Do you know where your canceled teen is?

The magazine did not disclose the writer's personal connection

In the impoverished ecosystem of contemporary print media, New York magazine has styled itself as a venue for rigorous, often wry, and overtly left-leaning journalism. More playful than The Atlantic. Less conservative than The Atlantic. And with more of an old-school commitment to voice-driven narratives than you might find in, say, The Atlantic.

They have built that reputation on the back of well-reported features in particular, often about issues related to social justice. But the magazine’s latest cover story was a missed opportunity for both transparency and righting social wrongs. Last week, we outlined some of the crucial omissions in “Canceled at 17,” a lengthy feature about the social plight of a high school student who had been “canceled” after showing a naked picture of his girlfriend to friends at a party. Now, it appears that the piece withheld some even more relevant context: that one of writer Elizabeth Weil’s children attended the school at the center of the story.

As we noted, Weil’s article is anonymized: stripped of real names, any specific locations, and all but a few vague dates. This both shielded the identities of the story’s subjects, and framed their experience as a grim emblem of the social justice moment. But in pursuit of that anonymity, the magazine chose not to disclose the fact that Weil had been a part of the school’s community at the same time as the protagonist. Continue reading

Before the promise of structural change, the thorny question of emotion remains

For some time now I have been at odds with myself; beset by crisis, my thinking has become pleated and folded back by doubt. The crisis has to do with feminism. Specifically, the suspicion I’ve had that, over the past few years, some loss or negligence has taken place within the movement. Perhaps it’s not even a loss, but a maladaptive respectability, a series of sheepish, brittle adjustments adopted after the humiliations of the Obama and Trump years. Whatever it is, I feel it most strongly when I talk to women who, as otherwise politically engaged and upstanding people, do not identify as feminists; I also sense it when I talk to the women who do, because of the stories of dissatisfaction we furtively tell one another.

The mainstream feminism of this millennium has been corny, childish, and lousy with feelings of self-worship. It has been sentimental, in that it frequently promised salvation through emotional identification, tending furiously to the general experience of being “put upon” by others. An incontinence between the personal and the political defined its expressions at the turn of the last century; from here stemmed the well-known lack of ideological consistency. Women began cheering on ghoulish girlbosses to office and boardrooms, excluding trans women from their ranks, and raising their own success as paramount. By now, most of us are aware of these missteps; I resent needing to repeat them, because such repetition has never actually served as a corrective — only as a signpost touting some better and more serious feminism.

That better and more serious feminism extols virtues of clear-thinking and restraint; it champions a “grown-up” stance, or what the critic Elizabeth Hardwick, speaking about her friend Mary McCarthy, identified as an “obsessional concern for the integrity of sheer fact.” To trim the emotional flubber from the reality of things — that is what good feminists are supposed to do. Continue reading

He just wanted to talk about 'Stranger Things'

Welcome to the Fallon Files, a weekly-ish series chronicling only the lowest lows of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

As expected, the overturning of Roe v. Wade has been a hot topic on the late-night shows this week. Since Monday, Stephen Colbert has had Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on for a three-part interview, Seth Meyers had Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson on as a guest, and Chelsea Handler (filling in for Jimmy Kimmel) delivered a monologue tearing apart the Supreme Court decision that already has over a million views.

Where is our boy Jimmy in all of this? Never one to not take a stand, he devoted a whole two and a half minutes of his monologue on Monday night to Roe jokes. Continue reading

Enough

It is generally agreed that the fetishization of bacon is a loathsome affectation. Bacon fever started sometime in the 1980s due to a massive lobbying and PR push by the National Pork Board. Today it lives on among those who cannot quite be described as “too-online” but who present themselves to the world in a similarly meme-driven way, plugging in an unconventional but not unusual trait and hoping that they might be able to pass off their fervor as sincere. Yes, bacon is good, but “bacon culture” is at this point met correctly with derision. Somehow “sandwich culture,” similar in almost every way, has yet escaped this fate. And that must change — immediately.

You all do not like sandwiches that much.

… And I know it!

Sandwiches. Sandwiches. “Sandwiches.” Once a writer friend was preparing to interview Scarlett Johansson and asked on Twitter if anyone had a question for her, so I responded with something like: Does she think the people who talk so much about loving “sandwiches” really give that much of a shit about sandwiches, or do they just like talking about “sandwiches” because they feel it lends their personality a fun and carefree sheen that is also a bit normie in an apparently charming way? Unfortunately this was translated in the interview as “what is your favorite sandwich.” Continue reading

Women must lift each other up

It seems our favorite quirkle girkle Meghan Markle has gotten around to doing something for women at some point: it’s a Vogue interview with Gloria Steinem about the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a plan for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, and Gloria’s fabulous leather pants. When the two feminist icons discovered they were both whiling away the long days of spring 2020 stopping the spread in Montecito — the happiest and most egalitarian matriarchal kingdom on earth — they struck up a mentor/mentee relationship. Meghan’s the mentor, in case that wasn’t clear.

Moderated by journalist Jessica Yellin, the two begin by dishing on Steinem’s abortion in London when she was a young, broke waitress. Just as an aside: the doctor who referred her to an abortion provider made her promise to “never tell anyone his name,” but then later she dedicated a book to him. “He’s no longer with us. So I thought it was okay, finally, after all these years, to do that,” Steinem said. Continue reading