Study Hall Digest 12/9/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

We’re Not Normal Union-Busters; We’re Cool Union-Busters

After unionization efforts at both NBC News and Hearst went public within the last few months — NBC staff announced in October they were organizing with newsGuild and Hearst staffers in November announced they would join the WGAE — organizing staffers have seen backlash from the powers that be and from their colleagues.

Some NBC News staffers and the bosses at Hearst have taken a remarkably similar approach to dissuading unionization: establishing a cute, colorful online graphic identity to parrot classic anti-union talking points. Over at NBC News, some editorial staffers created an Instagram page called “No NBC NewsGuild” that is reminiscent of a girlbossy gynecology start-up. NBC bosses apparently have nothing to do with it, but they have tried to stop the union in more traditional ways, per The Daily Beast — for example, the company’s digital executive vice president, Chris Berend, sent an email to staff shortly after the October announcement warning that unionizing could jeopardize health benefits and raises.

Over at Hearst, the company has set up an entire website with “Facts to consider” about unionizing, rendered in a colorful, sans-serif, millennial-friendly format — which a member of the union’s organizing committee tells Study Hall repeats the same anti-union talking points they’ve heard from management in meetings.

The website “wasn’t surprising,” said Joey Capparella, senior editor of Hearst publication Car and Driver. “It’s very classic union-busting rhetoric. [But] what we’re asking for us pretty reasonable: we want to have a say in how we’re treated.” And trendy graphics did not change Capparella’s mind: “I don’t think we really took that website all that seriously because it felt like, all of this has already been said — it’s things said in meetings with management, repeated on the website in slightly different ways.”

Capparella said the organizing committee and unionizing staffers are hopeful and optimistic going into an NLRB vote, likely to take place in January. Likewise, whoever launched the NBC Instagram seems to be in the minority — it has been widely mocked, and, as of press time, the posts top out at four (four!) likes.

But the approach, which presents itself as concerned parties merely sharing helpful (read: false) information staffers should know about unions, misunderstands the nature of the union effort. Management seems to think that undertaking the work to form a union is something staffers have done on a whim, and that they can easily be talked down. This is a misreading of the larger unionization wave, which responds to an unstable industry in which bosses have shown they do not really put their employees first. “We had really done our research and made this informed decision about joining the WGA,” said Capparella.

We Live in Memes Now (And That’s Fine)

Is anyone actually watching The Mandalorian? Does anyone even have a Disney+ account? I’ve met precisely one person who has seen the show (and quickly lost interest, despite being a Star Wars fan). I haven’t heard from a single fan, have no grasp of the basic plot, and have read no critical reviews. But I, along with half of Twitter, would die for Baby Yoda, a tiny green alien represented by a puppet that Werner Herzog (who plays the show’s villain) described as “heartbreakingly beautiful.” In fact, Twitter users have taken to calling the show “The Baby Yoda Show” – cementing the green infant’s status as a contextless cultural phenomenon.

Here’s Baby Yoda wearing Timbs and Airpods. A person I can only imagine is close to being fatally online got a tattoo of Baby Yoda holding a White Claw. This Hunter Harris tweet says it all:

Meanwhile, the artsy Noah Baumbach film Marriage Story (don’t let the title fool you — it’s about divorce) spawned memes long before everyone could see it on Netflix. A particularly melodramatic fight scene between ScarJo and Adam Driver has taken on a life of its own. The volume of Marriage Story tweets, some earnest and some mocking, was large enough to merit a Twitter moment. I consumed all the memes before finally giving in and watching the movie last night, which was a strange experience. I was never going to be a huge fan of a self-serious movie about two actors getting a divorce, but I will never know how I would have received it without having my brain already flooded by memes mocking the film.

For better or worse, this is the way new content is received and processed now — almost straight-to-streaming (the movie was in theaters for one month before appearing on Netflix), dissected by an irony-poisoned Twitter audience and meme-ified to death. I personally think it’s fine and very funny, but film Twitter is not amused! Brb, getting a tattoo of Adam Driver acting against the wall.

Politics Media Watch: Post-Kamala Amnesia Is Real

Last week, in the aftermath of Kamala “Cop” Harris dropping out of the race, some kind of collective amnesia swept over the media and political twitter. Suddenly it was in vogue for pundits like Joy Reid, a national correspondent at MSNBC, to point out that the December 19 debate will almost certainly have more billionaires (two) on stage than people of color (zero), which sums up the entire political process pretty well.

In the post-Kamala race, the hot takes have pointed at everything from her vague policy positions and a dumpster fire of campaign mismanagement as the reasons for her downfall. Some have deployed the “white male ‘leftists’ calling Kamala a cop ruined her chances” take, which casually ignores pieces written by people of color, like this one from January, that are critical of her record. And it doesn’t take trolly memes to see that there were plenty of reasons not to back Harris. Her office’s support of extended prison labor and the Three Strikes law during her time as California’s Attorney General was always going to haunt her. She should’ve never been responsible for stopping the flow of whiteness from taking over the 2020 race.

And yet, here we are, watching The New York Times run the headline: “Democrats Ask: Do We Really Want an All-White Final Four?” The answer might be “no” for a lot of Democrats, but for those in the media who help steer the coverage of candidates, the data points to an overwhelming “yes.” For months, TV news and online stories about the 2020 election have overwhelmingly favored three white people: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. It was always going to be difficult to match the inherited “star power” of being a former VP, a former front-runner in the last election, and one of the most outspoken Democrats in the Senate, but not giving other candidates a fighting chance for coverage brought bias into the race before it could even really begin.

We should have some sympathy for the K-Hive and all of the non-white contenders struggling to be seen in a pack of candidates that began as the most diverse in history and has ended up another crop of white people with a dash of gay neoliberal shapeshifting thrown in. There were other non-white candidates who deserved the time and attention of the media, but why give something like Julián Castro helping LGBTQ migrants cross the border airtime when you can talk about Biden talking about Obama again? – Chris Erik Thomas

Study Hallers Recommend: If you’re like me, you keep tons of tabs open not out of laziness or other moral failings (we tell ourselves), but because you need lots of tabs open! Doing research for an article? Seventeen tabs. Four email addresses for four different jobs? Four tabs, plus two for related calendars. Buying new shoes requires seven tabs, book research another dozen. And since freelance work isn’t one-thing-at-a-time, you need all of these tabs open, all the time.

Enter Workona, a tab management extension I discovered recently when my friend Nick Douglass shared the article he wrote about it for Lifehacker a year ago. Unlike other tools that deal with tabs by closing them and keeping a list for you to quickly forget about (hi, OneTab), Workona turns the open-tab habit into a new kind of productivity. This free Chrome extension takes a little getting used to—I spent maybe half an hour getting it set up—but I am convinced it’s changed my life. I can see all of my work in one panel, I feel at peace, and my computer fan is blissfully silent. – Jaime Green

Longread of the Week: At Longreads, Soraya Roberts contextualized the recent pile-on of a college student — who didn’t want a Sarah Dessen book selected for a campus-wide book club — led by wealthy, successful authors including Roxane Gay (who has since apologized). “Their relative inferiority within a larger hierarchy appears to convince them that they aren’t superior anywhere, that every threat is equal, that confronting the women below them is the same as confronting the men above. But privilege is not static and it adjusts to different contexts; this is the other side of the intersectional conversation. As much as various aspects of one’s existence — race, class, gender, age, sexuality, money, fame — can, in different circumstances and in different configurations, disempower, they can also do the opposite.” Yes.

Everything Else

— Science and Health publication Mosaic is shutting down after five years, citing a need for more funding and an inability to match the priorities of its parent company Wellcome.

— Emily Nussbaum is stepping down as The New Yorker TV columnist. Nussbaum announced that she will be going on book leave for 2020 and that when she returns she will be tackling profiles and essays rather than criticism. The New Yorker writer Doreen St. Félix will be taking over the TV beat. Congrats, Doreen!

— The Nation tackled the fandom around Quillette, that “intellectual dark web” favorite, beloved by accused abuser Stephen Elliott and feminist opinion writer turned anti-PC crusader Meghan Daum alike. What do Elliott and Daum have in common? They both try to distance themselves from the site while championing it — Daum claims she’s not a “particular fan” of Quillette, even while excerpting her book there, and Elliott claims he hasn’t bothered reading the site’s controversial (racist pseudoscience) takes, though he has also written for them.

— NYT op-ed writer Bari Weiss filled in for Meghan Mccain on The View, where she has previously appeared as a guest to talk about antisemitism on the left. Perhaps a sneak peek of what awaits her career when she departs the Times!

— TikTok has admitted it suppressed content from creators deemed likely to be targeted for harassment, or “vulnerable” users. Turns out that’s the same thing as suppressing content from disabled and queer creators.

— Highsnobiety has fired six staffers in its New York office, the result of “internal reorganizations” implemented by new editor-in-chief Thom Bettridge. The layoffs impact the news and video divisions, apparently in an effort to focus more on longform and style content.

— We Live in Memes, Part 2: The mockery of a very badly copywritten Peloton ad was so universal that the stationary bike company’s stock plummeted 15 percent in three days (that’s a $1.5 billion loss). The Peloton Wife quickly resurfaced in an ad for Ryan Reynolds’s gin, while the Peloton Husband has bemoaned his fate being cast as a domineering man.