Gawker 
Enter your username and password.
New York, 10:53 PM
Mon Nov 30
60 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip Your Editors:
tips@gawker.com
Tipline: 646-214-8138
Editor-in-Chief:
Gabriel Snyder | Email
West Coast Editor:
Richard Rushfield | Email
Contributing Editors:
Valleywag:
Ryan Tate | Email
Media:
Hamilton Nolan | Email
Politics:
Alex Pareene | Email
Investigations:
John Cook | Email
Entertainment:
Brian Moylan | Email
Nights:
Adrian Chen | Email
Azaria Jagger | Email
Ravi Somaiya | Email
Weekends:
Foster Kamer | Email
Video Editor:
Richard Blakeley | Email
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
05/17/09
I didn't have a chance to read Baum's articles or story proposals, but his account about the editor interactions rang painfully true.
05/17/09
05/16/09
The New Yorker is a dysfunctional place for the simple fact of its populated by writers and editors.
05/16/09
There's definitely two sides. Even if you're all pro-information and transparency, surely there's something to be said for discretion about your personal business matters?
This is a crowd that routinely blasts Julia Allison for her "vapid lifestreaming", but if she disclosed how much she made at TONY or whereever does that now push her to the vanguard of medium experimentation?
05/16/09
In my opinion, it was not in Baum’s best interest to indulge himself in this way. It could hurt his prospects for securing contracts with other publishers.
Susan Orlean’s reaction was, in my estimation, unnecessary and, in its own way, also indulgent. Although it is remarkable for me to see a mature writer lose her cool in a medium that is virtually real-time, I don’t see what she gained from this. Her retorts come off as overly emotional and defensive.
On the whole, I believe that it would be desirable for writers to have more information about others’ contracts. The problem is how to achieve a format that would convey factual data while preserving anonymity.
05/16/09
05/16/09
[www.danbaum.com]
05/19/09
05/16/09
First, the medium ... but still ...
This is not a federal offense ... but using ...
I suppose a simple ... but it was provocative ...
I ignore ... but this endless posting ...
But this would ordinarily ...
But then comes the message. ...
Even airing opinions ... It's just that [i.e., "but"] ...
He hasn't asked for my advice, but here it is ...
For me, the meat of it wasn’t all this "yes, but" hemming and hawing, but the "this is my experience" passage, which boils down to: "I got what I wanted, and I like the New Yorker. Sorry, Dan"—a message well suited to 140 characters.
P.S. When dealing with Twitter, don’t over-read twat.
05/16/09
05/16/09
That's the single dumbest thing I've heard all day. And I've spent the day on the INTERNET.
05/16/09
I'm sorry lady but your privilege is showing.
You, Susan, are a fucking asshole. Your opinion is the reason why people find out they are getting paid fifty cents on the dollar after working at a job for six months. Your opinion is why magazines can low ball freelancers and it is the basic reason why informational asymmetries continue to fuel job market.
By talking about the mechanics of this business and the manner in which it pays people, other people will know and understand how to negotiate with the New Yorker and I'm sure someone (who is probably a person of color or female) is probably hella pissed because their contract terms are terrible. And this is just on your elitist micro scale.
On a major scale, like I said above, not talking about the manner in which people are hired and paid perpetuates management ability to fuck over its employees because they don't know they are being paid 75 or 80 cents on the dollar. Then again, I'm guessing you probably don't worry about that much. Money just paper, right?
Bitch.
05/16/09
But yes, salary information is a tool of collective labor negotiation that is being neglected for the sake of a quaint notion of manners among citizens. Well, fuck manners - management is using that secrecy to fuck people up the ass. If there's any chance of turning labor back into a "seller's market", people are going to actually have to start selling themselves... and information is power, especially in negotiations.
I am sure this concept does neither start or end with Susan Orlean, but I disagree with the notion, whether she holds it or not, that salaries and contracts are to be held confidentially.
And it would be stupid to assert that a person has no business talking about the details of their own hiring and/or termination.
But half of that sentence of hers I agree with, at least in the context of others: it is poor conduct to reveal the nature of the information of OTHERS, including employment/termination and anything related. Let them speak for themselves.
05/16/09
05/16/09
05/16/09
— ➨ —
— ➨ —
For this and other dashes, please consult the helpful table in Wikipedia under Dash.
05/16/09
05/16/09
05/16/09
05/16/09
05/03/09
When we pay huge amounts of money for a bridge, or a sewer system, or whatever, we can reasonably expect the public to have a distinct and real benefit. But when we pay huge amounts (nationally) for philosophy professors, the public fails to benefit in any real way. I'm sure there is some vague benefit that some arcane and obtuse academic philosophical creations have been created, but to 99.9% of society, that money is essentially wasted.
And what is even worse is that the focus for the 'industry' of education is more about cranking out useless liberal arts research rather than teaching kids. It's a GREAT idea for our society to invest lots of money to teach students how to read and write well. It's not a great idea for our society to invest lots of money to produce arcane literary papers that 12 people will ever read (and all of them will hate it, likely including the author).
And yet every professor is more motivated by research than teaching. They are promoted and demoted by 'quality' of research, not by how well they teach students. The head of the English department couldn't give two shits if they can teach or not. They care about how many papers have been cranked out. And it's a damn shame, because they're ignoring the thing that could help society in favor of something that produces little to no benefit for most of the real world.
Please don't think I'm hating on academics, or liberal-arts professors. I considered becoming one. But really, which is more efficient and which does society really need? A paper examining the historical significance of the 16th century French aristocracy's clothing changes in response to civil unrest, or a classroom full of kids who can understand basic history?
Personally, I feel like the one that is useful is not what we are producing.
05/04/09
05/04/09
@DannyOcean: I relpied to your other post and now, having read this one, I'd say that we agree.
05/02/09
Because we have never heard that before. They'll throw in "talking just to hear your own voice," "mental masturbation," and all those other golden oldies that for some reason people like to think they are the first to have said.
I would like nothing more than to be made irrelevant. I don't really care about paying off my student loans. I don't want a career that requires, above all else, my abjection. And I know I'm not the only one who thinks this. My job is my job, just like everyone else's. You know how waitresses at Hooters are required to shave their legs and have big tits and all that in order to keep their jobs and get good tips? I'm required to write laborious prose that no one will read about subjects that no one cares about, give lectures that would make any human drool with boredom, and talk about shit that, yes, is often irrelevant in order to keep the job that puts food on my table and gas in my car. Most of us don't like it any more than you do.
05/03/09
Because in general, far too many liberal arts academics are paid large sums of money to create massive amounts of academia that doesn't create any value to anyone, anywhere, ever. That's why people rail against the system. Because generally people prefer that large amounts of money produce valuable content that people enjoy, whether that content be Gawker posts (clearly valued), bridges, useful computer programs or whatever. Money paid to academics to create obscure academia is money wasted if there is no benefit.
05/04/09
The idea that we get paid large sums of money, however, is laughable. Once an academic has tenure she might, maybe, break six figures -- just barely. There are superstars in every field who can make more, but they are by far the exceptions.
05/02/09
05/02/09
It is true that one should not pursue a graduate degree unless one is funded. I have been funded for my entire graduate career -- ending in about a month -- and I have still gone into debt. Traveling to conferences, buying endless numbers of books, even publishing articles in scholarly journals, all of it costs money. And even in the most generously funded programs, a fellowship or assistantship simply does not cover all this. Tuition and basic living expenses, sure. But if you want to get a job, you are going to go into debt paying for all the extras that aren't really extra if you intend to use the degree.
I saw many comments on the NYT site insinuating that if you're "good enough," grad school should never put you in debt. This is some posturing bullshit. Those at the top of their fields are often those with the most debt, for the reasons I enumerated above. We are also fortunate to be the most likely to get jobs, except that is little consolation in the current hiring environment.
This is going nowhere fast. But I feel like it needed to be said.