As President Francois Hollande announces a crackdown at home and abroad, it’s worth reading what Judith Butler had to say from Paris this weekend.
“Only a woman would be thanked for ‘helping out’”: A former Gawker staffer writes about the company’s problem with women, including a boys’ club tendency to keep offering story tips and promotions to the men, while treating female colleagues (in the words of Jezebel founder Anna Holmes) as either “emotional caretakers and moral compasses” who must “clean up other people’s messes,” or “circus acts,” “good for pageviews but ultimately very disposable.” The story ran on Matter after being killed at Gawker.com on Friday, and the writer, Dayna Evans, mentions that she first came to write it “as a result of several arguments I’d had with my male then-bosses and colleagues about what was perceived as a pay disparity in the many thousands of dollars between male and female employees hired at the same time in equivalent positions.”
Meanwhile, Gawker’s founding editor, Elizabeth Spiers, is apparently concentrating on more feel-good projects nowadays: The three menu options on her new site, Everup, are “Creativity, Productivity and Wellness.”
Those interested in the Internet may want to read this remarkable New Yorker profile by Adrian Chen of a scion of the Westboro Baptist Church.
At the Beverly Wilshire for the PEN Center USA’s 25th Annual Literary Awards last night, Roxane Gay accepted a Freedom to Write gong: Among the others honored were CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou and Francis Ford Coppola.
Amazon’s editorial team has chosen its ten books of the year—top of the list is Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, and not just because of what |http://www.vulture.com/2015/11/17-reviews-of-opening-lines-of-new-books.html#|Vulture said about her use of the gerund|.
Tomorrow night at Bluestockings, Juliet Jacques will mark the publication of her book, Trans, in conversation with media theorist T. L. Cowan about “transitions of many kinds, personal, and political, formal and critical.”