I Promise I'm not John McWhorter

And Don's Weekly Listen

Happy Thursday!

Before we come to this week’s Listen, I wanted to address a rumor that’s made the rounds on Twitter since the publication of my City Journal piece on Alex Ross last weekend: the rumor that I am, in fact, John McWhorter writing under a pseudonym. Those who started this rumor can have little idea how flattered I am by it. But as John himself has tweeted, it’s patently ridiculous.

The rumor relies on the theory that when I joined John and Glenn Loury on The Glenn Show in September, the automated voice that spoke for me was not reading a transcript of my words, but commentary written by John himself. This would have required John to have a plausible reason to disguise his identity when talking about music specifically—which he does not. John does not have a career in music, and regularly opines just as (if not more) controversially than I do on topics far closer to his own areas of professional expertise—linguistics and cultural criticism.

I assure you that I am not John, but an American orchestra conductor, as promised. I might even be a name some readers would recognize. I’ll leave it at that.

And now a Don’s Weekly Listen for our excellent paying subscribers: