Editors’ Note
Issue 15: Pundits
APRIL 9, 2024
The origin of the word “pundit” comes from 17th-century India; “pandit” was used to describe individuals who devoted themselves to Hindu scholarship. But over time, pandit lost its sense of expertise, the spelling altered, and political punditry began to take hold.
Today, anyone can be a pundit — all they need is a platform to host them and readers who believe them. The advent of social media and newsletter services like Substack has expanded the “punditocracy” beyond cable news, talk radio, and editorials. What does the democratization of opinion mean for facts and expertise? The latest issue of The Dial explores the evolution of the talking head — and what happens when individuals with platforms and money abuse their influence.
Christopher Clark reports on the unstoppable rise of France’s far-right media network, CNews, which has tripled its audience since 2017 and has “increasing power to direct the currents of national debate.” Lucas Barioulet and Wilson Fache document how Israeli content creators are being mobilized by the state to spread pictures and videos of the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. From India, Adil Rashid brings us a story about the consecration of a once-Muslim-now-Hindu temple, and the Hindu far-right’s movement to raze other Muslim sanctuaries across the country.
From Nairobi, Jacob Kushner talks with a philosophy and religious studies professor about the deaths of 429 Pentecostal worshippers in Kenya, who starved themselves after being told by their preacher to eat only the “word of God.” In a moving essay on the politicization of memory, Chinese writer Yan Lianke writes that Beijing’s leaders have forced a state of amnesia upon its citizens — willing them to forget resistance movements to prevent them from happening again. Alejandro Chacoff profiles the prolific Argentine author César Aira, whose work currently occupies the center of Latin American literature, but for whom “the most deeply rooted conventions of the profession seem meaningless.”
Finally, in an excerpt from her new novel Short War, Lily Meyer tells a coming of age story of a young American living in Santiago months before General Augusto Pinochet’s coup. “Before the coup, Gabriel was in love; he had plans; he had friends. After, he was a lonely American kid in a lonely American suburb, writing frantic letters to politicians who couldn’t care less that his girlfriend had disappeared.”
– The Editors