MEDIA DIET
By:
March 31, 2026
A weekly series exploring the media “input” of a group of people — HILOBROW’s friends and contributors — whose “output” we admire.
Carlo has been a valued HILOBROW contributor since 2019. His first post was on the topic of TONE BAR. His most recent contributions to this publication include: INQUIETUD | THE IMPRESSION THAT I GET.
Brookline, Mass.…
HILOBROW: What are your reading habits?
CARLO ROTELLA: I’ve switched to audiobooks for a lot of my daily leisure reading, mostly because I like to listen while I run (or walk, or do other things that don’t require much thinking, like washing dishes or shoveling snow). There are drawbacks to listening to books rather than reading them — there’s no such thing as a used audiobook, though you can take some of them out of the library or get free ones in the public domain from librivox.org — and mostly I’m in favor of doing one thing at a time, but moving through space under your own power and reading a book are two fundamental pleasures in life, and there are only so many hours in a day or indeed in a life. Kind of hard to pass up the opportunity to combine them. And it’s pleasurable, in a pre-modern sort of way, to be read to. One thing I’ve noticed over time, by the way, is that I crave faster and faster playback speeds. So at this point I’m up to 1.6x as my standard playback speed, though I’ll turn it down to 1.0 for poetry or for a prose writer whose words I want to savor in full as if they were poetry — like Charles Portis, Edith Wharton, or Jack Vance.
HILOBROW: What music did you love as a teenager? Do you still listen to it today?
CARLO ROTELLA: I listened to a lot of different kinds of music back then, including the canonical rock and soul that everybody else listened to, but I loved Chicago blues more than anything else. I grew up in Chicago, and in my high school years I spent a lot of time at a club called the Checkerboard Lounge, at 43rd and Vernon in old Bronzeville, where the fearsome company included regulars like Buddy Guy (who owned the place), Muddy Waters, Magic Slim, Junior Wells, Lefty Dizz, Johnny Dollar, and Sammy Lawhorn, and occasional glimpses of visiting heroes like Otis Rush and Fenton Robinson. It was a dollar or two at the door, and anybody who could see over the bar could get served a drink. It seemed like paradise to a 14-year-old looking for a little respite from being a teen. But here’s the thing. I still listen to blues sometimes (though it’s been largely overtaken in my listening habits by country music), but the music that really takes me back to my teens and to the world of the South Side in the 1970s in which I grew up is the music I was trying to get away from when I went to the Checkerboard — the music on the radio that tended to make me feel like there was just the same old thing on the radio and I should go out and find something else. I’m talking about soft rock, arena rock, prog rock, quiet storm, baby-making slow jams. The most potently dosed Proustian madeleines for me now are songs like “Kid Charlemagne,” “No Quarter,” “The Roundabout,” “What You Won’t Do For Love,” “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” “Me and Mrs. Jones.”
HILOBROW: How do you use social media, these days?
CARLO ROTELLA: Egil Skallagrimsson was crabby, violent, witty, litigious, hardhanded, thirsty, equally adept at dropping a scabrous verse on his enemies or laying them out with an axe. An interesting human, and one you didn’t cross lightly. He’s been dead for well over 1000 years, but I feel like it’s all I can do to keep up with his activities and opinions by rereading his saga — probably written by the 13th-century Icelandic ward heeler, mythographer, and hot-tub enthusiast Snorri Sturluson — every few years. Giving things a millennium or so to mellow is probably my natural pace of media consumption, which is one of many reasons why I’m not on any social media. Maybe that’s why I like The Week, a print-only magazine that summarizes some of the previous week’s news stories. You keep it in the smallest room in the house, and after a week’s worth of visits to that room, you’re caught up on the previous week’s news and ready for the next issue. No feverish clicking and refreshing to keep up with alerts and breaking news. Just the news, all the more palatable for being a bit stale.
MEDIA DIET series: MATTHEW BATTLES | DEB CHACHRA | ADRIENNE CREW | HOLLY INTERLANDI | CAROLYN KELLOGG | MARK KINGWELL | ADAM McGOVERN | CHARLIE MITCHELL | TOM NEALON | PEGGY NELSON | ANNIE NOCENTI | GARY PANTER | LYNN PERIL | JONATHAN PINCHERA | HEATHER QUINLAN | NICHOLAS ROMBES | CARLO ROTELLA | LUCY SANTE | SETH | MIKE WATT | JUDITH ZISSMAN | & more to come! Visit the SERIES INDEX.