Play it cool and play this episode. In episode 175 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about what it means to be cool. From swag gap relationships to Mark Zuckerberg and the manosphere’s failed attempts at being cool, your hosts examine coolness’s ties to youth and subversion and its opposition to displays of wealth. They trace how coolness emerged from Black American culture in the 1930s, before being associated with Beat Poets and punk musicians. They consider precursors to cool, like the Italian term sprezzatura, and question the ontology and the morality of coolness. Is coolness an attitude or a state? Is it inherently narcissistic? Can you ever successfully “try” to be cool? In the Substack bonus segment, Ellie and David discuss coolness through an ethical perspective.
Works Discussed:
Joel Dinerstein, “Jazz Cool”
Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz
bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
Dick Pountain and David Robins, Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude
Highlight: Ironic detachment
Ironic detachment, along with narcissism and hedonism, is one of Pountain and Robins’s criteria of coolness.
It involves a wholesale rejection of sincerity and an unwillingness to express interiority. The cool person doesn’t say what they really care about, and they don’t want to seem invested in anything.
Pountain and Robins point out that coolness spread in the post-war period. They argue that the horrors of the war led to a widespread disillusionment, where people found it hard to latch onto values. They thus turned inward, focusing on private experience and leading to ironic detachment from the world.
Related articles:
