Teeing up a plug for Phillips O’Brien, it struck me he exemplifies a development worth celebrating in the realm of letters. That I could publish the last seven words of the preceding sentence with a straight face in this epoch of declining literacy startled me. As emojis and TikTok supplant sentences and paragraphs and ubiquitous electronics fracture the calm reading requires, writing seemed a goner. My beloved craft was superseded, obsolete. But then – whaddayaknow – I find myself admiring much of the public commentary I gobble daily. Not only were O’Brien, Paul Krugman, Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, Dean Bundell, Timothy Snyder and a clutch of others informing me with grim facts, they were charming me with literary style. Though I dreaded hearing what they had to say, I looked forward to hearing them say it. Was I dreaming?

A shift is underway among writers which, while oft bemoaned, may improve the product. As electronic media replaces periodic print – an inevitable outcome – and AI assumes routine writing tasks – alike inevitable – fewer folks will try to make their living writing. Those who stick to it will be better at it, for they will be the diehards, who love the written word too much to relegate it to the dustbin of history. Passion improves performance, here as elsewhere. Writing is hard: the more talented the writer, the harder it gets. One recalls the old joke, “Beg pardon, sir, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Answer: “Practice.”

Yet another change is making better writers better. When I was a boy, journalists and pundits were employed by publishers. Having landed the job, you only had to please your boss, who was likely a pal. Readers did not purchase you in particular but the publication you worked for: if you lived in Cleveland, you read the Plain Dealer. To be best in your specialization, you needed only be best in the newsroom, not best in the world.

Now the few print publications that survive have decimated their staffs. Those crazy enough to still want to write have fled online. Online you compete with every writer in creation. Many the creditable print journalist who fails to garner an online audience because of a pallid style. OK’s no longer OK. You’ve got to shine – now. Bore for a paragraph and you’re offed with a click. So writers press their prose to sparkle more.

And press you can, liberated from institutional timidity. In the print era, a company’s survival mattered more than any writer’s license. One disgruntled customer could cripple a publication with litigation and cancellations. These days, appropriate managerial caution is intensified by government intimidation. If the corporate wellbeing of a CBS costs them a Stephen Colbert, to hell with him. Pusillanimity plus toadying equals blah.

Online, while writers may be poorer, they’re freer. If the Nameless One prevails in fall’s elections, expect a government crackdown on all dissident voices, but so far, that hasn’t happened. Most writers can publish what they please. (Interestingly, of the writers cited above, three – Blundell, Snyder, and O’Brien – live outside the United States, safer from our Gestapo government.)

I’ve always admired Paul Krugman for his preternatural clarity. But after he quit the New York Times, which absurdly tried to stifle him, his swashbuckling prose has often made me laugh aloud. That I could be reading about economics for fun defies probability, but so it is.

Phillips O’Brien, by the by, makes military strategy and history as exhilarating to read as horrifying to learn about. Spoiler alert: our government, on this front, does nothing but lie.