The Price Of Greatness

An Arc Conversation with Jay Cost

Berny Belvedere: Hi Jay, thanks for joining me here on Arc. I know you’ve been busy these last few weeks with the release of your new book, so thanks for taking the time.

Jay Cost: My pleasure. Great to be here.

Belvedere: Before we begin, I’m going to link folks to the earlier piece you did with us, which I think is also worth a read. Here it is.

Okay, so, let’s jump right in.

Your career as a writer occupies two planes of intellectual activity: on the first is the kind of work that stems from academic expertise and lends itself to book-length treatments, and on the second is the kind of work that requires a strong familiarity with, and deep understanding of, current events and lends itself to thousand-word columns. In our current day and age, how would you characterize the relative strengths and shortcomings of each of these two modes?

Cost: I always learn lots of new stuff when I write books. I like to think of writing a book as going on a journey, in which I have a vague idea of where I am going and how I will get there, but the details are mostly TBD. When I get there, I see how the path was laid out in the particular way it was — but only after I’ve walked it.

Writing columns is nothing like that, for me anyways. I rarely learn new things when I write columns. And I always worry that, if I do nothing else except write columns, I’d just become repetitive and boring because I would not be learning as much as I could be. So, this is why I like to do both simultaneously.

Belvedere: Which of the two — writing a book or writing columns — do you find more intellectually stimulating, and why?

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