What I learned.
In The Coquette, a novel I like to teach, the doomed heroine Eliza Wharton quotes Alexander Pope’s aphorism “every year is a critic on the last.” As the years pile up, I sometimes think of the many years separating my birth from the present year as forming a giant gallery of Statlers and Waldorfs. I do not think this is a healthy way to think, but as the spring semester winds down, I find myself thinking about what I have learned during this school year.
I started writing the first version of this essay one week after Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah. That tragic event led to many surprises, starting with three of my colleagues getting fired for remarks they made on social media, as part of a larger hunt for putatively leftist professors nationwide. The New York Yankees, who play in a city Mr. Kirk had recently called a “hellhole,” honored the slain podcaster with a moment of silence before a recent game. In December, some South Carolina legislators introduced a bill that would make October 14th “Charlie Kirk Day.” To be crystal clear: I think it is bad that Charlie Kirk was murdered by someone who took issue with what he had to say. I think it is wrong to shoot people you disagree with. That said, some of the reactions to Kirk’s death concerned me in various ways and continue to do so.
Charlie Kirk’s death prompted some reappraisals of the value of debate. In the pieces that eulogized Kirk, a common theme was his willingness to debate pretty much anyone, anywhere, on any topic. It is certainly possible to consider this willingness as a virtue, and as someone who was only vaguely familiar with Kirk before his death, this perspective offered a useful potential balance to learning about some of the unkind things Kirk had said that circulated in the wake of his death. Other observers, however, pointed out that what Kirk did was not debate so much as it was like an experienced comedian doing crowd work. This kind of comedy works through a power imbalance — only the comedian has the stage and a microphone, and the comedian is in control of the entire interaction.
An essay by Laurie Penny about her refusal to continue appearing in debates with right wing pundits extends this line of thinking about debate. This conversation branched into other conversations about debate in the context of debating as a contest for high school and college students. Many politicians — Ted Cruz, for one — came out of a debate background. As Penny observes:
An anecdote Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò used to open an essay he wrote in the wake of the Kirk assassination reinforces this position:
In 2019, I wrote a book called Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation, because – get this – I was concerned about the “erosion of democratic norms” occasioned by the growing popularity of the “town hall meeting” in academic, political, and corporate life. A town meeting is an annual gathering of citizens of that town to deliberate and vote on budgets and offices. “A town hall meeting” is simulacrum of an actual town meeting, typically hosted by a CEO, college president, or politician, and lacking any actual democratic proceedings. You can read the whole thing for yourself (for free!) if you want, but for now, consider that the “town hall meeting” became a popular thing for college presidents and CEOs thanks in part to “town hall” style electoral debates. If you have had the misfortune to have a “town hall” at your workplace or university, you know that a “town hall” is essentially a press conference with a live audience.
As a rule, debates are entertaining, if you like that sort of thing, but they rarely convey substantive information to voters. One of the most famous US presidential debates was the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon debate. The conventional wisdom asserts that this debate helped JFK to his narrow win in that election. The biggest takeaway from that debate was that Nixon looked uneasy on camera compared to the telegenic senator from Massachusetts, and that Nixon had five o’clock shadow. Did JFK’s Yankee sangfroid and smooth jawline help him manage the Cuban Missile Crisis? Probably not. A political debate establishes that the person who wins is better at debating than their opponent. We could also have political candidates play HORSE, toss the caber, or bake profiteroles, all of which would tell us just about as much about their relative merits for the office they are competing for.
Inspired by these political debates, advocates of debate as an extracurricular activity in college are likely to invoke the skills it develops that debaters can deploy later in life. I think this utility might be part of the problem with formal debates, and with the idea that debate is an unalloyed good. In order for a society to function, there needs to be a high level of consensus on most things. If, for instance, a society found itself debating if crosswalks represented a violation of the freedom motorists ought to enjoy, we would all be too busy getting run over to work on making schools better, or making sure everyone has a safe place to live. We cannot endlessly relitigate the things that make us a civilization. We waste a lot of time arguing about things like “who should have access to what kind of health care?” when an actual civilization would have answered that question with “everyone, and whatever they need.”
Reading and writing about town meetings and town hall meetings led me to think about the difference between deliberation and debate. As deliberation works in a town meeting, a motion is introduced, town citizens make arguments pro or con, and then the assembled populace vote. To choose a relatively straightforward example, in a town meeting, there might be a proposal to spend town money on new and larger culverts on Tower Road. There will be people who object to spending that money, and there will be people who will point out that investment now in larger culverts will prevent more costly road washouts in the new normal of extreme weather. Road washouts from the “hundred year floods” that happen every few years now might or might not figure in larger debates about climate change, but there is no debating being stuck in your house because there is a ditch instead of a road in front of it.
Ideally, this conversation will move forward by sharing new information, rather than coming up for a mean nickname for people who want bigger culverts. (“Culvert Queens,” anyone?) Next year, there might be a different debate about a different culvert, or building a new school, or firing the road superintendent, but there will not be a return to relitigate last year’s decision to put bigger culverts on Tower Road. To return to Laurie Penny’s experience, it is unlikely that the head of the road crew will be summoned again and again to debate visiting podcasters who insist that culverts are for lib cucks who don’t drive F-250s.
As such, the critical difference between deliberation and debate is that a deliberation decides things, while a debate can continue endlessly. If it is a group of friends debating who the best baseball pitcher of all time is over a few beers, that is fantastic. (A: Either Cy Young or Bob Gibson.) It is much less fantastic when these debates consider if some people deserve to be treated like people, or not. From what I have seen, some of the slain podcaster’s staged debates and public statements fell into the latter category.
If discussing the costs and benefits of specific culverts sounds boring, that’s because it is. The vast majority of choices any individual or family or institution makes are at least this boring. Any adult can tell you that the “adult situations” movies used to warn about involve choosing between replacing shingles on the roof or replacing tires on the minivan, not partying with babes in a hot tub. What makes school or college debating, and political debates on TV, exciting is the theater. As such, debate is not an entirely separate creature from professional wrestling, even if wrestlers have better costumes.
When I taught first year writing, argumentation was one of the skills I focused on. I did have a list of topics that were off limits – death penalty, abortion, and gun control. I sure don’t want to read papers on those topics, but I made that choice for the sake of the students — it is near impossible to find anything new or even interesting to say about these topics. One of the experiences that moved me to enact this policy was memories of going to St. Louis Cardinals baseball games in the old Busch Stadium when I was in college. There were two sets of bleachers some distance apart, one in right field, the other in left field. The fans sitting in left field would chant “left field sucks,” and the people sitting in right field would chant “right field sucks,” and this could continue all game. It will come as no surprise that these two groups never came to a consensus about which side was better.
For some, a more familiar version of this kind of debate-shaped non-debate appears in the old Miller Light commercials, where various ex-jocks would argue if the best thing about Miller Light was that it tastes great, or that it was less filling. A 2 Live Crew song rehearses this argument as well. It is entertaining to see John Madden and Dick Butkus engage in this banter, but again, there is no decision, only spectacle.
Similarly, in the movie War Games, a computer simulates millions of games of tic tac toe before coming to the conclusion that the game is a waste of time, b/c there is no way to win. The computer then does the same thing with a simulation of thermonuclear war, and figures out there is no way to win at that game, either. If the best fans in baseball, a beer commercial, and an early Matthew Broderick film can teach us anything, it might be that there are some games you can’t win, and even more debates that are not worth having in the first place.
What I did:
In the wake of all of this thinking I did last fall, I offered a version of this guidance to my students this spring:
Your paper should make an intervention. A successful intervention changes something. John Mullaney’s friends had an intervention for him, and he got sober. Last weekend downtown, a bystander intervened and got someone safely back to their own home. An alert patron sees someone choking and intervenes by using the Heimlich maneuver to expel a hunk of gristle from a fellow diner’s windpipe. An intervention is when you act, and your action changes a circumstance. You may not save a life with your writing, but the aim is to change the reader’s mind or heart about something.
For instance, I read, taught, and enjoyed, The Handmaid’s Tale. Some folks pointed out that the premise of that novel boiled down to “what if we had a world where all of the terrible things that happened to Black people in US history happened to educated white women instead?” I don’t know if this was where I encountered the argument first, but it sums it up well. I don’t imagine I will be teaching that book again anytime soon.
Closer to home, Jason Kirk’s novel Hell is a World Without You was a very specific intervention for me. His novel is about growing up Evangelical in the early 2000s, playing laser tag, going to lock-ins, and hoping you lose your virginity before the rapture. I grew up a kind of loosey goosey Episcopalian. I was not familiar with the world Jason describes until I came to Clemson.
As you know, I teach and study early American literature. One text that gets on the syllabus sometimes is Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It is pretty intense stuff. Many students over the years have complained about its focus on “scare tactics.” I did not really understand the stakes of that question until Jason described a youth church event where men burst in with guns and threatened to shoot them if they did not renounce Jesus. It turned out to be a skit, but I learned from Jason that that shit was real for some of my students, and I am not teaching that sermon again. That’s an intervention.
This is a very long preamble to an essay assignment, but my students started referring to their papers as their interventions, and that made me happy.
To return to minds and hearts: In 2025, like Ebeneezer Scrooge, I was the beneficiary of a three-part intervention, performed by the unlikely team of David Lynch, Mary-Ann Kirkonell Hall, and Sarah Mesle. David Lynch directed films, Mary-Ann Kirkonell Hall is a medical editor and writer, and Sarah Mesle teaches writing. After David Lynch’s death in January, one of the things people shared was a clip of him saying “fix your hearts or die.” In the spring of 2025, I had lunch with Mary-Ann Kirkonell Hall and talked about a side quest into medical writing I was pursuing. In the fall of 2025, Sarah Mesle published a book called Reasons and Feelings.
David Lynch’s statement is self-explanatory. He is not making an argument. He is presenting a choice. He is making a rhetorical statement asserting that empathy is mandatory.
If you care about how you write, I urge you to pick up a copy of Sarah Mesle’s book. On a sentence level, Sarah’s exhortation to use more interesting verbs than “to be” has affected just most of the sentences I have written since, and I wish I let fewer is-es through the cracks. More generally, I’ve never seen a book about writing that is as honest about the process as this one. As the title suggests, it is more concerned with how to win hearts and minds than it is with teaching you how to prove something.
I learned from my friend Mary-Ann Kirkonell Hall that the two things a thesis statement/argument/intervention/hot literary take needs are novelty and utility:
Novelty: What is new? (See the “What I learned” section of this paper.)
Utility: How is this new information useful? (See the What I did section of this paper.)
It can be hard to nail both pieces. In 2018, I gave a conference paper about bounce music, Katrina, and public housing. The novelty here is “this regional hiphop subgenre serves as an important archive documenting a part of Black New Orleans that has been largely gentrified out of existence.” As far as I know, I am the only person who has explored the role of .mp3 bloggers in remembering pre-Katrina New Orleans. I feel good about the novelty part, but I have never been able to put my arms around the utility of this argument beyond something vague along the lines of “as New Orleans seeks to preserve its own jazz heritage, it should not neglect the more recent past.”
If I try to braid these three far-flung elements into something with utility for those of you still reading, it would be something like “free yourself from the shackles of argument in your writing.” If you teach, try to free your students from the shackles of argument. For as long as I can recall, I have been telling students to avoid the word “prove” when they are writing about literature, because proofs are for geometry. A useful piece of writing in the humanities is much more likely to succeed if it persuades. What I learned from Lynch, Hall, and Mesle is that persuasion might have more to do with feelings than with reasons. My hope is that thinking of writing as an intervention will help students think of themselves as having the power to shape this troubled world we are bequeathing to them.
