When I think of excellent popularizers, I first think of Carl Sagan (astronomy), but there are others, such as Thomas Sowell (economics). How difficult is it to be an excellent popularizer? Damned hard, according to (linguist) John McWhorter, an excellent popularizer in his own right. Sowell’s work was the overall topic on this recent episode of The Glenn Show, featuring McWhorter and Glenn Loury, joined by Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute. Here is what McWhorter had to say about difficult task of popularizers:

What people don’t always know is that if you devote yourself to being a popularizer, to a certain extent, you’re not taking the easy road. And I have never heard anybody say to me, as a linguist popularizer, that the popularizing isn’t real work. So I’m not saying this out of some sort of pique. If anybody says that about me, and they must have, they’ve never said it to me. I get nothing but respect to my face, but I think a lot of people think popularizing isn’t as hard as doing the real thing.

Having tried to popularize, it isn’t just that you take away the detail and write stuff down. A lot of people who think “I could sit down and write a book in plain English, you know, explaining only what the ordinary person can understand. But I choose to do the real thing and write in tapeworm sentences and write with exquisite detail, etc.” A lot of those people, I very humbly say, you have to have them sit down with, metaphorically, a blank piece of paper, and you are going to write about what you do. And this is the thing: Decide what you’re going to put in terms of what the layman can understand, what is going to be a subtraction, what you’re going to share with, you know, 55 specialists. But then not only write down what the layman can understand, but make it so that the layman will actually read it. It’s one thing to put it on paper, but come up with a book that more than two people are going to read and then tell me that I’m just a “popularizer” and that I’m doing the easy thing because, frankly, not everybody can do that.

I know, there’s some very noble popular linguistics books written by very smart and very nice people. But I must admit somewhere towards the middle, I find places where I think the reason that this book hasn’t gotten around is because this person doesn’t happen to have that particular knack. I remember one, I’m not going to mention it where he gets to a concept that is a little hard, you can get it across to people. But frankly, you’d have to know how. But he says, “Get some coffee. This is hard.” And I thought “No, you don’t tell them to get some coffee. You figure out how to get it across to them without them drinking any damn coffee!” That sort of thing. It means that you have to work at it. With Tom, it’s hard work, what he’s done, especially when you can read it as an ordinary person, I think.

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Here’s another excerpt from this same conversation. McWhorter argues that today’s woke discussion concerning “race” is about “feelings.”

Jason Riley 0:06
I am very dispirited at the rise of the sort of progressive left and the woke movement and Black Lives Matter and the ascendancy of people like Tallahassee coats and Nicole Hannah Jones and Ephraim Kennedy. I think, Tom, the idea that, that he is not as well known as them, that his work is not as well known. I find just tragic. I mean, it infuriates me, I think he’s, he’s written circles around these guys, Cornel West, I would include in this group as well. And not only just in terms of his range, but the depth and the rigor of Tom’s thinking. I don’t think they come close to matching. And yet these these folks are elevated as these deep these deep thinkers on race, and I think that, that I find that very disturbing that we’re, this is what passes for, for deep thinking on race today, Nicole, Hannah Jones, and Ibrahm Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

John McWhorter 1:23
The race discussion is about feelings. It’s not about thought. And that’s what is conditioning the sort of thing that you’re talking about. I mean, just for example, if Ibrahm Kennedy had short hair, and his name was Anthony Jones, nobody would have any idea who he is. I think that’s a very obvious thing. If his name was Anthony Jones, Tony Jones, and he just had short hair. He didn’t have the dreadlocks, even with whatever he’s done. Nobody would have any idea. I’m just saying that it’s feelings. You know, that’s why he’s more famous than Tom.

Unknown Speaker 2:05
Think about Nicole Hannah Jones, and you sort of get this and Woke Racism? Where is all this deference to her coming from? There is no shortage of books on on slavery or the US founding? She’s written none of them. And yet, why are so few historians willing to call her out? Why isn’t the head of every history department at every notable institution in this country, calling her out? It’s intellectual cowardice,

Glenn Loury 2:45
We’ve been calling around here at the Glenn show

Jason Riley 2:48
But you’re the exceptions. That’s my point.

Glenn Loury 2:51
We’ve been pointing out that Ibrahm Kendi was an empty suit here.

Jason Riley 2:55
I know. I listened to the show

Glenn Loury 2:56
I’ve been calling for erudition, mastery, deep learning and a sophisticated intellectual frame from people who write about race for years. Why do you have travelers a few joining you that that the the mania behind the tiny has Tallahassee coats phenomena had a lot more to do with the cultural orientation of white newsroom elites that it had to do with the actual experience lived experiences they say of African Americans. So so I don’t ask you ask me a question. Why have we got got more people who are fellow travelers? I don’t have the answer to the question. But I know where to look for it. And it’s not in the black community. It’s in the structure of American intellectual and political culture center and left of center, in journalism in the academy in corporate America more broadly. And I think there’s a general loss of confidence in the virtues of the American project and the American experiment. . . . I’m talking about the heartbeat of the culture. I’m talking about merging institutions. I’m talking about the MacArthur Foundation. I’m talking about the place or committee, why are they talking about the faculty of the Columbia School of Journalism? I’m talking about the newsroom at the New York Times. I’m talking about the people who publish your pieces at the Atlantic. . . . I’m talking about the Democratic Party. I’m talking about the White House. I’m talking about blocking Michelle Obama. I’m talking about Netflix. I’m talking about Amazon and YouTube.