Introducing The Gold Standard

No Slop. Just Solveig.

I decided to get a PhD in Classics after spending my sophomore summer in Greece with a bunch of largely mediocre but arrogant Classics PhD students. I thought to myself, if these people are getting PhDs, then I’m going to get one, too, just for the hell of it.

I’m starting The Gold Standard for much the same reason. I know: the world needs another Substack even less than it needs another humanities PhD. Everyone and their mother has one. But everyone and their mother has one because it’s so easy now to farm out the work and publish AI slop. Almost daily, it seems, I come across a sleek new Substack started by an influencer or acquaintance who, I know for a fact, cannot write a sentence. (I mean that quite literally.) And that’s to say nothing of the steady stream of slop on X.

No, the world doesn’t need another Substack…but it does need more honest, old-fashioned writing. It needs more people putting in the time to formulate our own thoughts away from the influence of algorithms—for our readers, yes, but more importantly for ourselves. The writing process forces us to confront our opinions and ask, do I really believe this? Can I argue it clearly, in a way that makes sense to others? If not, why not? Through writing we learn what we really think. I’m learning what I think right now, as I type this paragraph on New Jersey Transit.

I met a sweet high schooler a couple of months ago who told me proudly that he, unlike his classmates, wasn’t using AI to write his assignments for him. No, he said: he merely used AI to help him come up with an argument and an outline, and then he did the writing himself. I couldn’t help but laugh. If you’re already given a thorough outline, the rest of your work can be as mindless as Color by Number.

That said, I’ve never believed in outlines. (An aside: although I was ultimately a straight-A student at Princeton, I received a B+ from my freshman writing instructor because I refused to adhere to her idiotic outlining methods. When I questioned her, she exclaimed in defense, “I have a PhD!” Need I say more about mediocrity in higher education?)

True, you should probably have a sense of what you wish to argue before you begin writing: your argument is, arguably, the most essential part of your work. But your argument should evolve as you write, as you test and reinforce your hypotheses with the facts you choose to present in each new paragraph. Just as Jan van Eyck’s finished Arnolfini Portrait doesn’t match the underdrawings, so a good essay almost certainly won’t match an early outline.

Which is why I also object to those who take the opposite approach of the high schooler, who come up with an original argument and outline but then feed it to AI to develop into an essay. If the final product is to be any good, then AI will stray from the strict contours of the outline, making choices about the direction of your essay on your behalf—choices you couldn’t even have known would exist before you (or in this case, AI) began writing. You deserve no more credit for your work than the higher schooler does for his. And hey, at least he picked his own words.

Now, I’m not a total troglodyte. I use Claude. I pay for Claude! I like how Claude tells me the best way to cook corn on the cob, how it can evaluate my new mole when I’m worried I’m dying of skin cancer, and how it can quickly remind me the details of the Peloponnesian War and suggest some scholarly articles for my perusal. I even pay for Grok, too, because as a good (half-, churchgoing) Jew, I always like a second opinion.

But I would never, and I mean never, ask Claude or Grok or any other bot to do my writing for me. Outsourcing writing means outsourcing thinking, and to outsource my thinking in that way would mean, in some sense, to lose my own humanity, my essence. With apologies to Descartes: non scribo ergo non sum, or something like that.

Moreover, writing is personal, intimate—or at least it should be. It should be just about the most personal, intimate thing a person can do. I choose every word and every comma with love. I think you should, too.

Still, I can hardly complain about people not doing their own writing if I’m not writing much myself. I call myself a writer, and yet since my daughter was born three years ago, I’ve produced maybe one article a month, if that. I can do better…and I’m counting on this outlet to, as the kids say, hold myself accountable. I’ll be posting original content here weekly, as well as reposting articles I publish in other publications, on topics ranging from Plato and grade inflation to my favorite children’s books and hotels in Greece.

I have strong convictions. I argue them well. People seem to like to read them.

Join me.