1/ I had a book interview scheduled with The Gist, but got a short email today cancelling it. I emailed Pesca and the email bounced. He's been suspended not for using the N-word, but for arguing that in some cases its use by whites is acceptable.
2/ It appears there's a real effort to drive him out of Slate, including other accusations that are fuzzy at best. I understand that some people just don't want the word used ever, in any context, by a white person. Five hours ago I said "an anti-black racial slur" instead of the
3/ word itself when recording a section of my audiobook that quotes from a report on racism in the Chicago Police Department. I'm not gonna ever use it. But it seems like Pesca got suspended in large part just for *arguing* for its acceptability in some circumstances. Not great.
4/ "Others referenced times Pesca had made flippant comments about non-binary pronouns" is one of the other allegations, just to be transparent. But no further info.
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One little, unimportant thing that will always remind me of how weird this era got was the New Yorker review of Jojo Rabbit. It's just a really remarkable cultural artifact that'll (hopefully!) be hard to explain one day.
I forgot that I fisked this guy's completely bizarre reviews of Joker and Jojo Rabbit for my subscribers -- if someone reminds me tomorrow I'll unlock this post since it's more than a year old. Just completely gonzo culture writing!
Okay, here's my unlocked post on this. What I try to do in my newsletter sometimes is not relitigate endless fights over POLITICAL CORRECTNESS or CANCEL CULTURE, but more specifically dissect what, exactly, is worrisome about certain progressive trends jessesingal.substack.com/p/the-mind-rea…
I know that Katie and I are viewed as highbrow moral paragons who would never do offensive posts, so I feel guilty sullying my followers' timelines with this, but Stav-From-Cumtown's war with the Letterboxd mods is going to go down in history
Half the people who ended up working for the Gawker Extended Diaspora hung out in forums like FYAD, absolutely said stuff more offensive than what they try to ruin others' lives over, and would NOT give one of their enemies an iota of "he was just a teenager" benefit of the doubt
Like what pisses me off about these guys is when edginess was the reigning ethos of the day among douchey journalists, they did that. Now performative SJ stuff is, so they switched. I'm sure they apologized or whatever but give OTHER people the benefit of doubt and let THEM grow.
I love the idea of just pulling up the moral drawbridge behind you -- it's so convenient
1/ Today's Loathsome NYC Media Controversy, which has layers and levels even I refuse to explore, centers on this tweet thread in which one media figure accuses another, completely baselessly, of pretending to be a WoC
2/ The problem is, as everyone points out, the target of her failed burn-thread has repeatedly said she does NOT consider herself to be that (she is part Puerto Rican). But if you really wanna dig into this there's some amazing stuff I can recommend, including looking into the
3/ accuser's past behavior/accusations, and the subplot wherein a New Yorker writer decides to insert herself, out of nowhere, by announcing she thinks the accuser's apology was good, only for the accused to point out (accurately!) that that isn't really her call to make.
1/ In part because some of Reply All's reporting on Bon Appetit was too credulous, at one point a young woman who is a *third-generation* Stanford grad (her mom and grandmother both went there) complains that after she was hired at BA as an executive assistant, she was asked to
2/ clean up a conference room before a meeting (the sort of task sometimes delegated to an EA who has just graduated from college). It's frustrating because the show mixes genuine, visceral insights into what it must feel like to be a "diversifier" with stuff like that that
3/many people would roll their eyes at. Similarly, Adam Rapaport is fidgety at a meeting with staffers who want to capitalize the 'b' in black... and then we hear he's fidgety in all meetings because of ADD. I don't think you can explicity refuse to include the voices of one side
Oh man -- PJ Vogt is out *permanently* from Reply All. I've listened to that show since it was tl;dr forever ago. Show simply cannot survive with only one of the two original creators. I very much want more specificity on the allegations.
2/ Katie and I discuss this on the next episode, but I don't think you're a bad person if you're disturbed by just how quickly everyone, including many professional journalists, assumed that the one side of this story we've heard so far is the entire truth. Anyone who reads that
3/ thread should have *some* questions, because there's certainly some vagueness. People should be willing to wait for more information before instantly believing and amplifying such an account. It's disturbing to watch. I do think it's possible that PJ and SP acted *exactly*