Read an amazing book…

and then procrastinated writing about it until the very last day when I had to take it back to the library because I’m awful.

Ta-nehisi Coates, my role-model in writing, my best friend in my imagination, had this to say about the Brad Paisley/ LL Cool J collaboration, so astute I hooted out loud:

One of the problems with the idea that America needs a “Conversation On Race” is that it presumes that “America” has something intelligent to say about race. All you need do is look at how American history is taught in this country to realize that that is basically impossible.

Eula Biss, a white (although she complicates this in her book) writer, wrote a book called Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays, in 2010 and it is extraordinary. Reviewing this book in Salon, Kyle Minor writes,

Eula Biss’ “Notes From No Man’s Land” is the most accomplished book of essays anyone has written or published so far in the 21st century. If it has not taken up residence in the popular imagination of readers in the same way Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” did in the late 1960s, perhaps it is because we live in a time in which it is more difficult for books to assert themselves with great cultural force in the way they once did, or perhaps because Biss, unlike Didion, has yet to receive the strong support of the systems of power that bring great books to the attention of a broad readership.

I would also argue this book hasn’t received the attention it deserves because it is a prickly and uncomfortable book about race. Ta-nehisi has always been incredible on the subject of why this “conversation on race” is so rarely done right:

I have had conversations with very well-educated people who, with a straight face, have told me that there are Black Confederates. If you ask a very well educated person how the GI Bill exacerbated the wealth gap, or how New Deal housing policy helped create the ghetto they very likely will not know. And they do not know, not because they are ignorant, stupid, or immoral, they do not know because they are part of country that has decided that “not knowing” is in its interest. There’s no room for any sort of serious conversation when the basic facts of history are not accessible.

Eula Biss, in an interview about revising the essays in this book in 2008:

I was revising this collection during Obama’s campaign and I remember feeling dismay at one point because the national conversation about race in that moment felt so misguided, so atrophied, so impoverished. Almost everything I heard about race on the news was silly or stupid and so I began to worry that my book assumed some basic understandings that just didn’t exist in this country yet.

In one of her great essays, Biss describes teaching a class at the University of Iowa while working on her master’s degree:

Racism, I would discover during my first semester teaching at Iowa, does not exist. At least not in Iowa. Not in the minds of the twenty three tall, healthy, blond students to whom I was supposed to teach rhetoric…. Sexism does not exist either, at least not any more. My students considered my interest in these subjects very antiquated. These things, they informed me, with exasperation, had already been resolved a long time ago, during the sixties.

This book is so rare and so uncomfortable because it is tackling a subject most people refuse to acknowledge even exists, or refuse to acknowledge as complex. I need to buy this book, and re-read it, and stew in it, and write longer on it soon. But please read it, if you want to be challenged, and amazed, and floored.

Oof. Why do I keep whining?

A woman named Karina Longworth wrote a review of two reissued Ellen Willis books at Slate. It was an okay review, sort of itself a bad attempt at writing like Ellen Willis. I hate when I read something mediocre about something I love, knowing that if I had tried to write it, I might have (probably would have) written it a bit better. BUT I didn’t; I don’t; and I won’t. So, good for Karina Longworth for actually writing and not whining like a jerk all the time.

I was living in Park Slope, nearly three years ago, when I was offered a full-time job with benefits writing film criticism in Los Angeles. I was 29, and this sort of job was the only thing I had even thought about wanting for years, so I jumped at it, without giving any real thought to the enormous ways in which the decision would change my life.

Although, boo fucking hoo. You got offered an actual journalism job in the middle of a recession, in the scorched earth era of journalism.

This is how Ellen Willis does this kind of ennui better:

One day, sometime during CCR’s banner year, 1970, I was feeling depressed and confused about music, politics, writing and almost everything else that was important to me. In an effort to shake off the mood, I stacked all five of my Creedence albums on the stereo and danced to them, one after another.

And me? No writing happening here. No Creedence dancing either. How to get started again?

Many fits of rage were had over the reading of these three articles….

First of all, a year ago, this awesome post was written about an NPR music intern at All Songs Considered. Note the word music.

Now, I’m all for discovery. The learning process. Expanding horizons. But friends, this tyranny cannot stand. How is it acceptable that you’re an intern at a music site, and you’ve never heard, for example, Cream’s Disraeli Gears? OK, OK, while I consider that particular album to be Eric Clapton’s only palatable work, not to mention a critical album in a mini-age of rock power trios, let’s try another one. Something a bit more obvious. Say… Beach Boys Pet Sounds. No? Haven’t heard that? How about maybe The Velvet Underground & Nico? Not influential enough? Doesn’t ring a bell?

Here’s one. How about the fuggin Joshua Tree? U2? Know that one? “With or Without You”? “Where the Streets Have No Name”? “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”? 25 million copies sold? No?

Geezer alert on this, but since when is it OK to be seeking a career in music journalism and not have heard this stuff? How did this come about, exactly? Here’s a better question: When did dignity get so scarce that you might be an intern at a music website and actually admit to never having heard this stuff? In the words of Pantera, “Is there no standard anymore?”

Earth, I quit. There is nothing more I can do here.

Now yet another genius 21 year old intern at All Songs Considered wrote this:

I never went through the transition from physical to digital. I’m almost 21, and since I first began to love music I’ve been spoiled by the Internet.

I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I’ve only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.

I wish I could say I miss album packaging and liner notes and rue the decline in album sales the digital world has caused. But the truth is, I’ve never supported physical music as a consumer. As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, I’ve never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and T-shirts.

Luckily, someone wrote a really fucking smart letter about this. Read the whole thing:

On a personal level, I have witnessed the impoverishment of many critically acclaimed but marginally commercial artists. In particular, two dear friends: Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse) and Vic Chestnutt. Both of these artists, despite growing global popularity, saw their incomes collapse in the last decade. There is no other explanation except for the fact that “fans” made the unethical choice to take their music without compensating these artists.

Shortly before Christmas 2009, Vic took his life. He was my neighbor, and I was there as they put him in the ambulance. On March 6th, 2010, Mark Linkous shot himself in the heart. Anybody who knew either of these musicians will tell you that the pair suffered from addiction and depression. They will also tell you their situation was worsened by their financial situation. Vic was deeply in debt to hospitals and, at the time, was publicly complaining about losing his home. Mark was living in abject squalor in his remote studio in the Smokey Mountains without adequate access to the mental health care he so desperately needed.

I present these two stories to you not because I’m pointing fingers or want to shame you. I just want to illustrate that “small” personal decisions have very real consequences, particularly when millions of people make the decision not to compensate artists they supposedly “love”. And it is up to us individually to examine the consequences of our actions. It is not up to governments or corporations to make us choose to behave ethically. We have to do that ourselves.

And also this:

What the corporate backed Free Culture movement is asking us to do is analogous to changing our morality and principles to allow the equivalent of looting. Say there is a neighborhood in your local big city. Let’s call it The ‘Net. In this neighborhood there are record stores. Because of some antiquated laws, The ‘Net was never assigned a police force. So in this neighborhood people simply loot all the products from the shelves of the record store. People know it’s wrong, but they do it because they know they will rarely be punished for doing so. What the commercial Free Culture movement (see the “hybrid economy”) is saying is that instead of putting a police force in this neighborhood we should simply change our values and morality to accept this behavior. We should change our morality and ethics to accept looting because it is simply possible to get away with it.  And nothing says freedom like getting away with it, right?

But it’s worse than that. It turns out that Verizon, AT&T, Charter etc etc are charging a toll to get into this neighborhood to get the free stuff. Further, companies like Google are selling maps (search results) that tell you where the stuff is that you want to loot. Companies like Megavideo are charging for a high speed looting service (premium accounts for faster downloads). Google is also selling ads in this neighborhood and sharing the revenue with everyone except the people who make the stuff being looted. Further, in order to loot you need to have a $1,000 dollar laptop, a $500 dollar iPhone or $400 Samsumg tablet. It turns out the supposedly “free” stuff really isn’t free. In fact it’s an expensive way to get “free” music. (Like most claimed “disruptive innovations”it turns out expensive subsidies exist elsewhere.) Companies are actually making money from this looting activity. These companies only make money if you change your principles and morality! And none of that money goes to the artists!

And believe it or not this is where the problem with Spotify starts. The internet is full of stories from artists detailing just how little they receive from Spotify. I shan’t repeat them here. They are epic. Spotify does not exist in a vacuum. The reason they can get away with paying so little to artists is because the alternative is The ‘Net where people have already purchased all the gear they need to loot those songs for free. Now while something likeSpotify may be a solution for how to compensate artists fairly in the future, it is not a fair system now. As long as the consumer makes the unethical choice to support the looters, Spotify will not have to compensate artists fairly. There is simply no market pressure. Yet Spotify’s CEO is the 10th richest man in the UK music industry ahead of all but one artist on his service.

Dear god. Okay, first of all, C and I buy all of our music. We just do. It doesn’t feel right not to. I realize this puts us in a very small minority. I hate, nay DESPISE Apple, as a company, but unfortunately, we buy our music through iTunes. We partly do this because we are both artists who eventually would like to be fairly compensated for our work someday. The person who wrote this letter is also quite right  —

The existential questions that your generation gets to answer are these:

Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?

Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?

This is a bit of hyperbole to emphasize the point. But it’s as if:

Networks: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!

Hardware: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!

Artists: 99.9 % lower middle class. Screw you, you greedy bastards!

Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!

I am genuinely stunned by this. Since you appear to love first generation Indie Rock, and as a founding member of a first generation Indie Rock band I am now legally obligated to issue this order: kids, lawn, vacate.

You are doing it wrong.

Okay, I hate internships. I think in the vast majority of cases they should be illegal. Even in the case that these interns are getting college credit and actually learning something from this experience, they should be getting paid. I think this whole thing is such a giant clusterfuck, that intern Emily could easily respond to this letter saying, “maybe if I got paid to do my work, I could actually buy music,” etc., etc. Maybe I am just a crotchety old person, but if these interns are the people seeking a career writing about music, then I worry about the future of  music journalism. But since I worry about the future of everything, all the time, perhaps I should just go back to my coffee.

Interesting…

Pink topics. An interesting opinion I like this:

Now, history clearly shows that many talented women writers have been relegated to what we might generally call “lifestyle” pieces or otherwise “soft” journalism, so I understand the surveyors’ interest in testing this category. However, the distinction between, say, “woman-specific health or culture” and serious politics is not at all apparent. Much of the writing that I (a man) and my colleagues (mostly women) do in DoubleX seems explicitly political to us, but by the metric of “Pink Topics,” we don’t count.

The authors of this report are obviously on the side of women, but I can’t help but feel that the crude distinction among subject matter actually enacts the same kind of stereotyping and pigeon-holing that it seeks to critique. If even women journalists’ advocates are buying into these arbitrary boundaries, how can we expect less enlightened editors to assist with their dissolution?

To quote Spirit of the West: “Every little thing is political”

Something to think about…

Due to excessive busyness, school-ness, travel-fatigue, etc., I largely avoided the 9/11 ten year hooplah. This, however, is one of the only things I read from the weekend, and it’s damn good.

Check out Laura Miller’s essay at Salon.com

Charged with looking beneath, behind and around such images, the novelist comes up against the question of what makes these particular violent deaths so very different from every other violent death. That isn’t easy to answer, and any answer you do come up with is likely to sound disrespectful, cynical, unfeeling and insufficiently solemn. A novelist may decide to push onward anyway, whether into sentimentality (“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”) or smarmy self-aggrandizement (“The Good Life”), but in such cases, the results feel thin, vaguely false and meretricious. “It’s kryptonite to novelists,” a critic friend of mine once said about 9/11.

Reading lots…

The Beekeeper’s Lament by Hannah Nordhaus is awesome.  This is one of my favourite parts. Entomologist Justin Schmidt made an index ranking the pain of insects stings, and it’s quite poetic and lovely:

1.0 SWEAT BEE: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.

1.2 FIRE ANT: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.

1.8 BULLHORN ACACIA ANT: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.

2.0 BALD-FACED HORNET: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.

2.0 YELLOWJACKET: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.

2X HONEY BEE AND EUROPEAN HORNET: Like a match-head that flips off and burns on your skin.

3.0 RED HARVESTER ANT: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.

3.0 PAPER WASP: Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.

4.0 TARANTULA HAWK: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.

4.0+ BULLET ANT: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

When entomologists are also amazing writers, everybody wins.

Joan Walsh nails it…

NAILS IT!  Specifically, on how the Republicans and Obama don’t understand how to fix the economy:

In fact, China and Brazil have robust growth because unlike the U.S., they’re building a middle class, not taking it apart, the way we are. These supply-side economics groupies distort what’s wrong with our economy: Thanks to unemployment and the foreclosure crisis, plus almost 40 years of no income growth for working and middle class families (and even income declines for some subgroups), Americans can’t help the country consume its way out of the recession, or contribute to the recovery with tax revenues (for those who think the deficit is the biggest economic problem.) The recession itself is making recovery much, much harder, and maybe impossible: Too many workers are draining public revenue, rather than producing it. The resulting lack of demand makes employers nervous about increasing hiring or even capital investment. Obama’s inability to respond with a bigger stimulus bill and other measures to use the federal government to stimulate demand again will hurt the country, and may hurt him politically too. But it’s possible it won’t, because in 2012 he’s almost certain to run against a right-wing kook or a formerly-moderate dissembler in next year’s election.

More on Ellen Willis…

I’m still reading Out of the Vinyl Deeps and loving it. I can’t imagine what it would have taken for a young-ish woman to write about how music made her feel in the New Yorker in the late-sixties and early- seventies. The magazine has always had a pretty stuffy image, and I’m so glad Ellen Willis wrote stuff like this in it:

One day, sometime during Creedence Clearwater Revival’s banner year, 1970, I was feeling depressed and confused about music, politics, writing, and almost everything else that was important to me. In an effort to shake off the mood, I stacked all five of my Creedence albums on the stereo and danced to them, one after another.

Good idea, Susannah Breslin…

She writes a blog at Forbes.com called Pink Slipped and she invited young female journalists to pitch a guest post. She got some interesting pitches.  Check it out.

I received almost 50 pitches from across the country and around the world. These young female journalists live in Iowa, New York City, DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Liverpool, India, South Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, and Australia. They have graduate degrees in journalism, interesting internships, blogs, a background in poetry, and at least one is a mother.

Their pitches ranged from totally vague to investigative journalism. The most common pitches had to do with being a woman. Several proposed hardcore journalism pieces, including one on the lingering impact of the BP oil spill. More than one referenced Rihanna’s controversial new music video, “Man Down.”

They want to write about poetry, working in a bagel shop, whether or not it’s worth it to get a graduate degree, sexism and the military, women and the prison system, being the new girl at work, human trafficking, the Wicked Witch, 9/11, “normal people,” “hard-ass women,” and the Karen people of Burma.

They are not yesterday’s journalists. They write stories, shoot video, take photographs, and blog. They are on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and LinkedIn. They are keenly aware of their online identities and are busily creating their own virtual brands.

New book on the go…

Started reading Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis On Rock Music. So far I’ve just read the foreword by Sasha Frere-Jones, the current music critic of the New Yorker, who, I was recently surprised to find out was neither a woman or a black person, which was oddly disappointing. Moving on – Ellen Willis was the first rock critic at the New Yorker, and the first prominent woman rock critic ever, which is pretty damn cool. Frere-Jones quotes Willis’ co-worker Karen Durbin at length in the foreword:

Ellen was that wondrous creature, an intellectual who deeply valued sensuality, which is why she wrote with such insight about rock and roll but also with such love. She respected the sensual; in a fundamentally puritanical culture, she honored it. She saw how it could be a path to transcendence and liberation, especially for women, who, when we came out into the world in the early to midsixties, were relentlessly sexualized and just as relentlessly shamed. Rock and roll broke that chain: it was the place where we could be sexual and ecstatic about it. Our lives were saved by that fine, fine music, and that’s a fact.

I’m so pumped to read this book!

On being underwhelmed by Oprah…

At Brutish&Short.

Right. So I’ve been thinking about this for a month now, trying to figure why I’ve been so disappointed in the farewell season, and I’ve come to the same conclusion as pretty much everyone else: Oprah is a big ol’ contradiction — good and bad, truthful and hypocritical, angelically open and devilishly shrewd. This is the sum total of the Oprah Show — and oh my, does it ever provoke contradictory feelings in me. The finale still made me tear up multiple times despite the skeptical distance I tried to maintain — I was a convert for 48 minutes.

TNC on the lack of women in book lists…

I’m quoting the whole thing because it’s so darn awesome:

There’s a lot of twittering about Esquire’s list of 75 books that men should read and the fact that only one book by a woman–Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find. There’s a point to be made here about sexism. But I’d like to focus on the implicit incuriosity that always accompanies these sorts of things.

Books are our most intimate art-form. The reader does a temporary mind-meld with the author, and a collaborative world–their words and our imagination–is conjured from nothing. And because each reader’s mind is his own, each of those conjured worlds, each of those planes, are different. And because the libraries are filled with incredible books, those of us who are readers spend our whole lives creating these private planes, walking them, mapping them, comparing ours with those of other readers, and then returning to our own only to see the contours changed.  And so we map anew.

Why any dedicated reading man would dream of this sorcery strictly with other men is beyond me. It goes against one of the great assets of reading–the voyage to new worlds. It would be as if Magellan said, “I like my small town fine enough.”

Put bluntly, if you call yourself a reading man, but don’t read books by women, you are actually neither. Such a person implicitly dismisses whole swaths of literature, and then flees the challenge of seeing himself through other eyes.

This is not a favor to feminists. This is not about how to pick up chicks. This is about hunger, greed and acquisition. Do not read books by women to murder your inner sexist pig. Do it because Edith Wharton can fucking write. It’s that simple.

AMEN AMEN A MILLION TIMES AMEN!!!!! (Sorry that the formatting is fucked up. WordPress is being weird and won’t let me fix it).

More hilarity with your righteous indignation, please…

Still working on David Rakoff’s book, and am particularly loving his essay “Beat Me Daddy” about gay Republicans, published in GQ in 2004-ish. Hilarious, astute, amazing. He wrote about a gay Republican group called Log Cabin Republicans, and had this to say about it:

Such abject masochism may make for great Billie Holiday songs – it kind of ain’t nobody’s business if Lady Day is beat up by her papa; he isn’t hoping to pack the courts with anti-choice troglodytes or to defund social security – but the Log Cabin blues have ramifications beyond the merely personal. It might be a price they are willing to pay for the sweet lovin’ they feel they’re getting from the rest of the GOP package, but I didn’t sign on to get knocked around by someone else’s abusive boyfriend.

In this whole Grizzly Mamas Sarah Palin feminist brouhaha, I’ve never seen a feminist writer take on why it’s so uncomfortable to watch these women sell us out to the GOP in a funny and concise way. There are a tiny handful of funny feminists, but they still aren’t writing stuff this good. He also interviews the head of some Pro-family bigot organization for this piece, who spends nearly an hour obsessing over anal sex, and the following bit of absurd hilarity ensues:

But if Knight displays an obsession with the mechanics of sodomy – simultaneously mesmerized and sickened by the tumescent, pistoning images of it that must loop through his head on a near-constant basis – he is notably impervious to an image he conjures when I submit as how HIV is transmissible through normative, upstanding, God-sanctioned heterosexual congress as well.

“Not as easily,” he says. “The vagina is designed to accommodate a penis. It can take a lot of punishment.”

My regards to Mrs. Knight.

I hate to say this, but if feminists were this fucking hilarious, we would be in much better shape. Can’t someone – other than Alex Pareene, a dude – just absolutely skewer Michelle Bachmann properly and we’ll be rid of her?

And bonus points! He’s Canadian!

I try not to read TNC before bed…

because his writing is too beautiful, and makes me think too much. In this month’s Atlantic, on the new Malcolm X biography:

Conscious sects sprang up—some praising the creator sky god Damballah, some spouting Hebrew, and still others talking in Akan. Consciousness was inchoate and unorthodox—it made my father a vegetarian, but never moved him to wear dreadlocks or adopt an African name. What united us all was the hope of rebirth, of a serum to cure generational shame. What united us was our champion, who delivered us from self-hatred, who delivered my mother from burning lye, who was slaughtered high up in Harlem so that colored people could color themselves anew.

Ta-nehisi is too good.

Fallows makes peace with the new media…

In a fantastic article in April’s Atlantic. He deftly synthesizes and articulates all or our fears and then he shows us how to deal:

If we accept that the media will probably become more and more market-minded, and that an imposed conscience in the form of legal requirements or traditional publishing norms will probably have less and less effect, what are the results we most fear? I think there are four:

• that this will become an age of lies, idiocy, and a complete Babel of “truthiness,” in which no trusted arbiter can establish reality or facts;

• that the media will fail to cover too much of what really matters, as they are drawn toward the sparkle of entertainment and away from the depressing realities of the statehouse, the African capital, the urban school system, the corporate office when corners are being cut;

• that the forces already pulverizing American society into component granules will grow all the stronger, as people withdraw into their own separate information spheres;

• and that our very ability to think, concentrate, and decide will deteriorate, as a media system optimized for attracting quick hits turns into a continual-distraction machine for society as a whole, making every individual and collective problem harder to assess and respond to.

Our protection against these trends is partly defensive, or conservative. Economic history is working against “legacy” news organizations like the BBC, The New York Times, NPR, and most magazines you could name. But historical forces don’t play out on a set schedule, and can be delayed for a very long time. Economic history is also working against museums, small private colleges, and the farm-dappled French countryside, but none of them has to disappear next week. Even as it necessarily evolves, our news system will be better the longer it includes institutions whose culture and ambitions reach back to the pre-Gawker era, and it would be harder and costlier to try to re-create them after they have failed than to keep them on life support until their owners find a way to fit their values and standards into the imperatives of the new systems.

But the new culture also creates positive opportunities—as, it’s worth saying again, every previous disruption has.

And isn’t this awesome?:

At an individual level, I think the “distracted Americans” scare will pass. Either people who manage to unplug, focus, and fully direct their attention will have an advantage over those constantly checking Facebook and their smart phone, in which case they’ll earn more money, get into better colleges, start more successful companies, and win more Nobel Prizes. Or they won’t, in which case distraction will be a trait of modern life but not necessarily a defect. At the level of national politics, America is badly distracted, but that problem long predates Facebook and requires more than a media solution.

Part of the problem, part of the solution:

On female bylines. Vogue does a profile on the Syrian first lady, and I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but the excerpts are hilarious (from Max Fisher at the Atlantic:

“Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic–the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement,” opens the story, “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert,” which also appears in the March issue of Vogue magazine.

And:

After securing what would be many journalists’ dream — time alone with Bashar al-Assad — Vogue‘s Joan Juliet Buck wrote only that he is, “A precise man who takes photographs and talks lovingly about his first computer, he says he was attracted to studying eye surgery ‘because it’s very precise, it’s almost never an emergency, and there is very little blood.'”

But this might be my favourite:

it notes, for example, Bashar’s “startling” electoral victories but not that he was the only candidate. It lists one detail after another portraying Bashar and Asma al-Assad as fun, glamorous, American-style celebrities: trips to the Louvre, a story about the couple joking with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Asma’s effort to give Syria a “brand essence,” the fact that all three Assad children “go to a Montessori school,” and countless references to Christianity.

I love it. Oh yeah, I’m sure Bashar al-Assad is a real dreamboat.

Thanks for really making the most of that opportunity, Joan Juliet Buck. I mean, I get it, Vogue has to be Vogue, but honestly? The Assads? I’m sure they’re glamourous – so is the Gaddafi family – just ask Beyonce and Jay-Z . But I guess we can’t really expect Vogue to be part of the solution, can we?

But this is:  a new Tumblr that draws attention to lady journalists’ work around the web. Good stuff!

The Editors Respond…

Elissa Strauss, a blogger, actually asked the editors of major publications about the dearth of female bylines. Good for her. They said a variety of interesting things.

First, what Strauss thinks:

After reading their responses and having the opportunity to speak with some of them on the phone, it struck me that the byline gap would not be resolved simply by having more female editors, or seeking out more female writers. It would help, but it isn’t the whole picture.

To begin with, I believe that there just aren’t as many women aching to cover subjects like the economy and politics — and you have to want it bad to get a gig in today’s journalistic climate. I think women still stay away from certain subjects because of the macho, boys club atmosphere that surrounds them; I believe women — present company included — are generally more inclined to write cultural criticism and cover the arts.

A perhaps deeper issue is that we still live in a world where news itself is gendered, where matters like making and raising human beings, gender identity, sexuality, and childhood and adolescence are considered something for the ladies, while subjects like war and politics, which are more likely to be covered by male writers and reporters, hold the monopoly on general interest stories. But I also think both editors and reporters often lack imagination when it comes to the ties between culture and gender and politics and the economy, and that perhaps we would all benefit from a more holistic view of how the world works.

Lastly, I know these publications that I singled out for quotes are hardly the only publications at which women are poorly represented. I chose them not because they are the worst in terms of byline equity, but rather because they are places that I hold in highest esteem. As I said before, these magazines are the sources of some of the sharpest ideas and most erudite and enlightened thinkers around, which is why I think it matters so such that they have more female bylines on their pages:

David Remnick, from The New Yorker gets right to the point:

I read your piece, I read the piece in Slate by Meghan O’Rourke, who writes for us and was an editor here — and you are right. It’s certainly been a concern for a long time among the editors here, but we’ve got to do better — it’s as simple and as stark as that.

The rest of the responses are good too, Jonathan Chait from The New Republic, especially. Take a looksy.

Two more takes on lady writers…

Laura Miller at Salon weighs in on the VIDA report, pointing out that there are less books by women reviewed because there are less books by women published each year. Ruth Franklin at the New Republic and two of her female colleagues looked into it, and sure enough “magazines are reviewing female authors in something close to the proportion of books by women published each year”.  Laura Miller traces this back, annectdotally, to reader preferences: women read books by both women and men, whereas men tend to only read books by men. With the rather large exception of J.K. Rowling, and some of those old dolls writing mystery and crime thrillers, I have generally found this to be true. It starts early – children’s book publishers are wary of books with female protagonists written by female authors, according to Miller.

Then, over at Slate, Heather Mac Donald, a conservative intellectual, if you will, looks at female participation in magazines, newspapers, op-eds and Wikipedia, decrying quotas and “feminism’s intellectual decadence”, whatever that means.

She zestfully points out that where Meghan O’Rourke and others went wrong was saying that the gatekeepers (editors, publishers, etc.,) are the ones who are biased; Mac Donald notes that “the idea that these gender imbalances represent gatekeeper bias was demonstrably false, even before the Wikipedia reality check”. How? Well, Wikipedia famously has no gatekeepers, but has a female contributor rate of 13%, much lower than the 27% VIDA calculated in mainstream publications. Mac Donald attributes this to “the constant quoata-izing by gatekeepers on women’s behalf”. Gee thanks, Heather.

I do agree with this Mac Donald character (although I can’t figure out why there is a space in her last name), in that the Wikipedia mystery can be solved by simply noticing that men are A)much drawn to arcane and trivial bits of knowledge and B) enjoy using their free time to do things like POST ON WIKIPEDIA, while most women have other (or better) things to do with their free time. Yes, there are female geeks out there, but I’m going to guess that instead of toiling on some factually dubious Wiki article, they are perhaps working on writing something that will get past those totally non-sexist gatekeepers, who, according to Mac Donald, have quotas they must fill at some major publication.

I have taken the following from this dust-up:

1. Gatekeepers sometimes can be and are part of the problem – it’s just a fact that women’s opinions on “serious” topics are taken less seriously.
2. Reader preferences play a role in this, so, if you care, try and make some of your guy friends read some really smart books by the ladies, off the top of my head – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, Big Girls Don’t Cry by Rebecca Traister, The Possessed by Elif Batuman, or anything by Curtis Sittenfeld. I know this will be hard, because they are unlikely to be separated from their patron saints of douchebaggery – Roth, Updike, Delillo, etc. We’ve been through this.
3. There are some mega-talented and super-intelligent women working in journalism these days, Jane Mayer, Hanna Rosin, Rachel Maddow, Mary Rogan, etc., Please, read their shit because they’re awesome, not because they are women.
4. A point was made somewhere in one of these articles, that perhaps women writers don’t pitch to these magazines nearly as often as men do, because they are intimidated, or somehow afraid of rejections, or lacking the balls to do so, or something. This is a possibility, though I wouldn’t want to speak for all women, but I do consider my own reticence to put my work out there. But as Alizah Salario asked, “Why don’t I submit my work and pitch stories more often? I know I should. I just don’t. I hesitate. I do the dishes. I come back to my computer and my idea has soured. Is it because I’m a woman, or is it just because I’m me?” I ask myself this question all of the time. I think it’s both.
5. So, again, if you care about this, encourage any girls you know to pursue their ideas, to ask questions, to keep writing, to keep trying.