In this week’s New York magazine, Jonathan Chait sounds the old alarm of “political correctness.” For Chait, trigger warnings and the idea of “mansplaining,” among other Internet-centric phenomena, amount to a grave hazard to free-speech and liberalism. The Internet, in other words, has given the p.c. cops more reach. "Political correctness is not a rigorous commitment to social equality so much as a system of left-wing ideological repression," he argues. "Not only is it not a form of liberalism; it is antithetical to liberalism. Indeed, its most frequent victims turn out to be liberals themselves.” At Jezebel, Jia Tolentino responds, pointing out that “what this whole article is railing against as the American Tone Gestapo Prepared to Destroy the Free Market of Ideas may in actuality just be the new, social-media-enlarged voices of minorities, women, and the people who value them finally daring to disagree.”
On This American Life, Jezebel writer Lindy West tells the story of an Internet troll who came clean and apologized for tormenting her online.
Conde Nast is launching “23 Stories by Conde Nast,” a branded-content division that will grant advertisers access to editors, who will help craft marketing campaigns.
Jack Shafer’s advice to the New Republic editor, Gabriel Snyder: “Kill the institution so a genuinely new institution can be built. No more anniversary issues. No more ‘20 years ago in the New Republic’ featurettes. Unless Snyder indulges his inner destroyer, his magazine will only invite comparison to the old magazine that so few people read anyway!”
Among the many books that will be turned into movies in 2015—since moviemakers seem to have run out of their own ideas—are Fifty Shades of Gray; Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt (the movie version will be called Carol);CarolGillian Flynn's Dark Places; Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation; and, of course, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2.
