Study Hall Digest 9/3/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Good Labor Day News!

• If you’re a freelancer, you can join a union! The Freelance Solidarity Project has unionized with the National Writers Union, meaning freelancers can have access to all the NWU membership benefits including grievance assistance. It’s an important and heartening development in the fight to organize freelance workers, made possible by the hard work of fellow freelancers who volunteered their time to organize with the NWU.
• Fact-checkers at The New Yorker, previously subcontractors who did not receive paid holiday or vacation time, have finally won employee status through a union push.

***

Scathing book reviews, one of life’s great pleasures, are having a moment — but not everyone is thrilled. Tobi Haslett’s Bookforum review of Thomas Chatterton Williams’ Self Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race swept literary and media Twitter this past week, with readers exclaiming at especially cutting lines (“Every possible observation about the world and the people in it simply pings off the metallic surface of an assertion so inane”) and praising the writer for an “exquisitely mean” takedown. In brief, Williams’ utopic vision of a post-racial society, which he seems to believe will be actualized at the interpersonal level, ignores realities of class, wealth, and systemic oppression.

Williams himself was upset, of course — he claimed on Twitter that he doesn’t mind negative reviews but found Haslett’s “shallow and snarky” (“a writer’s nightmare,” he wrote). He took issue with Haslett’s dissection of his previous work, a memoir in which he documents his escape from “hip-hop culture” through scholarly education and uses, per Haslett, “racist tropes” to describe black high school students in the process. But a writer’s previous work on an overlapping topic seems like not only fair game but extremely pertinent to a review of more recent work. When another Twitter user asked Williams to give an example of a review he liked, he linked to a paragraph-long Kirkus review that calls his book “insightful” and “indispensable.”

Takedowns are often a chance for critics to show some writerly verve. Andrea Long Chu is queen of the genre — her reviews of Jill Soloway’s memoir in Affidavit and of Bret Easton Ellis’ incoherent raging against political correctness in Bookforum were so incisive and devastating that they easily dominated online discussion on the days of publication. These reviews, as well as Haslett’s, did the work of dismantling inane, even harmful, arguments from prominent writers. Good, biting criticism was in service of that end, and it would be a mistake to just reduce that criticism to meanness.

Williams’ response immediately brought to mind what now seems like a very quaint, faraway controversy. In 2013, BuzzFeed’s then-books editor Isaac Fitzgerald said in an interview the section would publish only positive book reviews, which led to a debate about the role of criticism and whether takedowns served a purpose. Published authors, wrote Zoë Heller in the New York Times, “are not kindergartners bringing home their first potato prints for the admiration of their parents, but grown-ups who have chosen to present their work in the public arena. I know of no self-respecting authors who would ask to be given points for ‘effort’ or for the fact that they are going to die one day.” Harsh, but she’s not wrong!

Criticism is always dead, negative criticism is always controversial, and pans are always disputed. The traditional route, rather than complaining about it, is either to fight back or wait quietly, seething, for a chance at revenge. Maybe in another review.

***

Here’s a rundown of The New York Times drama in case you were busy enjoying your life offline during the long weekend:

• The New York Times office is literally infested with bedbugs.
• Jokes were made. Dave Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, joked that the bedbugs are Bret Stephens, a Times opinion columnist whose bad opinions no one can seem to scrub from their timelines. The tweet only got nine likes (in other words, it was not A Thing).
• Stephens emailed Karpf, cc’ing his provost, inviting him to come to his home to meet his wife and children and then call him a bedbug to his face.
• Karpf, who thankfully has tenure, tweeted out the email. The internet exploded. Stephens dramatically announced his departure from Twitter and deactivated his account before going on MSNBC to compare Karpf’s joke to dehumanizing language used by “totalitarian regimes.”
• Karpf, rather than slinking away and apologizing like Stephens had clearly hoped, wrote an essay for Esquire calling out Stephens’ clear effort to use his status and prestige to bully those he sees as inferior (if Karpf hadn’t had tenure, he likely would have faced professional consequences).
• Stephens, a man with a formidable persecution complex who is always trying to one-up his own melodramatic responses to benign shit, wrote an unhinged column pretty clearly likening Karpf’s joke to Nazi extermination rhetoric. Karpf wrote yet another piece in response for Esquire.

The Times, famous for its rigid social media policy imposed on employees and contributors alike (wait for our report this week!), is currently tightening those restrictions after deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman did some racist tweets, was called out by Roxane Gay, then sent a Stephens-esque email to Gay and her publisher demanding an “enormous apology.”

Stephens, meanwhile, is free to use the pages of the Times to embarrass his place of work and his colleagues. Those embarrassed by Stephens don’t have that freedom — Times employee Jamal Jordan was told by a senior editor to delete a tweet implying Stephens was an embarrassment to the newsroom and staff. It’s worth questioning why the standard for tweeted content is higher than the standard for column content — and also why the Times seems to foster such an attitude of entitlement and a misplaced sense of persecution among high-ranking staffers.

For more background on why NYT Opinion sucks, see this tweet thread. Basically, the rise of think tanks and the myth of “balance.”

Longread of the Week: Megan Reynolds at Jezebel undertook a quest for the sought-after Popeye’s chicken sandwich, dissecting the stages of hype and grappling with the ethical concerns around its consumption. Her take is a tad nihilistic: “Think about the sandwich you’re going to eat — consider the chicken — and then eat it, understanding that your role in this horrible chain is to consume and then eventually, to be consumed by the one force larger than yourself, which is death.”

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Reason has, unsurprisingly, refused to correct a series of errors pointed out by Felicia Sonmez, an accuser of Jonathan Kaiman, the shamed media man Emily Yoffe set out to rehabilitate in a glowing profile. Anna Merlan dug into the piece for Jezebel and found what I imagine Yoffe could have found if she’d tried to write a fair piece — that Kaiman had a reputation among colleagues for being aggressive when drunk and that this was part of a larger cultural problem concerning foreign journalists in China.

— Bernie Sanders wrote an op-ed for CJR laying out his plan to save journalism if he becomes president, pledging to halt mergers of major media companies while investigating their impact on democracy. He would also require media companies to disclose whether their restructurings would require big layoffs. He also wants to give employees a chance to buy media companies through stock-ownership plans.

— Sanders, meanwhile, has been subject to the Washington Post’s bad fact-checking, which claims he lied about a stat on medical debt when he very clearly did not. It seems the fact-checker went out of his way to dig up some contested issues with the academic source Sanders used. The Post’s fact-checking column has a history of being full of shit, particularly when it comes to Sanders — in July, while fact-checking the first Democratic debate, it disputed his claim that “three people in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of America,” claiming that because “people in the bottom half have essentially no wealth…the comparison is not especially meaningful.”

— Bad Blood author John Carreyrou has left the Wall Street Journal because the paper prohibits its reporters from taking paid speaking engagements, for which he is in very high demand thanks to the success of his book. Congrats on escaping media hell, John!

— Splinter has prevailed in a $100 million defamation lawsuit brought by former Trump staffer Jason Miller because the site reported on a court filing, which is public record.

— The New York Times’ 1619 project has been in such high demand that readers eager for a print edition of the project lined up outside the paper’s office last week.

— Emily Atkin is leaving The New Republic to launch a daily newsletter on Substack that will include reporting and analysis on the climate crisis. It increasingly seems that self-publishing on newsletter platforms is a solid option for reporters with personal platforms!