Airport and Ivy League — on writing for everyone

The first time I said it out loud, I was describing a podcast — Next Big Idea, the one where they take two recent books and have the authors on for twelve-minute snippets of takeaways — and I heard myself say: I appreciate the skillfulness of a communicator who can reach the kinds of audiences that are both at airports and at Ivy Leagues. That was my whole endorsement. That was what I meant.

Then I sat with it, because it could sound like a compliment and it could also sound like a hedge. Like I was saying: readable by the masses, and also respectable. Smart enough to impress, simple enough to sell.

Which is where I had to stop myself, because that’s not what I meant at all.

The airport reader and the Ivy League reader are not the same person in different moods. They have different training, different patience, different amounts of context loaded into working memory. The airport reader isn’t dumber. She just doesn’t have three years of graduate seminars filling in the background. And the Ivy League reader isn’t necessarily more sophisticated — she might just be more tolerant of things that are unclear, because unclear has been credentialed in her world.

Here’s the critique of popularization that I’ve heard a hundred times: when you simplify, you lose nuance. You flatten complexity. You condescend. The serious version of the idea is better, harder, truer. Leave it for serious people.

I used to half-believe this. Then I noticed something. The “serious” version is usually not actually clearer. It’s just encoded. Jargon doesn’t protect the idea — it protects the writer. Armor against the embarrassing question. Armor against someone saying: wait, what does that mean? Academic writing in many fields is hard to read not because the ideas are hard but because difficulty has become a proxy for rigor. The hedging, the qualifications, the passive voice, the footnotes within footnotes — none of that makes the claim more precise. It makes the claim harder to challenge.

So what does it actually take to write for both rooms?

Not simplification. Not the removal of complexity. What it takes is finding the level where the claim is genuinely visible — where a person doesn’t need prior credentials to see that it’s true, because it just is. That level exists for almost every real idea. And reaching it requires more precision, not less. You have to know what you actually mean. You can’t hide behind the jargon because there’s no jargon to hide behind. The idea either stands there in the open or it doesn’t.

I write about yoga. That’s a field where this tension is constant. There’s a version of yoga writing that’s for serious practitioners — people who know the Sanskrit, who have logged years in a shala, who can track a subtle cue about the breath at the back of the throat. And there’s a version for intelligent outsiders — people who understand body mechanics, or attentional training, or the way a system of practice can restructure a day. These audiences aren’t as far apart as they seem. The practitioner needs someone to tell her what she’s actually doing. The outsider needs someone to tell her what it actually is. The writing that works for both is the writing where neither group has to do translation work. The idea is just there.

The Shala Daily — the newsletter I write for the yoga community — works when it does exactly that. It fails when it assumes too much and leaves the outsider behind, or when it condescends and bores the practitioner into skimming. The failures are always the same: writer protecting herself, not reader encountering the thing.

There’s a democratic argument here, and I’ll make it plainly: inaccessibility is a choice. It is almost always made in the service of status — the writer’s, the institution’s, the field’s. A reader who cannot access an idea is not a lesser reader. She is a reader who was not served. The best writers, the ones who actually land at airports and at Ivy Leagues without condescending to either, have figured out that the way to reach the intelligent outsider and the serious practitioner simultaneously is not to split the difference. It’s to go further in.

Clarity isn’t condescension. It’s the actual work.