paper trail

Reading the comments

Nesrine Malik

The Guardian has surveyed the seventy million comments left on their website since 2006, looking for patterns in abusive commenting and trolling. They found that the ten most abused writers were eight women and two black men (despite the fact most of the site’s writers are white men). The article includes videos of the journalists (including Jessica Valenti, Nesrine Malik, and Steven Thrasher) discussing the effect of the abuse, as well as interactive data breaking down the survey, and a feature where readers can play moderator, deciding if various comments about feminists should be blocked. Despite all the abuse, Malik says, “I think it is a worthy venture to keep comments open, even if you don't like what readers are saying or how they are saying it. Journalists need to be challenged.” And then, let's not forget the admittedly faint possibility that your next encounter with an online troll might eventually make for a heartwarming radio segment (click through to "Ask Not for Whom the Bell Trolls").

Page Turner examines the recent Marianne Moore renaissance ("the freedom is new," William Carlos Williams wrote of her work in 1924, "the unbridled leap").

Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP leader who self-identifies as black despite being from a white family, is writing a book about race that will be published next March. On the Today show, Dolezal gave a preview of what we’re likely to get: “Race didn't create racism, but racism created race. . . . So I think it's important to really think through a lot of those topics and questions that people have, and that's why this became so visible, because it really challenged people to think about identity. . . . Is there one human race? Why do we still want to go back to the worldview of separate races?”

The New York Times media reporter Ravi Somaiya is leaving the paper in order to join Vice’s HBO show.

This weekend at the Whitney, poet Anne Carson will perform her poem Lecture on the History of Skywriting as part of a series organized to accompany Laura Poitras’s exhibition "Astro Noise." After the reading, Carson will have a conversation with Yemeni engineer Faisal bin Ali Jaber, who had family members killed in a 2012 drone strike (a video of the strike is included in the Whitney show). If Carson’s appearance at the 92Y earlier this week is an indication, she can expect the kind of welcome usually reserved for rock stars.