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What a silly question. Being an excellent writer is hard! Why is there only one Joan Didion?


I agree. While there was a depth to the analysis in this post that I somewhat enjoyed (though at times it felt a bit like a "why the joke is funny" explanation...) to me the primary reason that I like Matt Levine is just that I find his writing to be amazingly great. And not just his overall content and analysis (which I'm still often awed by), but I find his knack for putting words together in uniquely insightful, clear and often hilarious ways to be uniquely brilliant.

Some people are just really, really good.


There's also just... how many words has he written? He's been doing a multiple-times-a-week newsletter on the same subject for like two decades. The man is honed, dialed in to his craft. Even among the extremely extremely small group of professional writers who make their living from their writing, he must be an outlier on volume.




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