Matt Saccaro

I’ve been posting on BuzzFeed since about February 2012—so over a year now.

Funnily enough, I heard about the site through Bleacher Report. Bleacher Report’s writing program manager, King Kaufman, did a blog post about how media startups that weren’t being taken seriously were starting to gain more and more legitimacy as time went on. Obviously, the main example Kaufman referred to was Bleacher Report, but he also mentioned BuzzFeed. He said that while they were known mainly for lists of cats, they’d be known for other stuff in the future because they had just hired Politico’s Ben Smith as Editor-in-Chief.

Turns out King Kaufman was right!

BuzzFeed is on fire. They’ve experienced unparalleled growth in a shrinking, decaying industry. More recently, they opened a UK branch and have started a vertical solely for their community contributors in the vein of SB Nation’s fan posts.

A few days ago, I created my 200th post on the site. It was a post about an ancient Backstreet Boys Fansite that I found during idle internet surfing. You can read it here.

Other news: I’m working on a new ebook—that’s why I haven’t been writing as many articles recently. Most of my writing time is occupied with this new project.

Thanks for reading, everyone!

There was once a time when I thought fiction was a waste of time. “What point is there in reading about a bunch of fake stuff when you can just read history/science/[insert "real" topic],” I thought to myself.

I maintained this notion throughout the first two years of college—the years I spent at Nassau Community College. While I did enjoy some of the fiction that I read in literature classes there, I just wasn’t enthralled by it. The “Human Condition” series of classes in the Adelphi University Honors College helped some. Another class I took in the Honors College, “Politics and Literature” also helped get me a bit more interested in fiction. However, I still didn’t see it as something “better” than non-fiction. I thought fiction was a means to an end. That is to say, I thought it was useful for studying factual things like culture or political opinions or what have you. Fiction, in my mind, had no inherent value in and of itself.

After I graduated college, I thought even less of fiction. Perhaps some of this was political socialization. The world turned against college and against liberal arts degrees; fiction earned people a barista apron. Non-fiction (meaning books you’d read as a STEM major) got people jobs. Around this time, I also got really into the works of famed astrophysicists Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse-Tyson. “How could fiction possibly be worth anything when next to scientific literature,” I asked myself.

I found the answer in the form of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.

I really can’t put my appreciation for the series into words. I like it that much. It helped me realize that fiction wasn’t worthless. It also helped me in a very real, very fundamental way. Recently, I’ve suffered a few (somewhat major) setbacks and I was very dejected over them. Then I remembered a bit of banter between Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth. Jaime had recently had his hand cut off and was (understandably) morose and fatalistic. Nevertheless, Brienne managed to fire him up, to get him to persevere. Their exchange went like this:

“Jaime,” Brienne whispered, so faintly he thought he was dreaming it. “Jaime, what are you doing?”
“Dying,” he whispered back.
“No,” she said, “no, you must live.”
He wanted to laugh. “Stop telling me what to do, wench. I’ll die if it pleases me.”
“Are you so craven?”
The words shocked him. He was Jaime Lannister, a knight of the Kingsguard, he was the Kingslayer. No man had ever called him craven. Other things they called him, yes; oathbreaker, liar, murderer. They said he was cruel, treacherous, reckless. But never craven. “What else can I do, but die?”
“Live,” she said, “live, and fight, and take revenge.”
Craven, Jaime thought…. Can it be? They took my sword hand. Was that all I was, a sword hand? Gods be good, is it true?
The wench had the right of it. He could not die.”

This dialogue inspired me to just move on after what happened and to continue working and to continue trying. While non-fiction can bestow knowledge, fiction can stir hearts.

Now, for some other matters:

I’ve disabled comments on a few articles to stop the continuing influx of spambots. Hopefully they’ll go away. Also, I apologize for taking so long in between posts. I hate seeing any website not being maintained but I just had so much crap to put up with this month and it all ended so terribly haha. Anyway, thanks for reading.

Bleacher Report’s writing blog posted highlights of this incredibly helpful, no-nonsense list of writing advice. I read it and was really impressed/touched/inspired/etc by it. I figured that I’d link it here because it’s all really quite insightful in a very “tough love” sort of way.

Here’s the list, created by Chuck Wendig. I implore you to take a look at it.

The sixth item on the list really resonated with me. If you’re too lazy to check the link, #6 is about the psychological malaise of writing. Wendig said the following:

You will always have days when you feel like an amateur. When it feels like everybody else is better than you. You will have this nagging suspicion that someone will eventually find you out, call you on your bullshit, realize you’re the literary equivalent of a vagrant painting on the side of a wall with a piece of calcified poop. You will have days when the blank page is like being lost in a blizzard. You will sometimes hate what you wrote today, or yesterday, or ten years ago. Bad days are part of the package. You just have to shut them out, swaddle your head in tinfoil, and keep writing anyway.

I’m happy to know I’m not alone in this regard. I’ll always feel a bit crestfallen when I see amazing articles on Slate, Salon, BuzzFeed, Thought Catalog, Quartz, Huffpost, etc. I’ll ask myself “Why can’t I write like that?” But then I remember that the only way I can eventually write like that is to keep writing, so I fire up word and keep writing!

I could go on at length about this but it’s probably best that I don’t—haha. I just wanted to check in because I don’t get to update the “blog” part of my site because when I want to say something I’ll (try) say it on any number of websites rather than posting it here and not publishing those thoughts anywhere. This has the unfortunate result of making the site look out of date sometimes, but the “Recent Work” is always regularly updated.

As always, thanks for reading!

I’m pleased to announce that recently I started writing for the online magazine Forever Twenty Somethings.

I first noticed Forever Twenty Somethings (FTS for short) after they tweeted an article I did for Thought Catalog some time ago. I thanked them for tweeting it and they replied and even followed me. I followed them back and started reading their site. I wanted to contribute to FTS even then, but responsibilities as an administrator at B/R—in addition to those at my “real” job—kept me from having the time. I was also a YouTube channel curator at the time and had just started contributing to Thought Catalog as well.

FTS is somewhat similar to TC. They are both home to many, many “zeitgesty” pieces although FTS, as a general site, is a bit more focused and not quite as nebulous as Thought Catalog.

Forever Twenty Somethings published my first piece for them, titled “Why Are Millenials the Most Stressed Generation?” about a week ago. I’m looking forward to contributing more articles on FTS.

Thanks for reading!

I finally made some time to elucidate my views regarding post secondary education in the United States, as well as some of the views I expressed in that Thought Catalog article. First thing, using the term “liberal arts” was wrong. The word “humanities” fits the kind of content that I was talking about much better.

But before I go on about that, I need to share (some of) my college experience with you so that you can understand where I was coming from when I wrote the original article:

I graduated from high school not knowing what to do with my life, so I went to community college so I didn’t have to waste $20,000 a semester figuring it out. The college I went to, Nassau Community College, offered associates degrees there that didn’t have specific majors. They were just “Associate in Arts” or “Associate in Science”. I started on the “Associate in Science” trek and took a biochem class and a regular chem class. I did well in both but had zero interest in the curriculum. As I read the textbooks to study, I couldn’t imagine myself doing this for another semester, let alone the rest of my life. However, one positive aspect of being in the science classes was that I noticed many of the students had drive; they were more motivated. If they weren’t, they vanished in a week or two.

After the first semester, I switched to Associate in Arts. I knew I was going to declare for history when I transferred to my next school. I had loved history since I was a kid. Reading about it and writing about it for classes was always fun, provided the professor was actually decent (some were awful at NCC, but some were really great). Unfortunately, nearly all the other students in the liberal arts classes I took at NCC didn’t share this enthusiasm. They didn’t take notes. They didn’t do the readings. They didn’t do anything. I remember in a Western Civ II class, the professor grouped us up for a project. The first thing someone uttered in my group was “I don’t do shit for this class, I’m gonna fail.” Yet many these students managed to linger on in the class without dropping it.

Now, you’re likely saying, “What do you expect, it’s a community college!” True, community colleges aren’t known for their academic rigor. However, would you not agree that far more people attend community colleges than attend highly reputable schools? And that, therefore, community college students represent a greater percentage of the nation’s college-going populace than do the student bodies of various high-end schools? I used to lurk on the GradCafe forums (a popular forum for graduate students, current, former, and aspiring). A common phrase there was “Nowhere State University.” It was used to deride those who didn’t go to “good” schools.

I was among the people who attended “nowhere state university,” as much as it pains me to call my school that. I went to Adelphi University. I applied to the usual schools for a Long Islander when my time was running low at Nassau—CW Post, Adelphi, Stony Brook University, and Hofstra. I chose Adelphi because they had an honors college over just an honors program. The honors college had some really brilliant students and professors. The two smartest people I’ve ever met in my life were professors there. I also chose Adelphi because they gave me the most in scholarship money.

However, my classes at Adelphi were split roughly 1/2 and 1/2 between Honors College classes and regular history department classes that fell under the jurisdiction of the college of arts and sciences.

That’s where my views on humanities in college began to become…skewed.

The honors college classes were pretty good. Great quality of teaching, mediocre-great quality of fellow students. The regular classes, while they’d sometimes have flashes of brilliance, generally left something to be desired. Adelphi, outside of the honors college, proved to be community college for kids who had parents with more money to waste. I’ll spare you the details but many of the people in the history classes (that was my major) did NOT want to be there. About 40% were there on requirements (that’s another thing that’s wrong with college, arbitrary requirements so the school can make more money). Another 40% were there because they wanted to be history teachers. The majority of this 40% only wanted to teach because “High school was awesome + summers off and history is the easiest subject to get a degree in.” Now that’s 80% of people in almost every history class I attended who didn’t actually care about the content of the class. They wanted to pick up a requirement or an “easy” degree and cash in.

That still leaves 20%. What was their story? About 15% of these guys were just “I just need any degree and history is easy.” Only 5% were people who legitimately thought history was worth studying.

Now, this may sound (and in fact, be) naive but I applied my experience to the other local colleges. And, from what my friends who have attended them said, I was right to do so. This guy I used to hang out with had a girlfriend who went to college for one year (which cost her $30k) with a major in English. She quit after that one year and has been working at Target ever since.

So, back to my thoughts on college and what’s wrong.

I think we can agree that most students in the country attend a “nowhere state university”? That’s not to insult the typical student or the typical university, it’s just a numbers game. Most students aren’t going to Ivy Leagues, nor are they attending US News’ top-100 colleges.

And the stories of jobless, massively indebted degree-holders are so ubiquitous that you surely can’t deny the fact that obtaining a degree is certainly a questionable endeavour in 2013.

So, the question—in my mind—became this: Did the accessibility of the humanities in college ENABLE these things to happen? Did it enable the non-learners (people who are just there for the piece of paper, nothing else) to do what they did as well? When I asked my friends, they all agreed, especially based off their experiences. I knew I’d catch flak for what I wrote on Thought Catalog, but didn’t expect all the hate-tweets and the like. Of course, what I wrote on Thought Catalog was needlessly inflammatory among many other things and I regret writing it. Still, I’m not sure why certain humanities classes need to exist, and why students need to pay for them. A cynic will say that students need to pay for them because colleges require them so they make more money. I suppose that’s true.

Also, the common retort to “Liberal arts/humanities enable debt” shtick is “well then those people shouldn’t be going to college at all then or should major in something else.” That’s true but the notion that college is important is still far too pervasive in society for people to forgo getting a degree. Furthermore, at least where I’m from, people look down on the “lesser” professions like electrician and plumber even though those careers are fine money-wise. This stigma against jobs like that forces people to go get degrees they don’t need or want, wouldn’t you agree?

How can we fix all this?

I don’t think there’s one panacea that can fix all things wrong with college. A lot of what’s wrong is embedded in society’s views on things, like I said above. I think that in a generation or two, post secondary education’s image will become so tarnished that it will again be socially acceptable not to go there in favor of going to a trade school or whatever else. Colleges, in response to this, will attempt to start offering more helpful/”real” classes to try and regain customers.

“Then why did you write an article saying to ban liberal arts,” you ask?

I didn’t want to ban ALL of them. Most commenters seemed to ignore that I put “almost” in the title. Removing certain majors/classes and thereby gearing schools towards the practical rather than the arcane, in my opinion, would be a decent temporary, short term solution.

Why should STEM majors have to waste time and money on arbitrary requirements like Western Civilization? I love history and it’s nice to think that forcing an engineering major into a Western Civ class would make him historically literate but what if he/she just doesn’t enjoy history? They’ll be dead weight in the class and be miserable at having to do readings (which they won’t do) and write essays (which they’ll mail in/completely BS). The only person who benefits from that is the college who takes the student’s money for that useless experience. Halve or outright remove required humanities courses for STEM majors so they spend less money. This also grants them more time to pursue internships.

But what about people who want to major in West Asian Literature or Theater? This is where it gets trickier. I was definitely wrong to dismiss these things so swiftly in the Thought Catalog article but, at the same time, it’s kind of difficult to justify keeping some of the more esoteric majors and courses in the college. Theater is specialized and requires you to be doing something in-person on a stage, and you can’t just show up at a venue in Broadway and say “Hey! Teach me everything you guys know!” So, in that respect, theater needs to be taught—even if the job prospects might not be bright.

However, certain history and English/literature classes simply can’t justify the price tag, in my opinion. Like I said in the Thought Catalog piece, it seems really weird to pay so much money for a glorified book reading club. Yes, you are getting expert instruction but if you aren’t planning on becoming an historian or a professor yourself, why do you need costly, expert-level instruction? Look, I’m a huge advocate of reading and cultural literacy, but I’m also an advocate of not burning money. People can buy books off Amazon, read them on their own, and then find a forum about it or find free interpretations about the chosen books on the Internet. They can do these things cheaper than the cost of a degree that they won’t use or a requirement that they were forced to take so that the university could bleed them for a little more money. If this offends you, well, leave a comment and I guess we’ll talk some more haha.

Another helpful solution to the college conundrum is putting employment outlook/average wages for ALL majors in HUGE LETTERS on ALL college material (recruitment and whatever else).

Furthermore, I think that colleges suffer from course bloat in general. My first article for Thought Catalog was about that so I won’t type it all again suffice to say that the amount of courses should be declined and replaced with far more internships, read the full idea here.

Apologies if this is a bit long or scattered, it’s a bit stream of consciousness. Please, let me know what you think.

Thanks for reading, everyone!

Recently I wrote an article for Thought Catalog titled “The Case For Removing (Almost) All Liberal Arts from College” that caused a stir.

Readers weren’t happy with it and, quite frankly, I wasn’t happy with it either. I know I can do better. I came across poorly and I denigrated things and people that I didn’t intend to denigrate. I didn’t mean to slight anyone or to come off as a snob.

For all that, I apologize—not for having the opinion that the higher education system needs to be reexamined—but for the way in which I articulated that opinion. I requested that the article be deleted. It was inelegant.

And, to address a common response that I found in the comments of the article: No, I am not at all bitter that I got a history degree. I had some amazing professors in college that made my experiences there totally worthwhile. I blogged about my college life during senior year and I even wrote a short e-book about U.S. diplomatic history! I can’t imagine myself studying anything else in college. I enjoyed nearly all of my liberal arts classes.

Thanks for hearing me out.

My desktop background is a picture of the Martian surface taken by the Curiosity rover.

I was wowed the first time I saw the image, and now it’s become routine; it’s something I see every single morning when I turn the computer on. I didn’t realize until today how incredible of a statement that is.

I get to look at a picture of another planet—a planet that humans could only dream, speculate, and wonder about for centuries—every single day. Percival Lowell spent millions of dollars to create an observatory to examine the intricacies of Mars, and he spent years at his telescope trying to crack the red planet’s secrets. All I, or anyone else for that matter, needs to do is type “pictures of Mars” or any other such phrase into Google.

I’m still shocked over how amazing that is. We can instantly summon cosmic knowledge that eluded human kind for millennia.

I really love Twitter. It’s by far my favorite social network. It’s a fun, fast, easy way to interact with like-minded people and people who may not be like-minded per se but have similar interests.

It’s also a great way to get news/information. I can’t read every website with good content on it, but, collectively the 500-odd accounts I follow can—and then they can share the information with me.

Twitter is great.

However, as I’ve written about more stuff outside of MMA, I’ve noticed that I’ve had to start doing what I call the “Twitter balancing act.” I have followers who follow me because I’m an MMA writer. I have followers who follow me because I write about life/culture for Thought Catalog, and I have followers who follow me because of the stuff I’ve contributed to Buzzfeed.

The balancing act is tweeting enough to keep each group pleased with my twitter feed, without tweeting too much about any individual topic to alienate followers.

There was one weekend where I lost about 10 followers. It was the weekend of a UFC event. Of all the people who unfollowed me, none of them were MMA fans. I consulted one of my colleagues about it. He said “They probably didn’t want to be spammed with MMA tweets.” He was right.

My initial followers were MMA people. Thus, I grew accustomed to tweeting a ton about MMA and not worrying about it as my follwers were fans of the sport; they wouldn’t feel that I was clogging up or ruining their feeds with MMA insights and info.

Alas, things are a bit different now. The majority of my followers are still MMA people, but there is still a considerable (and growing) non-MMA contingent, and balancing my twitter around the two groups (MMA and non-MMA) is proving to be a fun and interesting challenge.

I guess I never really understood the purpose of having a “blog” to say write stuff that I’m thinking. If I wanted to say something, I found a platform to say it, if it was on B/R or Thought Catalog or other sites that ultimately declined publishing what I sent them.

Now I have this website that I think is really cool but I often wonder what to update the “blog” part with. I started the site not as a blog but really just as a site so people could look me up after reading my work and know who I was and whatnot. Yet here I am writing a “blog” update (I use quotes around the term because, like George R.R. Martin’s famous live journal, this is not a blog).

So, anyway, if you don’t see updates on this part, that doesn’t mean that I’m not updating the site. I frequently update the “recent work” section with my favorite newly written pieces from Thought Catalog and B/R.

Thanks for reading!

Once upon a time I thought I had the Internet figured out. I thought the “information super-highway” that connected millions was the end-all and be-all of human communication, the essence of humanity’s culture taken to its (ill)logical extreme.

I was wrong.

Living without electricity for over a week due to Hurricane Sandy showed me the light—or the darkness, as was the case.

Before the storm I thought the Internet was almost some kind of God. It was a nigh omniscient (how many people’s information doesn’t show up on a Google search?) a cornerstone in modern society, and a crucial part of the modern western person’s psychological makeup. The Internet that we were part of was a massive ocean that we all lived in or at least swam in from time to time.

I was more attuned to the forces of the Internet than most, perhaps, having two Internet-centric occupations and consuming massive amounts of internet content daily.

This constant exposure to the web is what influenced my views on the peculiar series of tubes. I spent nearly all day on it, as did many people.

It’s inescapable. We email, we read, we write, we play.

But that’s only as long as things run smoothly; the Internet is the ultimate fair-weather friend.

My power went out soon after the storm hit. A tree in my neighbor’s backyard collapsed, busting up a pole and igniting a small fire. After it was put out, calm was restored, but not power.

I immediately enabled every battery-saving measure on my phone. Afterwards I barely looked at it, knowing that I needed to save precious battery life because it could be days before I was able to charge it again. I craved to see what the Twitterverse was saying about the storm, and what inane complaints were flooding into my Facebook timeline while the rains of Hurricane Sandy flooded into Long Island.

But I couldn’t.

It was a “first world pain” to be sure, but the urge to see what was happening, to regain my connection to the rest of the world was strong.

As the hours became days, the urge to know subsided. Books replaced Buzzfeed, the radio replaced Reddit, and life moved on. A few days into the aftermath of the hurricane, a relative’s power was restored but, alas, the computer there barely deserved the name. The version of Internet Explorer the machine was running was so old it couldn’t play YouTube videos. Most websites crashed when trying to load. The “computer” wasn’t even capable of updating the browser.

It would be another week before I was back on the Internet in full capacity, like I was before the Hurricane.

Once I returned, the whole system didn’t mean as much. I felt like I did after the after the Star Wars prequels were made. Star Wars was still cool because it was Star Wars, but it was just…different. So was the Internet.

I thought of the Internet as something that was fated to be eternal, but it’s not—not even close.
Within a few days of its “passing” the memes and other unique traits (be they websites or individual browsing habits or what have you) fade in importance. The Internet, which once meant so much—everything practically—begins to mean nothing and less. It becomes an evanescent cloud of wi-fi dust, spreading itself thin in the air until it becomes nothing, untraceable, unknowable.

Once I realized that, I figured out that the Internet ultimately accounts for naught to society.

We have this belief that the Internet is like the third house in The Three Little Pigs—built of brick and sturdy enough to withstand all the huffing and puffing the world will throw at it. It’s anything but. As Allison McCann of Buzzfeed pointed out, the majority of the Internet is, in actuality, “a bunch of giant machines hanging out in Virginia” that are far from invulnerable to the world’s perils.

The Internet, while it is part of our “instant culture” (meaning that when Justin Bieber breaks up with Selena Gomez the whole world knows and has given its opinion about it on various social networks and websites) isn’t part of our enduring culture. Bad Luck Brian and his ilk cannot survive posterity, nor severe technological hiccups.

Thus, the Internet is simply a means to an end—a faster way to communicate or do business or get news/interesting content to read. The moment it becomes something more than that is the moment that the world deludes itself. The Internet is not a god. The Internet is not some sort of cosmic, cultural singularity. It is just as susceptible to maladies and misfortune as anything else in the world. This dynamo of the 21st century is fragile. It can be killed with the flick of a switch, the gust of wind, or the tides of the seas.