Here's my new column on Bari Weiss's column about Jodi Shaw, the Smith College staffer who says she's being discriminated against as a white person, in part because she wasn't allowed to rap a library presentation: mynewbandis.substack.com/p/noticeably-w…
Core thing here:
Also, my thesis re: why she wasn't allowed to rap her presentation:
Most notably: "The employee suggests that Smith tried to buy her silence. But it was the employee herself who demanded payment of an exceptionally large sum in exchange for dropping a threatened legal claim and agreeing to standard confidentiality provisions."
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This story smells weird on a bunch of different levels (did anyone call Smith for comment, btw?), but hilariously, this white lady seems very mad that they wouldn't let her rap a presentation, which probably saved her from personal humiliation.
Also: lady claims to have been a lifelong liberal, is claiming racism toward white people, things no liberal would ever say, says she got a settlement offer (any proof of that?), and apparently people are just calling Bari Weiss on the phone "every day" to complain about things.
I did it. I wrote 4,000 words about the Slate Star Codex article and put it on my heretofore dead Substack. I will almost certainly regret it for a million reasons, but I am a masochist, so here it is: mynewbandis.substack.com/p/slate-star-c…
I am a person who needs an editor and this did not have one, so there will be typos, self-indulgence, things that should be cut, digressions, and a general lack of structure. But I got to write "clusterfuck" without worry about what an editor would think, so that was fun.
And toward the end it kind of turns into a personal essay.
The ongoing Lincoln Project story reminds me that I haven't met anyone in politics yet who really understands how journalism works and how to handle a bad story. The Winning FormulaTM is also the right thing to do, but it involves a lot of humility and relinquishing some control.
First, don't lie to reporters. Ever. Even if you fool one, another one will find you out. And there are a lot of people who naively think they will fool ALL the reporters. This is just arrogance.
Don't try to intimidate people you suspect might be sources. It gives them more of an incentive to be a source, and it usually has the opposite of your intended effect: it encourages other people to talk to reporters.
Five year old just asked very delicately and formally whether he could say "shit."
I said no, but tbh, it's kind of dumb that he can't say shit when poop is fine. Sometimes kids think things are stupid because they are.
He's not quite old enough for me to say "i think there's no moral dimension to cursing whatsoever but your teachers and peers will think we're shitty parents".
Lauren Boebert fans are exactly who you'd think they'd be.
I like how he has to specify that it's not a typo because he believes I might have assumed otherwise given the intellectual rigor of the rest of the message.
Omg, he sent it again because he wasn't sure it went through. (And this time with his email, lol.) Economic insecurity, indeed!