The first time I met Evan Lorenz, I asked him directly about the outlook for Grant’s business model. “Competition is legion,” he said. Grant’s publishes 24 bi-monthly issues per year. It is delivered primarily in print through the U.S. postal service. It is prohibitively expensive compared to other subscription media.
While those attributes certainly make Grant’s unique, what the publication doesn’t do really sets it apart. Grant’s makes limited use of charts or other data visualizations, has a scant social media presence, and does not “atomize long-form content” into potentially viral short-form video. In other words, they eschew basically all of the modern “best practices” for building a media company. And yet, Grant’s persists, recently publishing its 1,000th issue.
It persists, uniquely, by the quality of its thought and the virtue of its writing. Even when Lorenz made his “legions of competition” comment, the true impact of AI-generated research and writing was not readily apparent. Today, neither subject-matter expertise nor even the ability to link words and phrases into sentences is required to produce “content” on just about any subject. The technology, rapidly improving though it is, begs the question: If it wasn’t worth the time for a human to write, what makes it worth the time for a human to read?
A profile of Grant’s in Institutional Investor relays founder Jim Grant’s approach:
His job is not simply to take the world as it is, “but to speculate as to what it just might be, and to criticize institutions as they are.”
Lorenz points out that despite the multi-decade campaign to make finance and economics a natural science, it is still “done by humans." As a result, markets rely on understanding the underlying values the system represents as much as the mechanical outputs of model inputs. Grant’s excels at holding this mirror to financial markets. They combine headlines, historical analogs, and data into crystalline, often humorous, prose highlighting human judgment's fallibility.
One of my favorite writers,
, recently wrote about how the vital knowledge in any discipline is illegible. True breakthroughs in understanding exist where the information cannot be neatly structured.Leo Strauss argues that the deepest philosophical teachings are esoteric. You have to learn from a “rebbe,” so to speak, or else you’re left with the standard, consensus reading of the text, not the method for discovering its subversive teaching. Each describes the same pattern: vital knowledge resists formalization.
For finance and economics, a parlance exists, a patois that can sound like ideas or information but contain neither. Flip on CNBC if you need proof of this. Writing incisively about markets is a uniquely human skill because the required insight is non-concensus.
Yet, the entire media apparatus marches towards greater and greater formalization of information. Content has never been more exalted as a way of connecting with humans or more vapid in its attempt to do so. Writing is increasingly being engineered, optimized for either tricking algorithms or paradoxically being recognized by non-human AI “readers.” Large language models reinforce the primacy of the written word while simultaneously devaluing it.
, writing in Splice Today,That’s the trouble. The machine doesn’t care. It’ll give you competent, lifeless prose forever. The burden shifts to the person in the chair. Can they still recognize warmth? Authenticity? The faint pulse of a real idea? Or have they been numbed by the sheer volume of almost good enough?
As for Grant’s, Lorenz summarizes what generations of writers know: You write to reveal the limits of your own understanding. Writing exposes the lies lurking in your meandering thoughts, it is an intentional practice to shake your illusions of understanding. The very best writing can give the reader that same experience.
You can read a recent sample of Grant’s at the link below.
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