04 - Navneet Alang - The Calculus of Poking the Bear
Into the Arena
The felling of the (Allison) Roman Empire and the calculus of the moment with tech columnist Navneet Alang.
If you've read Nav's stuff, you'll be as thrilled as I am to dig into his process, life, work, and, of course, the greatness of Windows phone.
Readers of the Toronto Star will recognize him as the weekly tech opinion columnist whose nuanced takes on tech and modern life offer a richness seldom seen these days in old fashioned newsprint. (His work is also found in Eater, The New Republic, the Globe and Mail, Macleans, Hazlitt and elsewhere.)
A Nav column seems to always command complicated material in a way that makes its depths understandable. And what we find is always a surprise.
In his autobiographical writing, this deftness turns inwards, and the results are at turns raw and personal. Things never stay in one place for long, however. Nav interweaves sophisticated notions of the self, the digital, the psychic implications of capitalism, and sometimes even straight up critical theory, into these unflinching investigations of the self.
I encourage you to check out his back catalogue!
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We cover a lot in this one!
Topics include:
Nav’s upbringing
Moving from London UK at 12
Lived in Etobicoke between wealthy predominantly white area and lower income predominantly brown area
Why Nav’s parents moved from London to the GTA
How the daily racism of London was escaped in Canada
Why Nav maintained his english accent in Canada
reflecting on the boom period of the personal essay
what it’s like to look back on old revealing essays
SSRIs and creativity
The dirty secret of academics: they are trying to solve their personal problems through their study
what brought Nav to the point of working on a dissertation
why a masters is academia's gateway drug
looking back on the dissertation and the stubbornness to finish
why the personal essay era ended
integrating teaching into Nav's life
teaching journalism vs English
how Nav knows he has crackin’ pitch
“too good for twitter” test
“speed of editor reply” test
bodily signals of a pitch
constrained format of the column vs the up and down rollercoaster of a longform piece
why Nav actually likes writing (mostly)
dealing with the “emotional waves of writing”
writing as a place to manage idiosyncrasies
battle to find and embrace your own writing voice
Nav’s drafting process
Nav’s appreciation of early editing from Jordan Ginsberg at Hazlitt
Nav’s experience with backlash from Jordan Peterson’s fanbase
the “calculus of the moment” and when to engage with conflict on twitter
Nav’s tendency to “poke the bear” in his written work
Allison Roman piece
how Nav was way ahead of the game on Alison Roman - stars aligned
Nav on the greatness of the windows phone
why Microsoft was ahead of apple in innovating on smartphone UI but couldn’t pull it off
how network effects limit the ability to drastically alter established smartphone design norms
what will the smartphone be replaced with next?
Thanks for listening!