellectual life. The magazine published dozens of pieces by Samuels and others analyzing the event, its contexts, and the reactions to it from American progressive institutions, universities, and media. The response established Tablet as the magazine of record for a particular kind of post-October 7 Jewish intellectual position: secular or ambiguously religious, hawkishly Zionist, sharply critical of American progressive institutions, elite-credentialed but estranged from the coalition it was credentialed into. The readership that wanted this particular combination had no prior venue where the combination was produced at this quality. Tablet supplied the demand. Samuels’s role in the supply was central.
The American progressive coalition had, before October 7, maintained a working accommodation with liberal Zionism that permitted elite Jewish intellectuals to operate within the coalition without extensive friction. The accommodation deteriorated rapidly after October 7 as the coalition’s progressive wing moved toward positions that elite liberal Zionists experienced as hostile. Writers like Samuels faced a choice between modifying their Zionism to fit the coalition’s new requirements, exiting the coalition, or occupying venues that permitted the original position to continue being held at the new higher cost. Samuels had already largely exited the coalition before October 7 through his earlier Russiagate heterodoxy and his Tablet work. October 7 confirmed the exit rather than causing it. The earlier exit positioned him to write into the post-October 7 moment from a position that was already established, rather than having to construct the position under emergency conditions.
Samuels is unusual among the figures you have asked about because his subject position is itself part of his subject matter. He writes about the literary journalism habitat that produced him, its collapse, and what that collapse means for the production of serious writing about American life. He writes about the coalition realignments that have pushed writers like him out of venues that once valued them, and what those realignments reveal about the institutions he once worked with. He writes about the Jewish intellectual tradition that shapes his own sensibility, treating his position within that tradition as both material and instrument. The reflexivity is unusual among working journalists. Most writers in his cohort either stayed inside the coalition and suppressed the analysis their position would have permitted, or left the coalition and stopped producing work at his level of literary quality. Samuels has done neither. He has stayed in the work at full quality while allowing the work to register his position outside the coalition. The trait combination is rare enough to be valuable, and rare enough that the framework’s predictions about hybrid vigor apply to it specifically.
The comparison with the other figures sharpens where Samuels fits. Baker performs full crypsis to maintain niche standing. Halperin was expelled and had to re-colonize. Kaus lost standing gradually by refusing crypsis. Bloom performs sophisticated crypsis that permits real heterodoxy. Alter occupied a sub-niche sheltered from coalition selection. Wax triggered maximum immune response through coalition-marker transgression. Sailer built an entirely alternative niche. Horwitz selected targets that avoided coalition markers. Samuels reduced his crypsis progressively as he built and joined an alternative institutional substrate that permitted the reduced crypsis. He is the migration case rather than the expulsion case or the refusal case. He moved to habitats that fit him, rather than being forced out or staying in place while the habitat changed around him. The migration was slower than Halperin’s re-colonization because Samuels’s original habitat collapsed more slowly than Halperin’s departure did. The migration was more deliberate than Kaus’s because Samuels had institutional collaborators helping to build the destination habitat while Kaus operated largely alone.
His continuing trajectory depends on Tablet’s continuing viability as an institutional substrate. The magazine has grown across the last decade. Its readership has deepened, its editorial confidence has increased, and its position in American Jewish intellectual life has solidified. The selection pressures that would threaten it come from two directions. The first is the broader collapse of independent digital magazines as economic entities. Tablet has navigated this better than most comparable outlets, but the environmental pressure remains. The second is the possibility that the coalition realignments that currently favor Tablet’s position reverse, reducing the demand for its particular combination of positions. Neither threat is imminent. Both are visible on the horizon. Samuels’s position within the magazine gives him institutional security as long as the magazine remains viable, and gives him the platform to produce work at the quality his training equipped him to produce. The equilibrium is stable for as long as the substrate holds. The substrate may hold for a long time or may not. Organisms whose niches depend on specific institutional substrates are hostage to those substrates’ continuing viability, and that Samuels’s career now depends on Tablet and on the cluster of related institutions that support his current position more than on the mainstream outlets that once supported his earlier position. That dependency is not unusual. Every writer has it. What is unusual is that Samuels chose his dependency deliberately, across a period of years, rather than having it assigned by default to the institutions that credentialed him. The deliberateness is itself a form of niche construction the framework treats as valuable, because it represents the organism shaping its environment rather than being shaped by it.
‘E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century’
Putnam’s diversity findings fit Samuels’s work better than they fit most writers in his cohort. His journalism has always run on suspicion of homogenizing managerial power. His 2016 profile of Ben Rhodes for The New York Times Magazine, The Storyteller of Obama’s Foreign Policy by David Samuels in the May 8, 2016 issue, described how a small echo chamber of foreign policy journalists got managed by a White House speechwriter with a creative writing MFA. His interview with David Garrow about Obama, published in Tablet, challenged the Obama biography the liberal coalition had spent a decade constructing. The critique tracks what Putnam’s data imply about concentrated elite networks operating in a diverse country whose broader civic capacity has thinned.
Horizontal gene transfer illuminates County Highway’s project. The 19th-century American newspaper form emerged in bounded local communities with shared assumptions, shared readers, and a regional ecology that sustained the paper. Samuels and Kirn port the form into a country whose local newspapers have mostly died. The broadsheet survives. The social capital that originally produced such papers does not. County Highway imports the vocabulary of the older form and operates in a host environment whose civic conditions cannot reproduce what the form presupposed. The magazine reads as elegy partly for this reason. It carries the signal of an older civic America that Putnam’s data help explain the decline of.
Phenotypic plasticity runs through Samuels’s body of work. In The New Yorker he wrote the long travelogue about the Pink Panthers, the immersive subculture pieces on jewel thieves and impostors. In Harper’s he wrote panoramic takes on the Sands demolition and Woodstock 1999. In The Atlantic he wrote American Mozart on Kanye West and the Arafat profile that David Brooks named one of the three most important articles of the year. In Tablet he writes Jewish-particularist cultural commentary and sharp-edged political interviews. In County Highway he writes as editor and occasional contributor in a register deliberately shaped to fit the small-town broadsheet form. Same man, different phenotypes shaped by venue, audience, and coalition need.
Exaptation describes what County Highway does with the 19th-century broadsheet. The form originally served local commerce, local politics, and local identity. Samuels and Kirn repurpose it as a vehicle for cultural dissent against the coastal managerial class and its assumptions. The broadsheet, once a tool of civic embedding, becomes a tool of critique from inside a coalition that sees itself as preserving what the managerial project erodes. The same structure serves a new function.
Signal parasitism cuts in a particular direction in Samuels’s case. His Harvard degree, Harper’s contributing editor status, New Yorker bylines, and Atlantic cover stories all came through the institutions the County Highway project attacks. He uses the credentials the elite coalition conferred to build a platform that criticizes that coalition. The prestige signal travels. The coalition that produced the signal gets deployed against itself. This pattern differs from straightforward signal parasitism. Samuels pays some of the costs the critics face from inside the establishment. His positions have cost him access to venues that once published him. The credential borrowing carries friction the standard case does not have.
Putnam’s data connect to Samuels’s Jewish work in a different way. Tablet’s project presupposes a bounded Jewish community with shared concerns, shared references, and shared willingness to argue with each other in the same room. The magazine has a specific readership, a specific set of writers, and a specific ethnic-religious scope. It operates as a tribal publication in the best sense. Putnam’s findings about social capital predict that such bounded communities produce more trust, more civic engagement, and more sustained argument than diffuse diverse ones. Tablet’s vitality fits the prediction. Its writers argue with each other in ways that produce cumulative intellectual work. Its readers form a recognizable coalition. The particularism Putnam’s data recommend for civic life at the neighborhood level operates at the subcultural level in Tablet’s case.
The Samuels-Newhouse position on American Jewry adds a further layer. Tablet has moved since the October 7 attacks toward sharper particularism, less faith in the liberal Jewish-progressive coalition that dominated American Jewish institutional life for decades. The magazine now reads assimilationist liberalism as a strategic error. Putnam’s findings support the move. Diversity without the substrate that sustains trust erodes the civic conditions Jews relied on. The bet that progressive coalition politics would protect Jews looks worse once Putnam’s framework gets applied. Low-trust societies produce worse outcomes for minorities than high-trust ones. The progressive project that imported the conditions Putnam measured does not produce the civic environment in which Jewish life thrives.
County Highway’s pastoral register faces a harder problem. The magazine celebrates small-town America, agricultural radio, Bob Dylan folk songs, Neil Young and Gram Parsons, the old American storytelling voice. The communities that produced that voice had specific characteristics. They were ethnically narrow, religiously coherent, and economically embedded in place. Putnam’s findings suggest these conditions produced the civic capacity the voice expresses. The present country has fewer such communities. County Highway reads as an attempt to recover voices whose source communities the broader coalition project has spent fifty years dissolving. Samuels does not name the civic-capacity problem directly. His coalition position lets him see parts of the pattern his fellow journalists cannot see. It does not let him name every part of it.
Exaptation fits what he does with the Jewish intellectual tradition. The Jewish literary-critical tradition he inherits from Trilling, Howe, Kazin, and the rest served a specific assimilation-era project of Jewish entry into American letters. Samuels repurposes that tradition’s instruments for a post-assimilation project. The critical voice survives. The integration optimism does not. Tablet reads Howe and Trilling through a framework their original readers would not have recognized. The tools keep their shape and change their function.
Signal parasitism also runs through his use of the New Journalism tradition. Talese, Didion, Mailer, and Wolfe worked in a mid-century American ecology with large circulation magazines, expense accounts, and editors who backed long projects. Samuels learned the form in the 1990s when the ecology was already thinning. He carries the voice into a 2020s environment where the conditions that produced it have mostly vanished. County Highway tries to rebuild some of those conditions in print. The effort fits Putnam’s diagnosis. Civic forms depend on civic substrates. Samuels is trying to grow one out of the other, working against the trend Putnam’s data track.
Samuels writes about impostors, serial identity changers, and con men across his career. The Runner by David Samuels collects some of this work. The theme reads differently through Putnam’s lens. A high-trust society produces the conditions under which impostors get exposed. Neighbors notice. Reputations circulate. Small towns remember. The low-trust diverse society Putnam describes produces the conditions under which impostors thrive. Samuels’s reporting on impostors is also reporting on what happens when civic verification breaks down. County Highway’s nostalgia for the small-town newspaper is also a wish for the verification practices a bounded community sustains. The journalism and the editorial project cohere once Putnam’s framework gets applied. Samuels reads American self-invention with skepticism because he understands what the civic conditions required to check such invention once looked like, and he suspects they are gone.
The Set
The circle around Samuels includes Alana Newhouse (b. 1975), Liel Leibovitz (b. 1976), Jacob Siegel, Park MacDougald, Sean Cooper, Armin Rosen, Tony Badran, Lee Smith (b. 1962), Matti Friedman (b. 1977), David Mikics (b. 1961), Wesley Yang (b. 1972), Michael Lind (b. 1962), Walter Russell Mead (b. 1952), Michael Doran (b. 1962), and Leon Wieseltier (b. 1952) as elder presence. Adjacent figures: Bari Weiss (b. 1984), Nellie Bowles (b. 1988), and Suzy Weiss at The Free Press; Yoram Hazony (b. 1964) at the Edmund Burke Foundation; Gadi Taub (b. 1965) and Einat Wilf (b. 1970) on the Israeli side; Matt Taibbi (b. 1970) and Walter Kirn (b. 1962) at Racket News as parallel exiles. Andrew Sullivan (b. 1963), Freddie deBoer (b. 1981), and Glenn Greenwald (b. 1967) move at the margins as fellow travelers without sharing every prior.
The Moral Test of the Sentence
The set treats prose style as a moral test. A sentence reveals the writer, and the collapse of American letters tracks the collapse of American civic life. They prize the journalist who can report from inside a story, talk to anyone, and produce a piece that lasts. They distrust the credentialed press graduate, the policy-shop fellow, and the corporate-communications hire dressed as a reporter. They honor Jewish learning, Tanakh and Talmud as living texts, and the literary line running from Isaac Babel (1894-1940) through Saul Bellow (1915-2005), Philip Roth (1933-2018), Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), and Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928). They value independence from institutional capture and admire writers who walked away from prestige perches to keep their voice.
The Canon of the Renegade Reporter
The hero reports the story the consensus press refuses to touch, on his own dime, against pressure, and in prose worth reading. Samuels's 2016 Ben Rhodes (b. 1977) profile in The New York Times Magazine, where Rhodes admitted constructing an "echo chamber" around the Iran Deal, sits at the canon's center. Seymour Hersh (b. 1937) serves as patron saint, the figure who broke My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and Nord Stream, and who pays the cost of independence by losing the prestige perches. Joan Didion (1934-2021), Janet Malcolm (1934-2023), Norman Mailer (1923-2007), Renata Adler (b. 1937), and Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) fill the founders' gallery. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) appears as moral compass. The hero refuses the access bargain, builds his own sources, writes long, and pays a career cost for sentences he can sign his name to.
The Tournaments of Voice and Prediction
Several games run at once. The first concerns scoop and source quality. Who can write the Iran piece, the TikTok piece, the Pentagon piece, the tech-oligarch piece with detail no one else has? The second concerns sentence craft. Who writes prose that holds against the canon? Who sustains a twelve-thousand-word piece without losing the reader? Who has voice? The third concerns sacred-cow demolition. Who calls the lie first, takes the heat, refuses to retract under campaign pressure? The Rhodes piece sets the standard. The fourth concerns Jewish literacy. Who reads Hebrew, knows the parsha, can place a current event inside a longer Jewish story rather than reaching for the latest secular slogan? The fifth concerns institutional exit. Who left The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New Republic on principle and built something new outside? Alana Newhouse with Tablet Magazine, Bari Weiss with The Free Press, and Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn with Racket News all earn standing through this exit. The sixth concerns prediction record. Who saw the Iran problem early, October 7 coming, the pandemic response failures, the Biden cognitive decline, before the establishment press would touch any of it?
The Collapse of the Managerial Order
The legacy press died sometime between 2008 and 2020, and what replaced it works as the public-relations arm of the credentialed managerial order. The Iran Deal was a foundational lie sold by manipulating reporters too lazy or compromised to check. The American university has been captured by an ideology hostile to its old liberal mission. The pandemic response revealed the new ruling class as authoritarian, anti-empirical, and contemptuous of working people. October 7 vindicated the circle's reading of progressive antisemitism. Israel works as advance warning for what visits the rest of the West. TikTok, Chinese state influence, and oligarchic platform capture threaten American sovereignty in ways the press refuses to investigate. Jewish particularism counts as a legitimate good. Literary craft carries civic weight. The writer owes loyalty to the story, not to the institution that publishes him.
The Scaffolding of Rooted Realities
The set's essentialist claims operate as background certainties. A real writer can be told from a PR operative by his sentences. There exists an American character that the new ruling class neither shares nor understands. Jews are a people with a continuous history, not a faith community defined by ethical universals. The press has a vocation, and current practitioners have betrayed it. Tradition carries content that managerial reason cannot replace. Some places, some texts, some lineages count as sacred in a sense the modern elite cannot register. Style is character. Bad prose comes from bad faith. Rootedness exists; cosmopolitanism feeds on what rooted communities produce.
