Screw-up at The Atlantic leads to inane corporate memo.

Perhaps you noticed the screw-up: The Atlantic ran an article promoting Scientology — "David Miscavige Leads Scientology to Milestone Year" — with a little "sponsored content" notation. Jumped on, they took it down and apologized. Now we get this inane corporate memo from the company's president M. Scott Havens:

We ran a “native advertising” campaign for a new advertiser that, while properly labeled as Sponsor Content, was in my opinion inconsistent with the strategy and philosophy for which this program is intended. In this case, we did not adequately work with the advertiser to create a content program that was in line with our brand. 

They meant to be more devious. Nice philosophy!

In addition, because we had not fully thought through the issues around commenting on Sponsor Content, we made some mistakes trying to moderate the commenting thread. The general media climate also played a role here.

No further explanation of what that "general media climate" is supposed to be. But one thing is clear: Any blame should be general:

One important note for everyone: casting blame on any group or any individual is both unfair and simply not what we do at The Atlantic. And we most certainly should not speak to the press or use social media to attack our organization or our colleagues. We are a team that rises and falls together.

Something makes me think intra-Scientology memos look like that. Well, clearly, The Atlantic is deeply into the media game of profiting from propaganda. It's great that they slipped up so obviously. Be on guard, though, because they are bent on getting it right, which is to say, doing it so you don't notice.

"Being Married Helps Professors Get Ahead, but Only If They're Male."

Headline at The Atlantic. The writer, Alexis Coe, begins with something the Princeton professor James McPherson wrote in the acknowledgements section of one of this books:

"The person most instrumental in helping me produce this volume has also been the most important person in my life for the past forty years, my wife Patricia. In addition to enriching my life every day, she has been a superb research assistant, having read almost as many soldiers' letters and diaries as I have."

Well, you see where this is going, but can I yell stop? It's not that he's male. It's that he is outward manifestation of a 2-person partnership. There is one name on the commercial side of the life they share, which has private arrangements that you don't get to scrutinize.

Ladies, if you are jealous of this lifestyle, ally with a man who would like to live like that, sharing a private life with you while you hold down the income-producing job.
Coe tells us about faculty wives who "explain they, too, once pursued a higher degree."

Without fail, they look at you a little sadly and say, "best of luck" or, far worse, "stick with it."

As if grad schools aren't full of males who aren't going to make it in serious academic careers! Ladies, if you really are at the top — McPherson-like in every respect but sex — and you think your disadvantage is the lack of a helpmeet spouse, why don't you marry one of those grad school males who aren't so likely to make it — someone who'd really love to take the backup role in your career and to take care of the home and the children?

"I have a theory about this," said Tara Nummedal, an associate professor of history at Brown University. "It seems pretty clear that smart women are going to find men who are engaged, but I just don't see that it works the other way." She added that a female professor with a stay-at-home spouse is quite rare, but often sees men with stay-at-home wives, allowing them to fully commit themselves to their professions.

Well, that's my theory too, except that I reject the sexism of smart women are going to find men who are engaged. Smart men want engaged women too. Engaged is a funny word here, but I take it to mean that individuals who are intellectually alive and working hard would like a partner with similar qualities. Why do women want that more than men? Is it merely the social convention that the man needs to bring in money? Is it some sexual need that corresponds to the man's desire for beauty? 

Her blog's "title begins with a common vulgar interjection" and her book "goes by the same name as the blog and concludes with the words 'I’m in My Twenties'..."

How the NYT refers to Emma Koenig's "FUCK! I'm in my twenties."

The NYT article fusses (inanely) over "fuck." What do her parents think? Her parents are 61 and 62 — i.e., my age, i.e., big Baby Boomers. Why the fuck should the New York Times think East Coast Baby Boomers struggle with language on the level of "fuck"? The mother is a psychotherapist and the father is "a television and film set dresser." And yet the article is headlined "Wash That Blog Out With Soap," as if the parents were from middle America and a generation or 2 older. I mean, it's been obvious to me for a long time that the NYT is aimed at aging, east coast, middle-class women.

(That's exactly what I am, despite my decades-long exile in Madison, a city which, it must be said, imagines itself as not really part of the Midwest wherein it finds itself.)

Perhaps the Times is craftily stroking me (and my kind) by luring us into the fantasy where we self-flatter: I'm more hip than this woman whose daughter is profiled in the NYT. You experience that  envy — she's pictured there, kissing her adorable daughter — immediately palliated with feelings of bullshit superiority: I'm cool with "fuck"!

If you keep going in the article, you get past the faux "fuck" flap and on to the real sexuality of the inner pages of the New York Times: real estate. Would Koenig's parents finance her post-NYU-arts-school lifestyle in a Manhattan apartment?

[Koenig's mother Bobby] Bass made a spreadsheet of all her daughter’s friends who were in the performing arts. “I wanted to see who was making a living, who was making a living in their art and who was being supported by their parents,” she said. In a graph of 45 young adults, only 3 were getting no help whatsoever, and those 3, Ms. Bass said, were working full time either in a restaurant or baby-sitting, and had limited energy left over to pursue what they had studied.

We're invited to admire the rationality and (apparent) computer use, but I'm marveling at the accomplishment of getting all that information on 45 individuals!

“It made me see that Emma’s social context was such that our helping with her rent was legitimate,” Ms. Bass said. “I didn’t feel like we were indulging her. I felt like it was a necessary fifth year of college where she had to stabilize herself without the structure and positive feedback of school.”

Emma’s social context was such....

May the younger generation read that and learn — learn how to reason with your rational — emotional — Baby Boomer parents.

And Ms. Bass was familiar with the data points surrounding her daughter’s generation, otherwise known as “Generation Screwed,” as a Newsweek headline announced recently. 

Screwed? You mean fucked.

Anyway, over at The Atlantic, Richard Lawson is reviewing the NYT article.

Emma Koenig, 24, has a blog. It's called Fuck! I'm In My Twenties and is full of cutesily hand-drawn musings about the plight of the aimless millennial. This blog is popular enough to have been turned into an Urban Outfitters book and now Koenig is working on a TV pilot. 

An Urban Outfitters book. Are you familiar with that special category of books that are sold next to the comfy clothes and cutesy housewares at UO?

Reaction to the piece has been, let's say, mixed. Because of an implied privilege in Koenig's work (mom and dad are gainfully employed, her brother Ezra is in Vampire Weekend), and an abundance of clever cluelessness, the comments section on the Times profile is littered with people calling her a whiner or a spoiled brat, deeming her frivolous and self-obsessed.

This is a common criticism of a particular set of young creative types who tend to blab on about their own lives....

Lawson — who's not an aging Baby Boomer like me but a guy in his 20s, late 20s — assumes the article is about the daughter, which for him and for others who are at least somewhat young, I'm sure it is.

Well-behaved women don't deserve a spot at Princeton.

The Atlantic has a long article with a title I feel like I've seen a hundred times: "Why Women Still Can’t Have It All."  It's very putting-the-duh-in-dull. I'm not saying you should read it. I just want to talk about the penultimate paragraph:

I continually push the young women in my classes to speak more. 

The author, Anne-Marie Slaughter, is a Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Somebody please tell me why Princeton University — Princeton University! — is admitting women who need to be continually pushed to speak more. In the 21st century. They don't deserve the seats they fill. They shouldn't be coddled. They should be flunked out. You get into Princeton and you sit there too timid — or too withholding — to speak? Unacceptable. The teacher shouldn't be prodding you.

They must gain the confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. 

Is this kindergarten? This is Princeton! How many applications for admission did Princeton turn down in the process of matriculating these ladies?

Yesterday, I saw the old bumper sticker: "Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History," and we had a conversation about whether the sentiment had any relevance today. I took the position that it did, because women still succumb to the cultural expectation that they should be pleasing and well-liked. It's a problem. Get over it or don't, but why are you occupying classroom space that could be used to good effect by someone who doesn't need a university professor to nurture her to the point where she can "present" her "insights" "readily"? If you'd confessed your limitation on your application form, the university could — and should — have rejected you.

My husband agrees...

A classic feminist line!

... but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen more. If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. 

Yes, men. You need to back off and behave more like the women who need the professor to continually push them to value their insights so that they may present them readily. The future depends on your going beta.

We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us.

Insist. Try a petite stamping of the foot while you insist. Yes, you can, little lady. And little men: Behave yourselves!

Absurd!

"What a ridiculously insulting article" in The Atlantic.

Says a commenter on "The Most Dangerous Gamer":

The profile of [Jonathan] Blow is interesting; what isn't is the facile presentation of [video] games as a artless wasteland, with Blow as the only artist and savior of the medium. I really liked Braid and the video description in this article managed to make me hate it a little. Subject does not make something artistic (be it violence or plumbers or an island of puzzles), a contemplative tone does not make something artistic, referencing other artists does not make something artistic, aping the "classy" bits of other mediums (classical music, painterly aesthetics) does not make something artistic.

Art is the skillful application of technique toward personal expression, and there are plenty of games that fall into that category--yes, even a few in the mainstream, like Bioshock, Heavy Rain, and LA Noire. And there's a world of independent artistic games out there that does not begin and end with Blow. To use a film analogy, you've written the equivalent of an article about 1970s Cassavetes while ignoring or denigrating both his contemporaries (Coppola, Roeg, Scorcese [sic], Kubrick) and his predecessors.

It's doubly unfortunate that your simplistic and (although I hate to see the word thrown around) pretentious dismissal of the entire non-Blow video game output to date appears to have been written for people who have never played or heard of a video game before, because you've told those people why they shouldn't ever bother.

There are important discussions to be had about the nature and state of the medium, but boiling them down into "games are guns/sex/juvenile, except for Blow" does nothing but stifle discussion and close minds.

Ha ha. I generally avoid video games, but this (bizarrely long) article really set off my bullshit detector. What is wrong with The Atlantic?!