There is nothing wrong with wanting to publish - or read - books that have a wide potential audience. But it does generate a certain plodding sameness of tone and subject matter that plagues a lot of contemporary American fiction.
A lot of people produce podcasts in which they simply ramble on for hours about themselves and their lives. There is something very poignant about the volume of human desire to be heard out there in the Wild West of podcasts.
The 'World Wide Web', as people quaintly called the Internet in 1996, was more or less made up of text. There was no YouTube. There was no Facebook. There was, however, Usenet, a loose and difficult-to-navigate assortment of message boards.
Prestige podcasts, like prestige television shows, tend to have an audience that believes itself literate, well-informed, and reasonable. Listening to podcasts, in this model, is a form of virtue.
Hollywood versions of watershed moments in American history are generally high-minded shlock. 'JFK,' 'The People vs. Larry Flynt,' even 'Lincoln': all of these boast excellent performances in scripts that are ultimately very conventional, even conservative.
Writing a novel about feminism can be a thankless task.
