That’s the hope of recent poseur alert recipient Alain de Botton, whose new group blog is modeled after the Daily Mail:
Journalists used to believe that good, clear, interesting writing was enough to make otherwise dull news stories interesting to the masses. And that was probably true a few decades ago, when most families took at least one daily newspaper, and far more people than today read general-interest magazines. It’s not as true anymore. Readers need more of a hook, de Botton believes. And so The Philosophers’ Mail gives us headlines such as “Kristen Stewart’s socks provide lesson in friendship,” “Taylor Swift’s legs beat Arctic melt,” and “Interview with the Soul of Angela Merkel.” …
After spending some time on The Philosophers’ Mail, it becomes clear that the point isn’t to deny or ignore all that garbage – or even to make fun of it – but rather to transcend it. “We begin,” de Botton told me, “by being very sympathetic to what [Daily] Mail readers like: beauty, glamor, murder, disaster. But rather than ending it there, we try to move the reader on to deeper themes. We see the flotsam and jetsam of the day’s news as an opportunity to sneak some big ideas across. We’re very interested in sugaring, or at least flavoring the pill.”
A sample post, “Important News: Anne Hathaway Takes Her Chocolate Labrador Esmeralda For A Walk!”, offers a defense of “Stars! They’re just like us!”-style reporting:
The doubts we might feel about looking at pictures of Anne Hathaway walking her dog are largely caused by accidental snobbery. We are liable to look down on an activity which, if it were presented to us in a museum, we might take very seriously. And yet what we’re doing here – looking at a pleasant person talking a walk – is not fundamentally different from the pleasures available in an art gallery. If we went on a special trip to Giverny to see Monet’s paintings we’d hardly think we were doing something a bit low-brow or pointless. Yet when we look at his lovely Wild Poppies Near Argenteuil we are – in many respects – doing exactly the same as when we look at Anne and her dog. …
Monet was a great artist in part because he wanted to draw our attention to times when nothing important seems to be going on. In the Wild Poppies picture, it’s just an ordinary day; they’ve probably gone on the walk hundreds of times. Monet is telling us that in just looking at someone going for a walk we are doing something worth taking seriously.
If the task of the news is to tell us important things, then we shouldn’t define importance too narrowly. Part of what we need is to stay hopeful about the human project. Hope is an achievement and we find it in these sort of scenes – scenes where no one is dying or suffering, where things are attractive, where there is an absence of sickness and in which everyday, quiet, ordinary contentment is glimpsed.
Previous Dish on merging philosophy and celebrity here.
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