The thing about this kind of bullying is that it doesn't just harm—often doesn't most harm—its direct target.
When you threaten someone's job because you don't like that they said something mean about you, and you're the kind of person whose threats carry a punch, you make other people scared.
For a New York Times columnist to email the provost of a university to complain about a faculty member's snotty tweet is an act of bullying. It's an attempt to stifle criticism of a public figure. It's an attempt to make his critics afraid.
Dave Karpf has tenure, so Bret Stephens' decision to whine to his provost is mostly just pathetic. But I (to pick a name at random) don't have tenure. A lot of us don't.
And so I'm taking a risk by tweeting this. It's a small risk, and a calculated risk, but it's a risk. And it's a risk whether Stephens reaches out to my administration or not. It's a risk because I don't know whether he will.
It's a risk I'm happy to take, for a bunch of reasons. But there are people reading this who would like to tweet about it, but won't, because they don't need the hassle. Because they don't want to take that risk. Because their jobs are precarious and they're scared.
If the incident went down as @davekarpf describes it, he's owed an apology and we're all owed an explanation. An apology from @BretStephensNYT, and an explanation from @nytimes of why this happened and how they're going to make sure it doesn't happen again.
The email is astonishingly thin-skinned, of course, and ridiculously histrionic. But cc'ing the provost makes it an attempt to interfere with Karpf's employment and his career.
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As the thread suggests, this is an example of a larger problem in politics. "One person should change his mind" is an actionable demand. "Ten million people should change their minds" is not.
Anytime you ask someone what should happen next and their answer is "everybody needs to..."? You can stop listening. That's not a strategy. It's not a plan. It's a wish.
When people here and on Bsky tell me to shut up and get behind Biden, I tell them they're talking to the wrong person.
Me getting behind Biden does nothing. Pelosi and Schumer and Obama, on the other hand? Getting behind Biden two weeks ago? That would have changed a lot.
(I tweeted about it last night, but as I sometimes do, I frontloaded conclusions rather than explanation, so I'm rebooting.)
There are a lot of people around—including a lot of people in my comments—who start from the premise that tearing down these posters is hostile to free expression, and so what happened to this guy was a free-speech victory. Let's unpack that.
I ran the first paragraph of Orwell's 1984 through ChatGPT, asking it to fix any "spelling, grammatical, or usage errors."
I think my copyediting gig is safe. Check it out:
Orwell: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions..."
ChatGPT: "It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, with his chin nuzzled into his chest in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped rapidly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions..."
It's only—the quoted text—not dangerous because it's so ignorant. If your goal is to "evaluate grammar" in order to determine whether a manuscript is publishably competently written, all you need to do is have a copy editor spend three minutes reading a random page. (1/?)
It's not an onerous task. But it's not also a useful task. Because lots of books that get published are written by authors who have a shaky grasp of grammar. Lots of GOOD books are written by such authors. Such manuscripts are the baby, not the bathwater.
Me, to my partner, also a copy editor, or vice versa: "How's the book you're working on going?"
Them, to me, or v-v: "It's fine. The author doesn't know how commas work, but it's fine."
"Meryl Streep is grievously miscast in Postcards from the Edge."
My view: Streep was perfect in the breakup scene with Dennis Quaid and a few others, but she needed to (1) be meaner to, and more like, her mom and (2) give the impression that she'd be a fun person to get high with.
I can buy Streep being Maclaine's daughter in Postcards, and I can buy her living the life she's living in the movie, but to believe the former I have to disbelieve the latter, and vice versa.
It would have been SO EASY to leverage the cachet of the celeb blue-checks in monetizing the new buy-in system. It really is astonishingly perverse how far he’s gone to do the opposite.