Tabloid Philosophy

A new web site from best-selling author Alain de Botton, the world’s best-known living philosopher, draws insight from trashy celebrity gossip.

The Daily Mail is simply the worst: not only is it one of the world’s slimiest tabloids, it also regularly, and shamelessly, steals material from other media outlets, and from independent writers and photographers. It gets a lot of stuff wrong, often on purpose. It is apparently owned and staffed largely by sociopaths.

And yet the best-selling author Alain de Botton, the world’s most famous living philosopher (whatever that means in 2014), reads it. He’s not particularly proud of that fact, but neither does he seem particularly ashamed.

He’s also not alone. The Daily Mail is the English-speaking world’s most popular online news publication. And that’s why de Botton has patterned his new website, The Philosophers’ Mail, on the London-based sleaze sheet.

"People can't stop reading" the Daily Mail, de Botton wrote in introducing his site on Facebook last week. But those people "often complain of how it leaves [them] feeling.” Sort of like how we feel when we eat too many Oreos -- a little guilty, and a little sick.

“We start from the idea that right now, a serious gap has opened up between
what's important and what's popular,” de Botton told me in an email chat this week. “Serious news outlets locate the problems of the world in the idea that we lack important information… But our sense is that there is already lots of critically important information out there.”

That is: if people don’t much care about important information now, why do we continue producing more of it? Having access to facts doesn’t seem to seem to help us solve problems. The (serious) news business is in what seems like a death spiral, essentially because people don’t value news enough to sustain it economically (if they ever did; news in newspapers is subsidized by other stuff in newspapers — comics, classified ads, advice columns, etc. On the Internet, news must make its own way).

To de Botton, the devaluation of news is not the fault of the population at large, but of the news media itself. “The challenge nowadays isn't
just to find stuff out (though that of course remains key), it's to motivate
an audience to care about it,” he told me. “The word popularization is deeply frowned upon by cultural elites, but in a democratic age, the skill involved in getting people to care about complex issues has to be near the center of what journalists need to excel at.”

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.” (Whether what the site publishes can be called news is certainly open to question, but it calls itself a “news organization.”)

The mashup of philosophy and trashy gossip seems a little disconcerting at first, which perhaps is part of the point. But the notion of leveraging low culture to produce high culture, or at least seriousness, is nothing new. BuzzFeed is supposedly founded on that idea. Even The New York Times does it, though often with a gloss of highminded detachment. The most hilarious example I can think of is when the financial-news site TheStreet.com several years ago launched a personal-finance site aimed at the masses, MainStreet.com, where the articles were all based on gossip (examples: “Tyra Banks and Ashton Kutcher are creating a new television show. What should men and women know before they team up at work?” And: “Deceased actor John Ritter’s family is suing his doctors for millions. Learn more about professional liability insurance coverage.”) The idea was widely ridiculed, and the approach didn’t last long. MainStreet is just a regular personal-finance site now (though it still dabbles in gossip.)

The Philosophers’ Mail seems a lot less forced, and certainly less stupid, than MainStreet was or BuzzFeed is, perhaps because it's a much more modest, less transparently desperate effort that seeks sustainability rather than wild success. De Botton is under no illusions on that score. The site is a small but serious undertaking. Three people work on it full time, and de Botton says it needs to draw a million unique readers a month. “After that, we make money,” he says.

The site costs about $4,000 a month to run. Contributors, who are paid (“more than the Guardian!” de Botton says), are all philosophers. It’s financed by The School of Life, which is just that—a school offering classes on "developing emotional intelligence through the help of culture." De Botton says he has a "three-month runway" to demonstrate that the site can sustain itself. There is no advertising so far, but the plan is to sell native ads. He didn't say what kinds of advertisers he expects, but it's easy to imagine ads from non--profit groups, publishers, or universities.

De Botton’s ambivalent take on The Daily Mail — his mixture of attraction and revulsion—is subtly apparent throughout the site. The post about Kristen Stewart’s socks compares the two main types of paparazzi photos (several are included, as they are in many posts) that feed the gossip machine: the authorized, glamorous photos taken on red carpets and at movie premieres; and the candid, definitely not authorized, definitely not glamorous shots of celebrities taken from behind bushes a half-block away.

It turns out, the Philosophers’ Mail reports, that shots of celebrities in their everyday clothes command prices from paparazzi that are six times higher than red-carpet photos. This, notes the writer (articles carry no bylines), is "deeply heartening" because it shows that our interest in "the real person" is greater than our interest in the star in her celebrity element.

Another post, headlined “Stars rescue world from feelings of insanity,” could be taken as a commentary on our infatuation with celebrity. It’s not about the stars of stage, screen, or song, but about actual stars — the big, gassy fireballs in the sky:

It's normally unpleasant to be made to feel small (by a boss or a waiter in a smart establishment), but to be made to feel small by something so much more majestic and powerful than we are has something redeeming and enhancing about it. The image of the globular cluster is sombre, rather than sad; calming, but not despair inducing. And in that condition of mind - that state of soul, to put it more romantically - we are left, as so often when we look at the stars, better equipped to deal with with the intense, intractable and particular problems and griefs we have to deal with.

And better equipped to deal with the endless parade of soul-sapping media that bring us reality shows, scandals, political nastiness, celebrity breakups, and inane listicles.

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.”