by Benjy Sachs
New York’s hottest cult is… grad school?
While Justin joined a real friend cult, I also joined a friendly cult. In my cult, we all pledged to forgo external relationships, spend much of our time in windowless rooms, and name our first-born children “Craig” in honor of our patron saint Craig Newmark (the Craig behind Craigslist).
I’m talking, of course, about starting my degree at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Going to grad school and joining a cult are pretty similar when you think about it. They both involve dedicating your time to an obscure passion the vast majority of other people find strange. So why do people join cults?
Sure, many people are interested in the occult or have a genuine desire to be a “Master of Business Administration,” but others may be just looking for friendship, for a sense of connection. Being a weirdo alone is kind of sad. But put a bunch of weirdos together and it’s kind of intriguing. Look, for example, at enduring interest in Charles Manson or the Jonestown Massacre.
Besides a brief interest in magic spurred by a family friend with a penchant for prestidigitation, I don’t have much aptitude for the dark arts. So I decided instead to go to grad school for journalism. For one, I do want to be a journalist. But also, it seemed like a good way to make friends. Everyone is cool, literary, a little artsy, and––naturally––good at asking questions.
During the weeklong orientation, I tried to talk to as many of my 113 classmates as possible. People had taken many different paths to get there. There were some teachers, bartenders, a baker, an animator, and a reformed marketing professional. I told people about my own path of being a government bureaucrat and getting DOGE’d. I talked to a few people about my zine and found out they had worked on a zine too. We really were all pretty similar. If this were a cult, we were already well on our way to a strong sense of collective identity.
One way to cultivate a cultlike sense of community is developing a shared lingo or set of inside jokes. I soon became hip to the journalism insider talk, which is mostly misspelling normal words on purpose. A paragraph becomes a “graf.” Your story starts with a “lede” rather than a “lead.” Don’t have time to write something now and need a placeholder? Just write “TK” for “to come.”
For a cult, though, journalism is pretty welcoming to “outsiders.” After all, you need to talk to people, sometimes random people on the street, to develop sources and gather information. Since starting grad school, I’ve talked to dozens of strangers in the name of journalism. As someone who considers himself an introvert, I initially found this pretty tough. I was embarrassed to be bothering people, taking them away from their conversation with a friend or scrolling on their phone or their cigarette just so I could get what I needed for an assignment. But, to my surprise, I found many people really do want to be bothered! A lot of people want to talk, and once they start talking, it can be hard to get them to stop.
Perhaps journalism is a cult of information, a worship of knowledge about the world that is new and correct. Or maybe it’s just an excuse for introverts to go outside and talk to people. Like how a zine can be a tool to encourage talking to your friends. Either way, it feels good to be part of a community, to be just one weirdo in a much larger and more interesting collection of weirdos.
