Numlock Sunday: Megan Garber on Misdirection

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Megan Garber who wrote the new essay collection On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics from The Atlantic.

Megan is a writer at The Atlantic, and the magazine has compiled a number of her essays into the new book. It’s a great read, an exploration into the ways that American political actors have parlayed the techniques of entertainment to their own ends. Today, we talked about amusing ourselves to death, what happens to a country when politics becomes entertainment, and Dwight Schrute. 

Megan can be found at The Atlantic and the book, as well as several other new compilations of essays from the magazine, is available wherever books are sold. 

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Megan Garber, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

You have a new book, it's a collection of a lot of your essays at The Atlantic, it's called On Misdirection. What prompted you to figure out this beat and tease out that you were covering misdirection over the past couple years?

A lot of the things that have really interested me about politics and political discourse, let's say, over the past few years are the ways that we are trained to see each other and then also to not see each other. It seems like so many things, so many of the big political stories, particularly at the beginning of the presidency of Donald Trump, and then up till now, so much has come down to are we seeing what we should be seeing, or are we in fact looking away from what we should be seeing?

Ideas about vision is actually one of the main drivers of all of these essays, which are very different other than that. I'm a political junkie, I love to follow politics and all of that, but I kept feeling for myself just as a news consumer, "Is this really the most important thing right now?" All these shiny distractions, daily outrages that come and go, and I know I myself, as a news consumer, often feel very addled, almost, and just in a constant state of distraction.

So these essays really do try to figure out what happens to that form of distraction on a mass scale. If I'm not the only one feeling this, but if a lot of people are feeling this, what are the consequences of that?

I loved how also you kept it in some of the more conventional forms of media as well, too. I know that a lot of our conversation about distraction has been related to social media and algorithms and kind of blamed on Silicon Valley ghosts that are destroying our brains.

But a lot of what you talk about is just super day to day. It's the way people talk about other people, whether it's on television or radio or things like that. Do you want to expand on how it's not just necessarily what we're doing online?

The first essay, actually, is a look-back at the scholar Neil Postman, who's one of my favorite thinkers, critics, et cetera. He wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985 that was looking at the impact of television, essentially, on American culture. And as you might guess from the title, making an argument that the entertainment has slipped the bonds of mere fun and mere escapism and distraction and has actually come into our lives and come to infiltrate lives in a lot of ways.

Looking at him in retrospect is the first essay in the collection. We chose that specifically bec