Trendlist: Althouse

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Althouse

Something made me click on "Prince Harry Is a Newly Minted Start-up Bro" at The Cut.
Goodbye to George Segal, February 13, 1934 – March 23, 2021.
"Watching the recent surge of women’s sports enthusiasts clamoring to save female athletes from the transgender rights movement, it’s hard not to feel a little wistful."
Function!
"Writing about gender differences within the Latino vote is inherently thorny terrain. There’s a long-standing, racist stereotype..."
"Media Twitter does not hate Substack because it’s pretending to be a platform when it’s a publisher..."
"The Golden Rule is a historically-proven, cross-culturally accepted, non-religious, time-tested method for addressing social aggression and dealing with difficult people."
What just happened at Medium?
At the Sunrise Café...

Something made me click on "Prince Harry Is a Newly Minted Start-up Bro" at The Cut.

Posted: 24 Mar 2021 07:39 AM PDT

But no sooner did I get there than I instinctively took the exit route provided at the top of the "Most Viewed" list:

"Why Did Princess Diana's Hair Look Like That?"

The new news of Harry's ascension to some bogus position in a start up (BetterUp) had less meaning to me than the old non-news of Diana's hair!

"This was pre-tabloid culture. Ordinary people didn't know about Sloanes," says [journalist Peter] York, explaining how an Über-bougie cult of overprivileged L.L.Bean worshippers could exist in near-complete segregation from the masses. That all changed overnight as the press started to gather outside Diana's flat, and suddenly Sloane style was seen "galloping down high street." It's ironic, York adds, because if Diana had just moved to the country with a low-key aristocrat like most Sloanes, she would have adopted a Sloane-mum hairstyle — longer and pushed back with a velvet hairband. Instead, she married a prince, and her look — as common as a brass-buttoned blazer in her peer group — became a totally singular statement.

That is more interesting than Harry the Newly Minted Start-up Bro.

Goodbye to George Segal, February 13, 1934 – March 23, 2021.

Posted: 24 Mar 2021 07:22 AM PDT

Remember when American culture ate up material like this?

Wikipedia:

Roger Ebert in his June 18, 1973 review.... gave the film four stars on a scale of four.... Vincent Canby of The New York Times described it... as "a restless, appealing, sometimes highly comic contemporary memoir." Richard Corliss of Film Comment praised Segal's performance, claiming that "No contemporary actor can touch George Segal for klutzy charm or a seriocomic capacity for suffering (he's the Tom Ewell of the Seventies), and no film has used his manic copelessness as well as Blume in Love."

I was 22 at the time, and I remember steering clear of this one.

"Watching the recent surge of women’s sports enthusiasts clamoring to save female athletes from the transgender rights movement, it’s hard not to feel a little wistful."

Posted: 24 Mar 2021 06:43 AM PDT

"So this is what it's like to matter.... But all this new passion has made me wonder, what if all these people claiming to be fighting for the future of women's sports would really fight for the future of women's sports? What if they suddenly said, 'We demand women's sports get equal resources, equal media coverage, and equal pay'?... Consider last week: As the N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments began, female players demanded to know why the weight room in the men's bubble had state of the art lifting equipment, whereas they got a stingy rack of dumbbells...."

Let me put it on Twitter too cause this needs the attention pic.twitter.com/t0DWKL2YHR
— Sedona Prince (@sedonaprince_) March 19, 2021

From "So You Want to 'Save Women's Sports'?/More than 20 states are considering bills to ban transgender kids from girls' sports. If only people really cared about female athletes" (NYT).

Function!

Posted: 24 Mar 2021 06:17 AM PDT

https://t.co/GuWsHirPPx
— Sam Ezersky (@thegridkid) March 24, 2021

"Writing about gender differences within the Latino vote is inherently thorny terrain. There’s a long-standing, racist stereotype..."

Posted: 24 Mar 2021 04:43 AM PDT

"... that associates Latino men with machismo — and, as we all saw for the past six years, Trump's political brand was built partly on an exaggerated macho sensibility. Ian Haney López, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told me that there is a risk of reducing Latino men's support of Trump to being about machismo — which takes 'a pervasive social dynamic' and makes it into 'an attribute of Latino culture.' 'Patriarchy is a problem across racial groups,' he says, though he adds: 'It's also fair to say if you're a man in a low-status group, masculinity may become more important to claiming high status.' A better place to start might be jobs.... Trump's image as a straight-talking businessman was definitely part of what appealed to my dad. He liked that Trump was a graduate of the Wharton School and that the former president grew up with men similar to those who worked with my grandfather...."

From "Trump, My Dad and the Rightward Shift of Latino Men/Why are Latino men moving away from Democrats? And how can liberals win them back? For me, it's a topic that hits close to home" (WaPo).

"Media Twitter does not hate Substack because it’s pretending to be a platform when it’s a publisher..."

Posted: 24 Mar 2021 04:19 AM PDT

"... they don't hate it because it's filled with anti-woke white guys; they don't hate it because of harassment or any such thing. I don't think they really hate it at all. Substack is a small and ultimately not-very-relevant outpost in a vastly larger industry; they may not like it but it's not important enough for them to hate it. What do they hate? They hate where their industry is and they hate where they are within their industry. But that's a big problem that they don't feel like they can solve. If you feel you can't get mad at the industry that's impoverishing you, it's much easier to get mad at the people who you feel are unjustly succeeding in that industry. Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes the media harshly? Trying to tarnish Substack's reputation so that cool, paid-up writer types leave it and the bad types like me get kicked off? That they can maybe do. Confronting their industry's future with open eyes? Too scary, especially for people who were raised to see success as their birthright and have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due.... Life in the 'content' industry already sucks. A small handful of people make bank while the vast majority hustle relentlessly just to hold on to the meager pay they already receive.... They have to tweet constantly for the good of their careers, or so they believe, which amounts to hundreds of hours of unpaid work a year. Their publications increasingly strong arm them into churning out pathetic pop-culture ephemera like listicles about the outfits on Wandavision.... [T]hey have a right to be angry. But they don't have much in the way of self-awareness about where their anger really lies.... They're so angry because they bought into a notoriously savage industry at the nadir of its labor conditions...."

From "It's All Just Displacement/Blue checkmarks are mourning bad careers in a broken industry" by Freddie DeBoer (Substack).

"The Golden Rule is a historically-proven, cross-culturally accepted, non-religious, time-tested method for addressing social aggression and dealing with difficult people."

Posted: 24 Mar 2021 02:51 AM PDT

"The Golden Rule is a resiliency tool that allows us to remain in control and win at the bully game. But what makes bullying a game? Bullies want to look and feel like winners by dominating other people. When we remain calm and kind, we win, they lose, and they leave us alone. The Golden Rule is a force for relational change that turns enemies into friends and empowers victims.... Humanity is biologically programmed for what many social scientists refer to as the Law of Reciprocity or 'the rule of nature.' Simply stated, this principle means I'll treat you the way you treat me. If you're nice to me, I'll be nice back, and if you're mean to me, I'll be mean back.... Unfortunately, living life according to the Law of Reciprocity means everyone else controls our emotions. They act — we react. We live in a constant state of response to others. This is where the genius of the Golden Rule comes in. Living life according to the principles of Golden Rule puts us in charge because we understand how to leverage the Law of Reciprocity in a way that allows us to remain in control of our choices. When an enemy is mean to us and we choose to be kind back, we reverse the flow of negative behavior. Our enemy's brain tells them to stop being mean and to reciprocate kindness. Practicing the Golden Rule frees us from living in reaction to a bully's actions. It disempowers bullies who are seeking control. It reverses the balance of power in our relationships. It allows us to communicate from a position of strength and confidence: calmly and kindly, motivated by positive virtues of reconciliation and peace, rather than negative reactions of anger, resentment, and revenge."

From "The Golden Rule Solution to Bullying" by BrooksGibbs (Medium).

That's a 2015 article that turned up when I googled the question: Does the Golden Rule empower bullies?

What just happened at Medium?

Posted: 24 Mar 2021 02:38 AM PDT

I confess I haven't ever followed Medium. I don't use it, and I don't understand what's supposed to make it different from other publishing options like Twitter and Blogger. I did see 2 headlines just now at the top of my favorite link-gathering site Memeorandum.

The first is "Medium Editorial Team Update" at Medium itself, written by Ev Williams. This piece is incredibly dense and wordy, a style that makes me suspicious. What are you trying to hide/finesse?

I retreated to Wikipedia to read about Medium. There was no update showing the latest news, but I did learn that Evan Williams is the person who developed Twitter and also that he was the co-founder of Blogger. Clicking through on his name, I see that he is credited with coining the term "blogger," which you might think is something that I would know. Some additional clicking got me to the information that someone else coined the term "blog," but Williams goes down in the history of social media language for being the person who added the suffix that referred to the type of person.

The other headline at Memeorandum is "Medium Tells Journalists to Feel Free to Quit After Busting Union Drive/After what workers describe as a successful union-busting campaign, Ev Williams has announced to journalists who work for him that they should feel free to go" (Vice). Now, that's clear. Clear and clearly opinionated.

But I searched for Williams's name in the news and have turned up a NYT article, "Medium Offers Buyouts to Editorial Employees/A top executive is leaving the company, which announced plans to shift its focus from its own publications to writers who use its platform." So that's where I will start (and if you wonder why I read the NYT, this is a good example of why).

The "top executive" who is leaving is not Williams, but Siobhan O'Connor.

Evan Williams, a Twitter co-founder who started Medium in 2012, explained in a long email to the staff after the meeting that Medium was "making some changes" to its publishing strategy. He said Medium would reduce the budgets of the publications run by the company and redirect resources to supporting independent writers on the platform....

Some staff members wept on the video call, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Employees were told that they did not have to take the buyouts but that their jobs would most likely change if they stayed, the people said....

Less than a month ago, a union drive at Medium failed. The Medium Workers Union fell one vote short of a simple majority of workers needed for union recognition....

Where's the "union busting"? I take it the unionization effort failed. I'm guessing the story at Vice is that these new changes are designed to fend off future unionizing success. The NYT eschews any talk of that.

I go back to Vice to explore my suspicion:

Employees at the company say that journalists who work at Medium's nine publications were not the initial driving force behind the union, but were some of the most vocal supporters of it....

Medium hired the unionbusting firm Kauff McGuire & Margolis in the leadup to the February union vote. Williams also held "coffee chats" with small groups of workers, where four current employees told Motherboard that Williams said that it would be difficult to raise money from venture capitalists if the union won the vote.

"He mentioned in the all hands and the coffee chat that the VCs he talked to would not fund us if we unionized," one current employee said. "This is awfully close to a 'threat,' which you can't do, but just toes the line because he's not saying 'we'll lose funding,' he's saying 'I talked to someone who said we'll lose funding.'"...

In his [March 23] email, Williams announced that the company's editorial strategy would be shifting away from a focus on publications.... Over the last several years, Medium, formerly a blogging platform, has invested heavily in hiring career journalists—writers, editors, and audience development experts—to create professional publications with specific editorial missions....

The move feels in some ways to emulate parts of the individual-based strategy that Substack has championed in the past few months, offering to showcase individual writers and provide them with deals and some support....

A current Medium employee said they believe that the move was retaliation for unionizing: "Editorial was the department that supported the union most vocally and visibly ... this is coming basically a month after a failed union drive preceded by pretty blatant union busting tactics by management."

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 23 Mar 2021 03:55 PM PDT