The New Yorker's Girls obsession

Well I thought I was done writing about Mikki Kendall, but I jumped into a Facebook argument between Susan Brownmiller and the New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum. Brownmiller posted a comment that she had been left out of Jezebel's feminist encyclopedia, which she found out via this NPR interview.

I couldn't resist pointing out that Brownmiller had been accused of racism during Mikki Kendall's #solidarityisforwhitewomen hatefest, and mentioned the ageist attack against Steinem and other feminist pioneers by Elena Haliczar and Versha Sherma. I also pointed out how much Kendall hated "Girls" because she thinks that Lena Dunham is racist because her cast is white. I knew that Nussbaum, like half the New Yorker staff, had written glowingly about the show.

Nussbaum's reply:

I sometimes have issues with other feminists, and other critics, and other writers in general, male or female, and when I do, I try to make reasoned arguments for the problems with what they've said. Things like an activist Twitter hashtag tend to catalyze responses I find illuminating, other ones I find cheap or harmful, and so on. That's the nature of these kinds of internet blowups. Including the one about Girls, which was searing, but which I personally found pretty helpful in thinking about diversity on television, even when I didn't agree with individual critiques of the show.

If Kendall ever finds out how much Nussbaum likes "Girls" I don't think Nussbaum would consider her critiques helpful - I think she would find herself accused of racism by Kendall.

Kendall's actually a lazy blogger - much of her karnythia Tumblr account is reposting of others' work and her just agreeing - although that's pretty much how most Tumblr accounts work (not a hotbed of originality) and that's why if somebody accuses you of racism - as Mikki Kendall did of me when I disagreed with her assertion that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were/are racists - it may be reposted many times, which is why it appears high on a Google search results list. 

Kendall posted a long screed against Lena Dunham ("Girls" is her project) written by somebody else here, and at the end just says, with her trademark grace and discernment:

Out of curiosity, how old do white women have to be before they’re responsible for their racism?

I've never seen "Girls" and so have no opinion on the show. Everything I've heard about it made it sound irritating, so I've been in no hurry to see it. And the fact that the New Yorker staff has such an obsession with it is also annoying. And I use the word "obsession" advisedly:

Here is Emily Nussbaum on Girls, in the New Yorker.

Here is Emily Nussbaum on Girls, again, in the New Yorker.

Here is Emily Nussbaum and Rebecca Mead on Girls in the New Yorker.

Here is Erin Overby on Girls, in the New Yorker.

Here is Patricia Marx on Girls, in the New Yorker.

Here is Richard Brody on Girls, in the New Yorker.

Here is Richard Brody on Girls, in the New Yorker.

Here is Richard Brody on Girls, again, in the New Yorker.

Here is Richard Brody on Girls, yet again, in the New Yorker.

Here is, yes, Richard Brody on Girls again, in the New Yorker.

Hilton Als defends Lena Dunham, and Girls, against charges or racism, in the New Yorker.

Guess who, on Girls again, in the New Yorker.

Margaret Talbot on Girls, in the New Yorker.

Anna Holmes on Girls, in the New Yorker.

Anna Holmes on whether Girls is racist, in the New Yorker.

Lorrie Moore on Girls, in the New Yorker.

Meghan Daum on Girls, in the New Yorker.

Oh dear god, Brody again on Girls in the New Yorker.

Why is this 70-something man

so obsessed

with this

television show

by Lena Dunham

called "Girls"?

Anyway, Salon is still publishing ethics-free Mikki Kendall's work, they just published something a month ago called The Real Mommy Wars. I will say that Kendall has made a leap, professionally - she doesn't blame white women for everything that's wrong with the world, at least not explicitly, and she doesn't make scurrilous accusations of attempted murder against anyone. But sad to say, it's her defamation inclination that gives her work any originality at all. Here's an excerpt from the article:

We need a conversation about the war on poor mothers, on disabled mothers, on indigenous mothers, on trans mothers, on mothers who are not in heterosexual relationships, on mothers who are migrant workers, on mothers doing the most with the least. Feminism is supposed to be about making it possible for all to achieve equality, not about playing games of one-upmanship.

You don't say. Feminists have been saying this since the first issue of Ms. Magazine.

Kendall wants you to believe, though, that feminism has been about one-upmanship. She doesn't provide any evidence for this implication though, but evidence is not the Kendall way - she says whatever the hell she wants and you are to accept it, purely on her authority. 

And that's what Salon considers worth paying to publish. And I thought the New York Times publishing Delia Ephron's anti-the color blue rant was bad.

Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown

I took this screen shot at 6:50 PM on Sunday, February 2, 2014. It had been announced a few hours earlier that Phillip Seymour Hoffman had died.

Dylan Farrow's open letter in which she charges Allen with molestation was posted online by the NYTimes Saturday night. Normally the New Yorker would be all over that celebrity tragedy crap - as can be attested by the speed with which they got one of their staff writers to do a piece about Hoffman within hours. They have yet to acknowledge Dylan Farrow's unique contribution to American celebrity history.

I saw the Hoffman news pop up on Facebook while I was arguing with fans of Woody Allen over their belief that Mia Farrow had attempted to destroy their idol through a conspiracy involving her daughter, Allen's therapist and the judge who refused to grant Allen custody of Dylan and the other kids. It's pretty clear that Allen, who could not tell the judge during the custody case the birthdays of the other children and who was pretty well known not to care much about children generally only cared about getting custody of Dylan.

I am inclined to believe Dylan Farrow, considering that prior to the incident in question Allen had been seeing a therapist, at Farrow's insistence, to try to end his compulsive habit of shoving his thumb into the little girl's mouth. This is covered in Farrow's autobiography What Falls Away, published 17 years ago.

But whether you believe Dylan Farrow or not, it's on the public record that Woody Allen is a grotesque human being. Farrow included the ruling of the custody battle with Allen, in which the judge said concerning custody, in part:

None of the witnesses who testified on Mr. Allen's behalf provided credible evidence that he is an appropriate custodial parent. Indeed, none would venture an opinion that he should be granted custody. When asked, even Mr. Allen could not provide an acceptable reason for a change in custody.

And concerning visitation he said:

The common theme of the testimony by the mental health witnesses is that Mr. Allen has inflicted serious damage on the children and that healing is necessary. Because as Dr. Brodzinsky and Dr. Herman observed, this family is in an uncharted therapeutic area, where the course is uncertain and the benefits unknown, the visitation structure that will best promote the healing process and safeguard the children is elusive. What is clear is that Mr. Allen's lack of judgment, insight, and impulse control make normal noncustodial visitation with Dylan and Satchel too risky to the children's well-being to be permitted at this time. 

It is unclear whether Mr. Allen will ever develop the insight and judgment necessary for him to relate to Dylan appropriately. My causation is the product of mr Allen's demonstrated inability to understand the impact that his words and deeds have upon the emotional well being of his children.
I believe that Mr. Allen will use Satchel in an attempt to gain information about Dylan and to insinuate himself in her good graces. I believe that Mr. Allen will, if unsupervised, attempt to turn Satchel against the other members of his family. I believe Mr. Allen to be desirous of of introducing Soon-Yi into the visitation arrangement without concern for the effect on Satchel, Soon-Yi, or the other members of the Farrow family. In short, I believe Mr. Allen to be so self-absorbed, untrustworthy, and insensitive, that he should not be permitted to see Satchel without appropriate professional supervision until Mr. Allen demonstrates that supervision is no longer necessary.

Allen may not have been tried for child molestation but it's clear that based on what the judge has heard, including the refusal of Allen's own witnesses to commit to claiming he would be a good custodial parent, he did not trust Allen with Dylan.

It's not entirely surprising that the New Yorker has refused to acknowledge Dylan Farrow's existence, since the New Yorker adores Woody Allen and publishes occasional pieces by him. A search of the New Yorker web site reveals that Allen has contributed a piece to the New Yorker each year for the past four years, and is mentioned in the New Yorker at least several times a month besides. Dylan Farrow is mentioned in passing in an affectionate profile of Allen from 1996, and that's it. Even more interesting, Ronan Farrow is not mentioned a single time. Farrow now has a job with MSNBC, as this Guardian article mentions. Both the Guardian and MSNBC no doubt share a big chunk of reader/viewer demographic with the New Yorker. That the New Yorker has never seen fit to mention Ronan Farrow once cannot possibly be just a coincidence.

It seems Ronan and Dylan Farrow are Soviet dissidents to the New Yorker's PRAVDA.

One of the fascinating aspects of Facebook is that it's very possible to end up talking to - and especially in my case arguing with - celebrities with whom, in a previous technology age you would never have access to.  This weekend I have been arguing with the Allen partisans, notably in a discussion started by Letty Cottin Pogrebin. She's a feminist celebrity, which means she's not exactly a household word, but she is a celebrity in my book.

Pogrebin and I are on the same page actually, Pogrebin's comment was:

Dylan was 7-years-old when Woody Allen started violating her. He has never been punished for this horrific abuse of his little girl. Not only has he gotten away with it all these years but he continues to win awards with impunity. When will the law catch up with him? Check out Nick Kristoff's blog.

But then I got into it with a lesser celebrity, Sheila Weller. OK, she's not exactly a celebrity but I own a book by her, Girls Like Us, which I blogged about last March, although I didn't know the same Sheila Weller was that author until I googled her, well into the debate. Since I rather enjoyed the book I would normally have been favorably inclined towards Weller, but when I commented it was odd that The New Yorker hadn't mentioned Dylan Farrow's piece, Weller defended the New Yorker, as you can see here:

Apparently Weller has a problem with my defending my position by providing evidence that in fact the New Yorker often does consider celebrity scandals worthy of mention and by the fact that Allen has contributed to the New Yorker in the past year. And for my efforts Weller decided to retaliate by psycho-analyzing me, suggesting I'm "unusually angry and sarcastic."

Her viciousness was not at all unusual in Allen partisans, I found. On the same thread, those of us who believed Dylan Farrow were informed we were part of an hysterical witch hunt, and Allen's plight was compared to - and I kid you not - black men who have been lynched.

A big issue with Allen partisans is the presumption of innocence. They had to be continually reminded that a comments thread on Facebook is not the same as a court of law, and that some people stating that they believed Dylan Farrow was telling the truth was not, actually, the equivalent of a rampaging lynch mob.

I think it's very likely that Woody Allen did molest Dylan and got away with it, and even if he didn't molest Dylan in the attic there's plenty of evidence in the public record that he's a loathsome person who has nevertheless lived a wonderful life of wealth and critical adoration. Much like the Noah Cross character in Chinatown, directed by Woody Allen's soul-twin Roman Polanski. Although Noah Cross was not adored, just wealthy. 

And the take-away of the whole affair, for those of us who do believe Dylan, is portrayed by Jack Nicholson's dazed character as he's led away in the last scene of the movie and somebody says to him: "forget it Jake, it's Chinatown."

New-fangled technologies are destroying our society!

The New Yorker typically carries many cartoons per issue - in fact on several occasions when I mentioned reading something in the New Yorker, I've been told by someone that they "like it for the cartoons" - as if to say, I guess, they're not one of those lah-dee-dah pretentious eggheads who reads New Yorker articles.

The New Yorker makes its archives available online, and you can see that its covers have grown more editorial, as opposed to simply decorative and seasonal artwork in the past 15 years.

So the sheer quantity of cartoons has inevitably lead to sacrificing originiality.

Case in point is this week's New Yorker cover, which expresses the New Yorker's typical curmudgeonly approach to technology - 

As one Facebook commenter said - and approved by 24 Likers last time I checked:

Lovely cover. The smartphone and tablet illuminating their respective users tells a lot about where we are right now as a society. We are "more connected" to each other, yet alienated from the very person sitting next to us.

I find this incredibly irritating. People who say such things must have a memory-span of a goldfish. It took me a couple of minutes to search the New Yorker Cartoon Bank to find several other examples of how demon technology is thwarting human social interactions - with fax machines, cell phones, and yes, newspapers.

This cartoon is from 2000.

Here is a cry for simpler days of human handwriting from 1996.

And here is a portent of the death of human face-to-face interaction from 1993 thanks to newspapers - curse you Johannes Gutenberg!

Parity Report update: I stopped doing a regular series on the lopsided ratio of male to female contributors to the New Yorker, but a quick spot-check of this May 5, 2014 issue is 3 female contributors out of a total of 11 (not counting cartoons/illustrations or poetry) - a 27% parity rate - which is typical of the New Yorker for its entire run to date. 

sucking David Mamet's dick

How the male theatre critics love David Mamet. He is their ideal, two-fisted, manly man who wasn't afraid to have his characters say 'fuck' before that became de rigeur.

And if you want to see the critics suck Mamet's dick hard, the place to go is The New Yorker magazine.

John Lahr worships Mamet and his play Glengarry, Glen Ross. That is the perfect Mamet play, having no female characters at all to drag down the sweaty glorious manliness of the scenario. Of course Mamet has no reason to include women since the play is about the brutality of business not about the brutality of sex.

As I've written before on this blog, one of the biggest fears of men of the theatre is the possibility of being thought of as soft and unmanly, and so they cling to the most manly male playwrights, revelling in tales of brutality and inhumanity. They have some respect for Tennessee Williams, mind you. After all, he did write A Streetcar Named Desire and Stanley Kowalski is a spendid sister-in-law raping brute of a man. But he never had the tough wimmin-disdaining atittude of a Mamet.

Hilton Als's review of Martin McDonagh's brutal play The Pillow Man - which expresses a revulsion of feminine weakness blatantly through the crucifixion of a little girl - compares McDonagh to all the favorite playwrights of his cohort: Mamet, Shepherd, Pinter, Beckett, Pirandello. Damn, Hilton Als loves him some Martin McDonagh. The only manly brutal playwright man he missed is Neil LaBute. But then LaBute's latest play Fat Pig was about feminine concerns so he might be out of the manly club for men at the moment.


Let's not forget the film critics in the New Yorker. David Denby also loves Mamet and his film Heist, but then how could a movie about a criminal with a "hipster moll" fail to charm a straight male New Yorker critic?

No suprise that The New Yorker speaks from a male perspective. It's fairly well known that although at least half the readers of The New Yorker are female, the vast majority of its contributors are male. A web site called Moby Lives documented this fact in 2002. But never fear, the New Yorker cannot be pussywhipped into affirmative action. In the February 6, 2006 issue there are 13 contributors listed, of which three have female names - and two of those contributed poems.

An amazingly high percentage of theatre critics are men. I watch the TV show Theatre Talk regularly, hosted by Susan Haskins. I don't know if I've ever seen a female theatre critic on the show. And in fact the only female critics in New York I know of (except for on the Internet) are Linda Winer of Newsday and a few in the Village Voice (although not the first-stringers).

So it's no surprise that manly Mamet is the toast of the town, since the town in this case has a male to female ratio of about 4:1.

The latest installment of Mametphilia is expressed in this week's New Yorker in the form of Hilton Als review of a revival of Sexual Perversity in Chicago.

In Mamet, American has found its chief chronicler of the ways in which what lies between the thighs does and doesn't relates to what lies in the heart

By "America" of course, Als means men, but then you knew that because that IS the default human being in these United States.

Only a man would consider Mamet a suitable chronicler of love and lust. Mamet's Oleanna makes clear just how much Mamet dreads the possibility of female power. Which might make him a perfect chronicler for a guy from The New Yorker, but not for some of us other Americans.

The New Yorker April 17, 1926

The New Yorker from April 1926

This cover of the New Yorker from April 1926 does not look like it was created in 1926. I might have believed 1966 but even more 1996 or 2016. It's not only the clean lines and the appearance of the woman drinking with a straw, it's that bright pink, which seems so contemporary, rather than from a decade before my mother was born.

When this cover was printed, few people knew who Hitler was, and nobody knew what atomic bombs or TV or penicillin were, let alone laptop computers and blogging and Wikipedia.

The artist is Clayton Knight, who had a busy life - he was a WWI aviator before he became an artist.
Then he created the Clayton Knight Committee to prepare to fight the Axis while the US was still neutral in the beginning of WWII. So it wasn't only his illustration work that was forward-looking.

In spite of its cover, the inside of the issue is believably from 1926. It features a profile of F. Scott Fitzgerald and family which, although "The Great Gatsby" had been published a year before, does not mention the book once, while it mentions "This Side of Paradise" several times. This must have been the last time Fitzgerald was profiled without Gatsby being mentioned.

Fun fact: "The Great Gatsby" enters public domain in nine and a half months.

The author of the New Yorker piece keeps raving about how attractive Fitzgerald is, but I don't see it. Certainly his center-parted 1920s hair style did him no favors.

The rest of the issue is very much from 94 years ago, with reviews of silent movies and inexplicable humor. I've written about the New Yorker magazine many times on this blog, and back in 2010 I wrote about incomprehensible examples of humor of the time. Unfortunately the cartoons are no longer visible in the blog post, I deleted the original image files without thinking.

I found another example of comedic bafflement in this April 1926 issue. The caption reads:

"Tripe? Oh, I'm mad about trip!" "Me too. I always say I'd do almost anything for a bit o'tripe."

 It's by an artist named Peter Arno who was an important contributor to the New Yorker's early tone. This cartoon is apparently the first appearance of what became "The Whoops Sisters" described in a Vanity Fair article about Arno:

The Whoops Sisters are two middle-aged foulmouths, later named Pansy Smiff and Abagail Flusser, who spout double entendres (“Whoops, I lost me muff!”) as they stumble about tipsy in New York, with their bloomers visible to appalled young men. In a 1927 appearance, the sisters gleefully toboggan through a cemetery, shouting, “Whoops! Mind the tombstone!”

Dorothy Parker was an enthusiastic fan of the Whoops Sisters, which her disapproving friend Edmund Wilson saw as an example of her “cruel and disgusting” sense of humor. But Parker had lots of company, including Benchley and Fitzgerald. Arno didn’t offer Prohibition tut-tutting about their drinking. He celebrated their rudeness. “These, even more than the introduction of the one-line joke, were the red, red revolutionists of the joke world,” Benchley wrote of them, finding the ladies “sinister” and “macabre,” and that, with their arrival, “fifty years of picturized joking in this country toppled over with a crash.”

So the remark about tripe is an example of their rudeness or it's a double entendre? I guess? Does "lost me muff" really count as a double entendre?

I noticed the cartoon because the rest of that issue, and every other issue of the New Yorker in the 1920s is crawling with flappers, and the Whoops sisters are wearing long frilly old-fashioned skirts. Which I guess makes sense, they're supposed to be middle-aged and flappers were young things.

French culture was a symbol of all things fancy in 1926, too, and another thing that jumped out at me in this issue was the conversation between a married couple in an ad for a shaving cream called Latherite.

The wife suggests the husband try her shaving cream and he says "Egad, has the day come when my spouse shall even prescribe my shaving cream for me?"

To which she responds in French, sans translation: "Ce n'est pas la pomme seulement, mon ange, qu'Eve peut offrir à son mari aujourd'hui!"

Which I am proud to say I was able to translate without cheating as "It is  not only the apple, my angel, that Eve can offer to her husband today."

Although why did she suddenly bust into French? Apparently that's what readers of The New Yorker would want. Below the conversation it says "Latherite will appeal especially to readers of The New Yorker because it's so refreshingly different. It contains lanolin, menthol...

Lanolin and menthol are standard ingredients in shaving cream now but maybe Latherite was a pioneer and at the time lanolin and menthol were refreshingly different. Just like throwing untranslated French into your advertisement I guess.

But I don't get the comparison of suggesting your husband try Latherite with Eve offering Adam the apple. Were lanolin and menthol subversive in 1926?

Speaking of New Yorker parity...

The magazine VIDA: Women in Literary Arts is on the case of the New Yorker - and other publications, with the feature The Count which has nothing to do with Count von Count, you big geek.

Here is their pie chart for how the New Yorker did in 2010:


Which translates into a 26% parity rate for the year.

Now the favorite excuse for why the parity for these various high-falutin' literary publications is half of what it should be in the twenty-first century is because women just don't submit work as much as men.

There are two problems with this argument as it applies to the New Yorker in particular - the New Yorker uses mostly the same cast of characters week after week.

Looking at this week's issue, and not counting the regular critics/columnists, and editor Devid Reminick, I see a bunch of people I recognize from other New Yorker issues: Ryan Lizza, Jane Mayer, Judith Thurman, Malcolm Gladwell, Jill Lepore.

It's a big insiders club. So the slush pile has little impact on gender parity.

Which may explain the second problem with this argument - the parity rate hasn't budged since at least 1971. Since I have handy access to the New Yorker archives I did a random sampling of four issues from 1971. Here's the breakdown:

February 13, 1971
Total bylines: 13
Female: 4
Male: 9
Parity score 30.77%

June 12, 1971
Total bylines: 12
Female: 3
Male: 9
Parity score: 25%

August 14, 1971
Total bylines: 11
Female: 2
Male: 9
Parity score: 18%

November 13, 1971
Total bylines: 19
Female: 3
Male: 16
Parity score: 15.79%

Average parity: 22%. So based on this random sample, parity has improved in 40 years by 4%.

But as is the case now, back in 1971 the same names pop up on the byline - Calvin Trillin, Edmund Wilson, John Updike. It doesn't hurt female representation that at that time Pauline Kael was movie critic and Edith Oliver was the off-Broadway theatre critic - both those spots are filled by men now.

But even discounting the in-crowd policy, are we to assume that women are only 4% more ambitious and career-oriented than in 1971? That would be odd, considering that 45% of all American women were in the workforce in 1970, the number was 60% in 2007. The rate for American men at the same time went from 82% in 1970 down to 75% in 2007.

So if the parity rate has changed so little in that amount of time, what can we conclude? That the New Yorker is an exclusive club that feels that a steady three men for every woman contributor ratio is just about right.

free plug for The New Yorker

When I first subscribed to the New Yorker, lo these fifteen or so years ago, I thought it was a good bargain. Not only did it have good, often great writing, but it was a weekly. I adored getting a magazine once a week, especially back fifteen years ago before everything was on the Internet.

And speaking of which - thanks to the Internet the New Yorker is an even better value - more than twice as worth it as it was fifteen years ago because the archives of the entire run of the magazine - from 1925 - is available to subscribers online. And what's really neat is that the archives are images of the original magazine, not just text. So you can see all the antiquated advertisements. Like this one, which is kind of poignant considering it's from the July 20, 1929 issue, just three months before the big stock market crash:



Your boat is apparently a yacht. The radio probably cost almost as much as the boat.

Many of the advertisements from the 20s are very elegant line drawings, but there's no mystery. They're trying to sell you silk stockings, or a Packard automobile or Spud cigarettes.

But the cartoons are absolutely inscrutable... I mean... wha?



Wikipedia tells me that Payne Whitney was a famous rich guy of the time... but I still don't get it.

Until I checked out the back issues of the New Yorker online I had always thought Dorothy Parker's book review column was called "Constant Reader" but it was actually signed by Constant Reader and called "Reading and Writing." It was in the October 20 1928 issue in which she reviewed A. A. Milne's book and famously ended it with: "And it is that word 'hummy' my darlings, that marks the first place in "The House at Pooh Corner" at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up."

This is the cartoon that appears on that same page... whah???



I guess the joke is that she's asked for a book about a cardinal who has a mistress. And the guy behind her is embarrassed? Maybe?

I was curious to see what the New Yorker had to say about the Beatles over the years, but was disappointed that for the most part it was pretty uninspired stuff. But I found this little slice-of-Beatle-life interesting, from the February 22, 1964 issue:

The ones they screamed loudest for were Ringo, the drummer, and Paul, who was doing most of the singing because George, who usually does most of the singing, had laryngitis or something.

Afterward, I went around backstage to the dressing rooms where the Beatles were changing their shirts. 'I'm soaking,' said the Beatle named John. 'Got a ciggy? John and Ringo and George left in their limousine for the Plaza, where the Beatles were staying, but Paul got left behind, so I climbed into a taxi with him and one of the public-relations men. At first, there was a taxi full of Beatle fans behind us, but it got swept away by traffic. Paul said that the Beatles had never had an audience at a rehearsal before and that it made them feel good to be playing before people instead of just into space. Then Paul said New York traffic was bad but London traffic was just as bad and Paris traffic was worse, because Frenchmen were maniac drivers. Then the public-relations man said he had lost fifty pounds, and Paul said he couldn't tell how much that was unless it was translated into stone.

Apparently the writer confused John with George because anybody who knows anything about the Beatles knows that George was most certainly not at any time in the history of the Beatles in the running for the Beatle who usually does most of the singing. But at least the cartoons were much more scrutable by the 1960s. In fact the cartoon that is on the same page as this Beatles piece would not be entirely out of place in a recent issue of the New Yorker. Although the couple would probably be a bit more attractive.



But there's so much more over the years - there's the Salinger story Hapworth 16, 1924, which was never published anywhere but in the New Yorker; there is the legendary Vietnam articles; there are all the contemporary reviews of plays and novels and movies, and on and on. Right up to the present day, and the hugely important article on the Koch brothers which I blogged about the week it was published.

So I guess I will have to read every issue of the New Yorker now.

And "The Cardinal's Mistress."

stupid sexist New Yorker

I've been a New Yorker subscriber for fifteen years now, ever since I discovered it was a weekly periodical with some really good writing in it. The New Yorker is a bastion of the liberal and the literary. Women are also liberal and literary - more so than men are, even, according to various studies.

So you'd think the New Yorker wouldn't be sexist at all. But it is sexist. The first way it is sexist is its persistently lopsided male:female contributor ratio. Now this ratio is not uncommon - all prestige fields are dominated by men. In fact, some have argued and provided evidence for the possibility that any field that women come to dominate is automatically demoted, prestige-wise because it is felt to have become too polluted by girl cooties.

But the New Yorker, being the most liberal and literary publication around should be better than that.

The indispensible blog The Sexist has been having an awesome Man Madness tournament to determine which organizations in the D.C. area are most male-dominated. They don't include The New Yorker, so I did my own review.

I don't look at the New Yorker's org chart the way The Sexist does, but rather the contributor roster. Let's just look at a selection from 2010 at random - because I don't have all day - also I'm not counting the cartoonists as contributors although the gender ratio for cartoonists is probably even more skewed in the XY direction. Also not counted, "web only" content:

January 4, 2010
Contributors: 18
Female contributors: 3

January 18, 2010
Contributors: 19
Female contributors: 7

February 1, 2010
Contributors: 24
Female contributors: 9

February 8, 2010
Contributors: 21
Female contributors: 3

March 22, 2010
Contributors: 24
Female contributors: 3

April 5, 2010
Contributors: 22
Female contributors: 6

Note that not only did no issue have more female than male contributors, most of these issues didn't even come close to 50% female contributors.

To return to the cartoonists - not only are there more male cartoonists, but the New Yorker's legacy of sexism is even more obvious in its cartoons. Not just the obvious belief on the part of most of its cartoonists that male is the default gender (and of course our entire society runs on that belief) but every now and then you get the most crass regressive olde tyme bullshit - like the cartoon in this week's New Yorker:



The gal-pal sister blog of The Sexist, called Tiger Beatdown, examines the pernicious effects of that Mars-Venus propaganda in her review of (500) Days of Summer:

And that is where shit gets REAL complex. Because, like: I have been in the situation of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in this film. It’s a common situation. It’s not a fun situation, necessarily. It’s also not a situation which mandates going on a rant about “whores” in one’s place of work, but whatever. The thing is, I think I find it easier to maintain my high-mindedness and cool in those situations than another person might. Specifically, a person who is a dude. Despite the much-vaunted crazy clingy psycho bitchiness of my gender, I think it’s easier for me to be gracious in those situations precisely because I am a girl.

Because girls frankly expect this behavior from guys. We are told, continually and throughout our lives and in every major media outlet and dating guide, that Guys Are Just Like That. Or the vast majority of them, anyway. Guys want physical contact, girls want emotional contact, we’re told; therefore, if we make physical contact with a guy, we should not expect emotional contact to follow. Granted, to hope is not to expect, and the entire courting structure is basically designed to allow us to perform a semi-realistic risk analysis, but girls are still basically informed that this entire deal, this sex and/or dating deal, is a game of poker and you shouldn’t play unless you can afford to lose something, and you should be cautious with your bets.

Dudes, on the other hand, are apparently entirely unprepared for this. Girls want emotional contact, they’re told, and guys want physical contact; therefore, if they make emotional contact with a girl, they can reasonably expect it to be reciprocated. And when it’s not, it’s like gravity suddenly stopped working. This just isn’t how things go; it’s an outrage; she’s cold, evil, a monster. Or at least this is what I can uncover from the dudely works of Nathan Rabin and (500) Days of Summer. They’re playing the same game of poker as the rest of us, these guys, but they think it’s play money. Which means that when it’s time to pay up, that sucks extra-hard.

So, yes: (500) Days of Summer is a movie about a boy who acts like a girl and a girl who acts like a boy. But here’s why I’m not thrilled about this: If Zooey Deschanel were actually a boy, and in this situation, most people would not perceive her as the problem. She wouldn’t be a monster, a whore, a freak; she’d just be a dude. And she’d get to complain about the clingy psycho bitch she fucked who’s now, like, putting all this pressure on, that bitch is fucking CRAZY, she just hooked up with the girl, she didn’t buy her an engagement ring, etc. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt, were he an actual girl, would be getting some sympathy from his lady friends, true, but he would also be getting well-meaning lectures about how Dudes Are Like That, and what did he expect, and he needs to be more cautious about these things and not put out so easily, and has he ever read a book called “He’s Just Not That Into You?” He should read that book. He would be told, to be blunt, that he was the real problem in this situation.

So the verdict, in case you were wondering, is that if girls fall for boys, and those boys don’t fall for them, they are clingy bitches. And if girls don’t fall for boys, and those boys DO fall for them, they are heartless bitches. No matter how this situation goes, if there turns out to be an inequality of desire, you’re getting called a bitch.

New feature - The New Yorker Parity Report

I'm certainly not the first person to notice the crazy lopsided gender ratios of high-end literary-type magazines like the New Yorker, as this article in Jezebel demonstrates:

The current issue of The Atlantic boasts five-and-a-half pieces by women (Katherine Tiedemann and Peter Bergen share a byline on this story, hence the "half") out of 18 total stories.

The Nation has four-and-a-half pieces by women out of 17 articles in its January issue. (Teachers' union head Randi Weingarten shares a byline with Pedro Noguera.)

The January Harper's is a little worse. It includes 21 bylined stories, but only three pieces from women writers: Lynn Freed, Deb Olin Unferth, and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. Barbara Dobrowska and Tom Littlewood translated a piece together, as did Clare Cavanagh and Adam Zagajewski.

A look at the page of contents for the January 13 New York Review of Books reveals 21 essays, including six-and-a-half by women critics: Mary Beard, Arlene Croce (who used to be the New Yorker's dance critic), Sue Halpern, Amy Knight, Margo Picken, and Ingrid D. Rowland; Econo-couple Paul Krugman and Robin Wells contribute a piece under a shared byline.

Among literary magazines, N+1's last issue had out of its 16 items only one piece of fiction, one essay, and one review by women contributors. (There is one un-bylined piece of commentary.)

The Believer is doing comparatively well. Out of 23 bylined pieces, its current issue boasts poetry by Tracy K. Smith, an essay by Unferth, a review by M. Lynx Qualey, and a conversation between John Ehle, Michael Ondaatje, Linda Spalding, and Leon Rooke. Two women (Thalia Field and Bianca Casady) are interviewed (by male writers) and three of the books reviewed in the issue are by women.

Although I'd take "Mag Hag", the author of the Jezebel article a little more seriously as a feminist if they didn't write: "A subscriber boycott is a pretty ballsy move, and I certainly hope it will make the editors there think differently."

Yeah, a "ballsy" move. Like something that someone who has balls would do. Who has balls again? Oh yes, men. Maleness=courage. Who doesn't have balls? Oh, right, pussies.

OMFG - with friends like that...

Anyway, since this article from back in January, the New Yorker appears to have changed its gender balance NOT AT ALL. I'm sure the New Yorker's not the only one. But I'm not ambitious enough to track all those magazines (and the Atlantic and Vanity Fair are pretty right-wing anyway) so I'll stick with the one I subscribe to.

The New Yorker Parity Report
A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

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A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: +7.14%

November 14, 2011

Total writers - 21
male - 15
female - 6
gender parity score: 28.57%

Last week's score
Total writers - 14
male - 11
female - 3
gender parity score: 21.43%

The Mystery of Vanity Fair

I have only a short blogroll, and James Wolcott's blog is on it. He writes well, he's witty, he's liberal and he loves to mock right-wingers. He did claim to be a friend of the loathsome Camille Paglia (I use loathsome for brevity's sake, in place of "misogynistic", "pretentious", "shallow", "anti-Semitic", "self-infatuated", "empty-headed", "crackpot" and "friend of Rush Limbaugh") but he only mentioned her the one time, so I forgave him, especially with all the Pajamas Media hilarity he's conveyed lately.

His most recent blog post promotes his bread and butter job at Vanity Fair magazine, but sorry, James, (Wools? Wolly? Cotty? one wonders what the wags of the Vanity Fair set have jocularly dubbed him) that's where I draw the line.

Once or more a year, I really don't keep track, The New Yorker has a "fashion" issue. Half the magazine is wasted on stupid glamor ads and even an article or two about fashion.

It seems to me that subscribing to Vanity Fair would be like getting the fashion issue of the New Yorker every month.

Vanity Fair, like the New Yorker, is part of the Condé Nast family of publications, but so is Glamour and Vogue and Bride's, Elegant Bride and Modern Bride (what, you can't be both an Elegant AND a Modern Bride? And what's with all the fucking Bride magazines anyway? Are there really enough Brides to read them all? Or is the bifurcation of brides into elegant and modern part of a clever plan to force modern, elegant brides to purchase two magazines to cover all their archetypal bases?)

You have the New Yorker for fiction, non-fiction (including some of the best political and medical reporting around) reviews, arts and culture listings and cartoons - on a weekly schedule. If you want fashion you go to your Glamour-Vogue-Bride option. Having Vanity Fair trying to cover both New Yorker territory and G-V-B3 territory is the opposite of the clever modern/elegant bride scheme. So who is Vanity Fair aimed at? Someone who is too cheap to subscribe to both the New Yorker and one or more of the fashion mags? Hardly what advertisers are looking for, is it?

I mean, how can anybody over 40 care about fashion anyway? Once you hit 40, unless you're Madonna and you work out 12 hours a day and spend whatever it takes to maintain an unnaturally youthful appearance, nobody's all that interested in looking at you, and that includes men in spite of all the "men age better" bullshit you hear. They don't age better appearance-wise, they age into wealth.

But even if you are under 40, do you really need to buy a magazine to figure out what to wear? On a monthly basis? Even if you're wealthy enough to afford to buy designer fashions?

Not only does Vanity Fair care about fashion, it indulges in - nay, sets the standard for the Best Dressed List. The Best Dressed List, like the word loathsome, encompasses so many things I hate: celebrity worship, plutocraphilia, fashion obsession, and gossip-column discourse.

THIS JUST IN: The New York Times reports today that many of the Best Dressed Lists don't even have integrity!

"Everyone has a best-dressed list now, to the point that it has become empty and meaningless," said Amy Fine Collins, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and one of the guardians of what is generally considered the most authoritative of American best-dressed lists. It was created in the 1940's by Eleanor Lambert, the fashion publicist. The list had such prestige that those selected, women like Nan Kempner, Babe Paley, Carolina Herrera and Lynn Wyatt, referred to themselves as B.D.L.'s.

Before Ms. Lambert died in 2003, she passed it on to four editors of Vanity Fair, Ms. Collins; Aimee Bell, a senior articles editor; Reinaldo Herrera, a contributing editor; and Graydon Carter, the top editor, with the idea that the magazine would continue publishing an annual list. For two years it has done so.

But Vanity Fair's 2006 list has been put off, at least for a few months. The sending out of ballots to nearly 2,000 fashion editors and journalists, normally completed by now, has not yet begun. The reason?

"There were too many other lists," said Ms. Collins, a member of the B.D.L. Hall of Fame, a distinction given to those elected so often that their sartorial superiority goes without saying. "Six or seven years ago you wouldn't find any others, but when Ms. Lambert disappeared, it became wide-open season. It opened the door to the idea that best-dressed lists are a universally interesting journalistic undertaking."

Vanity Fair's list will return once it can regain an element of surprise, Ms. Collins said. She said she suspected the other magazines had attempted to "jump the gun on Vanity Fair." But she is having none of it. "What the others represent," she said, "are special favors to the darlings of whatever magazine is in question. Or it looks like they are doing favors or payback to P.R. people."

When our very Best Dressed Lists have become empty and meaningless we are truly slouching towards Gomorrah.

As if I needed another reason to hold Vanity Fair in low esteem (besides that they also publish war-monger turncoat Holocaust-denier-supporter - ah fuck it, loathsome Christopher Hitchens), I see that they feature that stalker Jennifer Aniston on their cover. Well, I'm sure Vanity Fair featured Aniston first, before imitation rendered it empty and meaningless (and obnoxiously ubiquitous.)

So why DOES Wolcott write for Vanity Fair? They're full up at The New Yorker? He can't really be interested in fashion can he? Cause based on the pix I've seen, he's well over 40 and ain't nobody looking at him for a hobby. Maybe fashion is some sort of genteel erotic fetish?

ANISTON! I said QUIT IT BITCH! No means no! I'm getting a court order to keep your face out of my life!

Who keeps paying David Brooks to write worthless crap???

Now we know why the New Yorker can't hire more women writers - it has to save that money to pay David Brooks to write utterly worthless crap.

Brooks's "think" piece, Social Animal is the worst dreck I've seen in a magazine with intellectual/literary pretensions since Vanity Fair paid Christopher Hitchens to write an incoherent misogynist screed called "Why Women Aren't Funny".

Brooks's inability to grasp the complexities of all social realities would be astounding in anybody this side of fourth grade, much less from somebody who makes a living as a writer for the biggest media outlets. But I can't express the baffled middle-brow inanity of Brooks any better than Tom Tomorrow:



More Tom Tomorrow commentary on the travesty that is the output of David Brooks here.

But it is just Brooks's intellectual near-sightedness that makes him a perfect candidate for the theories of evolutionary psychology. "Social Animal" only mentions "evolutionary psychologist" once, in reference to David Buss (for a perspective on the outrageously bad "science" practiced by Buss, take a look at this excerpt from "Adapting Minds" by David J. Buller) but the article is completely informed by evolutionary psychology. In fact, if you took all the articles about evolutionary psychology from all mainstream publications from the last twenty-five years and rolled them into a big gray ball of mush, you'd have Brooks's article. All the biggest EvPsych tropes are there.

I won't get into them all now, it would take hours. If only my full-time job was debunking evolutionary psychology - I would be extremely happy. Thanks to this Brooks article though, I bumped into what is surely one of the greatest magazine article titles in the history of the world:

Is Evolutionary Psychology Total, Utter, and Dangerous Bullshit? by Stanton Peele. And this is in Psychology Today, to my utter amazement. I thought PT was completely in bed with evolutionary psychology.

But the one, perfect example of the absolute, utter and blindingly manifest (to anybody but editors at the New York Times and the New Yorker) black void of literary and intellectual value that is the musings of David Brooks is this bit from "Social Animal" :

Erica was impressed by him: women everywhere tend to prefer men who have symmetrical features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than they are."

Now this is all standard party-line evolutionary psychology, iterated and re-iterated for the past twenty-five years. But the beauty part is that just a few weeks ago, in the December 13, 2010 issue of the New Yorker the "symmetrical features" study was completely debunked in "The Decline Effect":

In the three years following, there were ten independent tests of the role of fluctuating asymmetry in sexual selection, and nine of them found a relationship between symmetry and male reproductive success. It didn’t matter if scientists were looking at the hairs on fruit flies or replicating the swallow studies—females seemed to prefer males with mirrored halves. Before long, the theory was applied to humans. Researchers found, for instance, that women preferred the smell of symmetrical men, but only during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. Other studies claimed that females had more orgasms when their partners were symmetrical, while a paper by anthropologists at Rutgers analyzed forty Jamaican dance routines and discovered that symmetrical men were consistently rated as better dancers.

Then the theory started to fall apart. In 1994, there were fourteen published tests of symmetry and sexual selection, and only eight found a correlation. In 1995, there were eight papers on the subject, and only four got a positive result. By 1998, when there were twelve additional investigations of fluctuating asymmetry, only a third of them confirmed the theory. Worse still, even the studies that yielded some positive result showed a steadily declining effect size. Between 1992 and 1997, the average effect size shrank by eighty per cent.

… For Simmons, the steep rise and slow fall of fluctuating asymmetry is a clear example of a scientific paradigm, one of those intellectual fads that both guide and constrain research: after a new paradigm is proposed, the peer-review process is tilted toward positive results. But then, after a few years, the academic incentives shift—the paradigm has become entrenched—so that the most notable results are now those that disprove the theory.

This shouldn't have been hard for Brooks or the New Yorker editors to find - as of this writing it's in the New Yorker web site's "Most Popular" article list.

Paul Krugman often refers to the zombie lies of economics - claims that have been proven false, but keep coming back no matter how many times they are debunked.

And the reason they won't die a natural death is because somebody wants to believe in them. Clearly some editor at the New Yorker wants to believe in the just-so stories of evolutionary psychology. Otherwise they wouldn't pay the intellectually-limited but over-employed David Brooks to keep spreading them.

Our Contributors

I've neglected the New Yorker Parity Report in the past several months. My only excuse is that the monotony was getting to me.  During the time I was tracking the female contributor ratio - almost a year - not a single issue of the New Yorker had an equal number of male and female contributors.

The closest to parity was July 30, 2012 issue which had a 38% female contributor rate (parity would be 50%) and would even have made parity except for the three male poets in the issue.

This week (December 10, 2012) the parity rate is 15%.

They no longer allow a non-paywall link to the magazine's table of contents but they do to the "Shouts and Murmurs" pages (posted here for your convenience with a star next to each female contributor) and the list of contributors demonstrates a parity rate of 17%. These are their regulars, not one-off writers, and is probably the real barometer of the New Yorker's acceptance of female participation.

As an experiment, I clicked on a back issue of the New Yorker at random. I got the February 9, 1981 issue - 30 years ago. Out of the ten bylines, four are female. That's right, 30 years ago the parity rate for a randomly-selected issue of the New Yorker was 40%.

At the rate the New Yorker is going it will have an equal number of male and female bylines... never.

New Yorker Parity Report - July 30, 2012

Looks like The New Yorker is doing things differently now - it no longer provides a permanent link per issue date to its online table of contents, so I can't provide a link to it from this blog as I have been doing since October 2011.

Now you have to link directly to the online copy of the magazine, which only subscribers can view.

So the New Yorker parity report will look a bit different from now on, as you can see. Now you can count the authors and determine the gender imbalance yourself by looking at the table of contents image... but I'll still do the math.

And they were SO CLOSE to parity for July 30, 2012. But since the reckoning is done by the bylines, and I do include poetry, they failed - the three male poets skewed the gender balance once again.

---

The New Yorker Parity Report

The New Yorker, July 30, 2012

A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

---

A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: +13%

Total writers:13
male:8
female: 5
gender parity score: 38%

Last week
Total writers: 20
male: 15
female: 5
gender parity score: 25%

New Yorker Parity Report - July 2, 2012

As I was saying yesterday, the New Yorker was only 2 - 3 writer gender-flips from parity in last week's issue. As if the New Yorker suddenly woke up and realized it was on the very edge of gender parity, it veered off in the exact opposite direction - two more male writers and two fewer female writers this week, to "achieve" a parity reduction of 5%. That was a close call, New Yorker!

The New Yorker Parity Report

A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

---

A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: -5%

July 2, 2012

Total writers: 21
male: 15
female: 6
gender parity score: 33%

Last week
Total writers: 21
male: 13
female: 8
gender parity score: 38%

do editors do anything?

As a blogger, I don't have an editor. Which means I write exactly what I want, but it means I don't have a second pair of eyes to vet what I've written. But having an editor doesn't prevent professional writers from including absurdities in their work.

Technically I am a professional writer - I make a living as a technical writer. And I've even made a tiny pittance from plays of mine. You could even argue that since I do make money through ads on this blog that counts as professional too, in that vague 21st-century way. But in spite of all this, I usually don't think of myself as a professional writer.

And in any case, I hold Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights, and New Yorker writers to a high standard since they presumably do have editors. But the things that get by these editors...

I've already blogged a couple of times about John Lahr's turn of phrase for his review of Adam Rapp's RED LIGHT WINTER in the New Yorker - "(Rapp) brings memorable news about the heart, telling us both how it fools itself and how it kills itself."

First off, I hate when reviewers presume to use the royal "we" - reviewers should speak for themselves, not try to implicate others in their often ill-considered opinions. But I digress.

There is a metaphorical tradition of giving the heart, and the brain and other body parts independent agency. And I can maybe accept "the heart fools itself" as a workable metaphor. But kills itself? A broken heart might lead to suicide, but the heart does not kill itself. To say the heart kills itself is just overwrought portentousness.

But I can imagine the New Yorker editors being intimated by John Lahr, since he is the son of the Cowardly Lion; has written a book/movie about Joe Orton; collaborated with (and sued) Elaine Stritch, and generally hobnobs with the famous and well-connected, of both historical and contemporary varieties. Who would have the nerve to laugh in Lahr's face over the heart killing itself metaphor, when it could come back and bite them later (the fact of them laughing, not the heart.)

I adore ANGELS IN AMERICA and was prepared to love everything by Tony Kushner, but that didn't work out. I bought his book "Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, A Play, Two Poems and A Prayer." I was underwhelmed by most of it. His essays have good stuff in them, but they also ramble and repeat.

But it is the best essay in this collection, the foreward to ANGELS called "With A Little Help from My Friends" that has the most annoying passage. Kushner notes his relationship to friend and artistic collaborator Kimberly T. Flynn - very nice and well done. But then there's this bit, and I'm not sure why it's there:

...I was introduced to Elizabeth I. McCann, who said to me: "I've been worried about how you were handling all this, till I read that you have an Irish woman in your life. Then I knew you were going to be fine."

I assume he put that in there to curry favor with an important theatre producer, which McCann is, especially at that time, but ye gods it's such an annoying thing for anybody to say, I half expected he was deliberately trying to make her sound stupid by reporting those words.

I'm Irish (mostly) myself, but I hate all that ethnic-identity crap. And what a simplistic sentiment. But I could see somebody saying that to make small talk, because small talk is a form of communication that has a very different set of rules from all other forms of communication. Inanity is perfectly acceptable in small talk. But there's no reason to share such inanity out of its small talk context.

You'll be fine with an Irish woman in your life? Why? Because she'll brew you a big ole jug of poteen??? What the hell?

The final straw that prompted this blog tirade was in the New Yorker too. I happened to read an article by Adam Gopnik, a long-time staff writer at the New Yorker called "What Would Jesus Do? that was fine - better than fine, interesting and well written for the most part, but the entire effect of excellence was ruined for me when I got to this:

as the Bacchae knew, we always tear our Gods to bits, and eat the bits we like.

He says "THE" Bacchae so presumably he's talking about the one by Euripides. But no gods are torn to bits in The Bacchae - Pentheus, the king of Thebes who refuses to believe that Dionysus is actually the son of Zeus, and therefore a god, is torn apart by Bacchants at the instigation of Dionysus.

So a king is torn up, not a god. And even more - Pentheus is not eaten, his body parts are flung around and his mother takes his head, bewitched by Dionysus into thinking it's the head of a mountain lion:

Scattered lies his corpse, part beneath the rugged rocks, and part amid the deep dark woods, no easy task to find; but his poor head hath his mother made her own, and fixing it upon the point of a thyrsus, as it had been a mountain lion's, she bears it through the midst of Cithaeron, having left her sisters with the Maenads at their rites. And she is entering these walls exulting in her hunting fraught with woe, calling on the Bacchic god her fellow-hunter who had helped her to triumph in a chase, where her only prize was tears.

So the Bacchae tells us no such thing that Gopnik claims. I would argue that rather Euripides is saying that gods are monsters who will devise needlessly cruel punishments for skeptics.

But even if Euripides did write a play about a God who is torn up and eaten (and what the hell kind of sorry excuse for a God is that?) Gopnik's observation would still be ridiculous because it contains "we" and "always." What do you mean "we" white man?

And what's with the "always"? Gopnik is clearly trying to make a connection between the story of the Bacchae and Jesus's invention of ritual cannibalism ("take and eat, this is my body") but it doesn't fly, and not only because Pentheus is a king and not a god. When The Bacchae "knew" anything, it was long before the magic Jesus myth was invented, and no other Greek gods - and why would Eurpides be acquainted with any others culture's mythologies - were being torn up and eaten. And even if there is some instance in some mythology of mortals tearing up and eating a god, there would certainly be no justification to say "we" always do such things. More like "almost never."

So why both the inaccuracy and the idiotic "we always" claim from a well-paid New Yorker name-brand staffer?

Here's what I think happened - Gopnik saw a production of the Bacchae years before he wrote this article, and somehow had the impression that Pentheus was a god. And then he just invented the "we always eat the God we love" angle, because he thought it was an important piece of human psychological insight. And was too lazy to Google "The Bacchae" and nobody bothered to check his work - or couldn't bring themselves to correct such an important New Yorker insider. And certainly Gopnik would have no motivation to ruin Gopnik's Wicked Kewl Theory Concerning The Bacchae and Our Persistent Theophagy.

But at least somebody, somewhere, is paying attention to some of Gopnik's carelessness - at the bottom of the article (the article was written in May 2010) is this :

*Correction, August 13, 2010: Not all the Gospels are named for disciples, as originally stated.

They are the Walrus, goo goo ga joob

It really startles me now, how little the election of Justin Trudeau registered with me. I am a regular reader, as anybody who follows this blog would know (like maybe three people but anyway...) of Paul Krugman and of The New Yorker and both Krugman and the New Yorker wrote about the election win. I must have read both, or at least read the Krugman piece and noted the existence of the New Yorker piece, but I have no recollection of either.

And the New Yorker piece mentions Krugman:

Trudeau is now set to become, among other things, Paul Krugman’s favorite politician, since he promises to follow an economic plan that might have been hatched on the right-hand column of the Times’s Op-Ed page: raise taxes on the rich and unapologetically do some deficit spending in order to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and its middle class.

I would have remembered if I had read that. Being Krugman's favorite politician means quite a bit to me.

Via the New Yorker article I discovered a piece in the Canadian magazine The Walrus, (a magazine I had never read or heard of before) and I was really pleased to see that the author confirmed my own conclusions about the character of Justin Trudeau - and that's pretty significant considering that the author Jonathan Kay collaborated on Trudeau's autobiography "Common Ground." So he probably knows Trudeau better than anybody outside of Justin's family and close friends. Kay writes:

He’s someone who desperately wants to do the right thing. Who believes that what he does and says can set things right; that he can heal people and relationships; that he can make people like him and—a sad fantasy for many children of divorce—one another.

As I blogged a couple of weeks ago:

(I love him) also because he is always trying to do the right thing. He's super-conscious and for the most part carries it off with a fair amount of grace and not too much self-consciousness. And he almost doesn't have to - he's pretty much Canadian royalty, as the son of former Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau. The fact that he tries so hard to do the right thing makes him so admirable.

Kay made his observation in reference to a story Trudeau told about his relationship with his mother (I mentioned a couple of others in a previous blog post.) This story jumped out at me too, for its poignance and its exposure of the character of an endearing adolescent:

I spent more than thirty hours interviewing Trudeau. He told me hundreds of stories, not all of which made their way into the book. But there is one, from his young childhood—during the period after his mother, Margaret, abandoned the family—that stands out clearly.
“Whenever I knew my mother was on her way to visit 24 Sussex, I could barely contain my excitement, and began planning my welcome,” is how Trudeau tells the story in Common Ground:

On one occasion I decided to mark her arrival with a musical theme. I had received a small record player as a gift and enjoyed playing the hits of the day—“the day” being the early 1980s—especially Journey’s romantic ballad “Open Arms.” I had heard my mother say how much she liked the Journey song, and I decided that this would be the soundtrack to her entrance at 24 Sussex after one particularly long absence. I waited for her to arrive in her VW Rabbit before cueing up my tiny, tinny record player in my room upstairs. As she opened the door and entered the foyer I cranked up the volume and rushed to the top of the stairs. “Listen, mom,” I yelled down to her. “It’s our song!” Her reaction was to stare up at me, happy to see me but a little confused because she couldn’t hear the music at all. The volume on my record player was about half the level of a modern cell phone. I remember being crushed by that, so desperate was I to inject a sense of magic into every moment that we did have together as a family.

When Common Ground was published in 2014, and the Trudeau camp chose to disclose my role in preparing it, lots of friends asked me some variation on the question: “What’s he like? ” I would say, “Read the book.” And like clockwork, they would roll their eyes and reply, “No—what’s he really like? ” The underlying assumption is that books of this type are mere propaganda. Depending on the politics of the person asking me the question, there usually was some suggestion that, behind closed doors, Trudeau is either a closet socialist or a corporate shill. That he is a thumb-sucking ignoramus who is spoon-fed his lines by Gerald Butts—or a tactical genius who wears his glibness and childlike enthusiasms as a political mask. That he is a tormented scion who is desperate to rise to his father’s epic legacy—or who bitterly detests the old man’s oversized shadow. Since we have spent the last decade trying to figure out the “secret agenda” of Stephen Harper, it was perhaps inevitable that the country would become convinced that there is some “real” Justin Trudeau lurking below the surface.
You can find the real Justin right there, at the top of those stairs, playing his record player.

That last sentence especially is as perfect, concise a summation of a politician's character as any you're likely to see, right up there with another favorite of mine, the line from the New Yorker's David Remnick about Obama: His practiced calm is beyond reckoning.

Kay also addresses the phenomenon of Trudeau being considered just a pretty dummy - or at least less of an intellectual than his father. I could see that was bullshit even before I read "Common Ground" - and Kay of course spent quite a bit of time with Trudeau during the writing of the book and so is in a position to evaluate Trudeau's mind:

Pretty, yes. Dummy, no.

Trudeau probably reads more than any other politician I know. And yet you wouldn’t know this from the way he talks about ideas: His boyish, eager-to-please personality leads him to project publicly in a way that can seem intellectually unsophisticated. Political oratory always sounds best when it’s relaxed and natural. Trudeau’s hyperactive personality makes that a difficult act for him to pull off.

I admit that I am sometimes guilty of idealizing Canada, in light of the election of Trudeau vs. Trump and for other reasons, but Canada is dragged down by anti-intellectuals the same as in the United States - although perhaps not to the same degree. But I think that Trudeau's coming off as more of a regular guy and less of a brainiac serves him well. His being thought of as not-so-bright makes him much more palatable to the know-nothing slobs of Canada. Obama's and Hillary Clinton's obvious intellectual superiority were resented by many Americans and it worked against them.

Obama only squeaked into office, in my opinion, thanks to the overwhelming support of African Americans and the fact that his first opponent's running mate was Sarah Palin and his second opponent was Mitt Romney, who came off as a rich prig, and made Obama look like a regular guy by comparison. Women didn't support Clinton the way blacks supported Obama, since women suffer more from Stockholm Syndrome. But if Trump had gone up against Obama there's a good chance Obama would have lost. In spite of what Obama claims.

But I digress.

Trudeau should keep doing what he's doing.

I have to say, I was surprised by the reason given for the selection of the name "The Walrus" for this magazine. I immediately assumed it was from "Through the Looking Glass."

But no, it's a Canadian thing.

Thoughts on Catch and Kill

Ronan Farrow's new book "Catch and Kill" is great - even better than the article he wrote for The New Yorker From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories - and that won a Pulitzer.

I got the audiobook version which I recommend because Farrow himself reads it, and as a bonus, he does voices every time he quotes someone. Sometimes it's a little annoying - he makes many of the actresses he quotes sound like drag queens. But it does add to the drama and I especially enjoyed his impressions of Harvey Weinstein and Woody Allen. 

I couldn't help noticing that when he quoted Rachel Maddow, when she interviewed him about the New Yorker article, his voice hardly changed at all. I think it's because he admires Maddow (who doesn't? there's a great story about her in The New York Times) and more, identifies with her. His first book is War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence, which sounds just like the kind of book Maddow would write.

The book is much more personal than the New Yorker article and not only includes the stories of Weinstein's harassment and assault of actors and Miramax employees, but the story of getting the story itself, on assignment at MSNBC, and then when he began to get too much dirt on Weinstein, MSNBC's efforts to kill the story. He then took it to the New Yorker, who supported him. As a long time fan of The New Yorker, I enjoyed Farrow's account of the goings-on at their office. Meanwhile Matt Lauer, Farrow's fellow MSNBC employee had been harassing, assaulting and raping coworkers for years.

As if that isn't enough, Farrow discusses in detail the cloak-and-dagger of Black Cube the Israeli private intelligence agency. Black Cube went so far as to send a female operative to befriend Rose McGowan in order to find out what McGowan was saying about Weinstein in the book she was writing. And they were keeping tabs on Farrow himself. Meanwhile there was a mole at Black Cube feeding information to Farrow.

And then there's the fact that Donald Trump is discussed in the book and has used the same "catch and kill" tactics to suppress negative information about himself.

This is a book for our time.

Woody Allen's precious reputation

In another chapter in the New Yorker's quest to ignore the existence of both Dylan and Ronan Farrow,  New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum has been getting attention in New York Magazine thanks to her tweets about a recent Woody Allen play which contains a light-hearted reference to child molestation.

I was ready to believe that the reason for the silence is that none of the New Yorker staff writers are interested in Dylan and Ronan Farrow and so that's why neither of their names have come up in the New Yorker since 1996 in Dylan's case and never in Ronan's case.

But boy oh boy they sure like to talk about poor dead drug addict Phillip Seymour Hoffman. By my count they have 5 think pieces about Hoffman so far since he turned up dead three days ago. They even called the loathsome Daphne Merkin in from her exile out there with the makeup tips and the horoscopes at Elle magazine to contribute something: it's quite a talent to write a think piece completely devoid of any ideas.

*** STOP THE PRESSES! ***

While reviewing the New Yorker I saw they have finally posted something about the case, Listening to Dylan Farrow by Sasha Weiss. The piece ends with this:

These things are difficult to talk about, which is why they are worth talking about. While taking seriously that we don’t know all the facts—that this public discussion must be traumatic for Dylan Farrow and could utterly, and possibly unfairly, ruin Allen’s reputation—our talking about it, with sensitivity and care and journalistic rigor, is not simply prurient. It reinforces Phyllis Rose’s insight that the mysteries of family life are where politics begin. We shouldn’t look away from those mysteries.

What I have to wonder is how Allen has any reputation left to ruin. Between the fact that Allen was seeing a therapist for his weird behavior towards Dylan, including a compulsion to shove his thumb into her mouth - and his behavior was characterized by the many people who witnessed it as "obsessive" - and the fact that a judge refused to grant Allen custody of Dylan on the grounds that the judge, in essence, did not trust Allen with her, what exactly is Allen's reputation? 

And then of course there is his blatant predilection, as the New York Magazine I linked to says, for "being creepy about young girls."

Now it may be true that his admirers don't know about these things, or don't want to know, but there's also the possibility that they don't care.

Roman Polanski is a convicted child rapist and seems to have suffered from it not at all. A long list of people in the entertainment industry, including Woody Allen, signed a letter of support for Polanski a few years ago.

The fact that a certain percentage of people consider Polanski a monster is more than remediated by his continuing career, his wealth and his sweet life in France. 

What Woody Allen and Roman Polanski demonstrate is that there is nothing at all that will ruin the reputation, sufficiently to hurt him in the slightest, of a canonized Great Man of the Arts.