Author: Andrew Sullivan

Amanda Hess chronicles the vitriolic and often violent rhetoric aimed at her and other female journalists by anonymous commenters. She warns that “no matter how hard we attempt to ignore it, this type of gendered harassment—and the sheer volume of it—has severe implications for women’s status on the Internet”:

According to a 2005 report by the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking the online lives of Americans for more than a decade, women and men have been logging on in equal numbers since 2000, but the vilest communications are still disproportionately lobbed at women. We are more likely to report being stalked and harassed on the Internet—of the 3,787 people who reported harassing incidents from 2000 to 2012 to the volunteer organization Working to Halt Online Abuse, 72.5 percent were female. Sometimes, the abuse can get physical: A Pew survey reported that five percent of women who used the Internet said “something happened online” that led them into “physical danger.” And it starts young: Teenage girls are significantly more likely to be cyberbullied than boys. Just appearing as a woman online, it seems, can be enough to inspire abuse. In 2006, researchers from the University of Maryland set up a bunch of fake online accounts and then dispatched them into chat rooms. Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7. …

But for many women, steering clear of the Internet isn’t an option. We use our devices to find supportive communities, make a living, and construct safety nets. For a woman like me, who lives alone, the Internet isn’t a fun diversion—it is a necessary resource for work and interfacing with friends, family, and, sometimes, law enforcement officers in an effort to feel safer from both online and offline violence.

Friedersdorf changed his view of the matter after reading McArdle’s inbox during a guest-blogging stint:

Even as someone who’d previously blogged about immigration in California’s Inland Empire, fielding insults and aggressive invective as vile as any I could imagine, I was shocked by a subset of her blog’s correspondence. To this day, I don’t know if I was experiencing a typical or atypical week. Perhaps in the abstract, there isn’t any threat more extreme than the death threats I’d received and brushed off as unserious. But I read emails and comments addressed at McArdle that expanded my notion of how disturbing online vitriol could be. And it took my actually reading them for my perspective to change.  … Lots of women thrived as bloggers despite this extra obstacle, but I am fairly certain that it caused many others to self-select out of journalism or certain sorts of journalism.

Kilgore calls Hess’s article a “must-read”:

The tendency of men to view this sort of exposure to communications that would be clearly criminal if delivered in person or by mail or phone as obnoxious but tolerable if deployed online is a big part of the problem, particularly given the predominance of men in the law enforcement and digital communities that are the sole recourse for victims. (Ignorance is also a problem, at least for law enforcement: Hess recounts making a 911 call after a battery of extremely disturbing death-tweets by someone who seemed to know how to find her; the officer who responded asked, “What is Twitter?”).

Timothy B. Lee wonders about the legal issues raised in the article:

Hess cites the work of Danielle Citron, a legal scholar who has argued that the hostile reception women receive online should be viewed through the lens of the civil rights movement. In her view, online harassment discriminates against women online in much the same way sexual harassment creates a hostile environment in the workplace. Thinking about the issue in those terms might motivate people to action, but actually extending civil rights law to cover online harassment could be a legal quagmire. The courts are likely to hold that some online harassment is constitutionally protected speech. And Congress had good reasons to exempt intermediaries such as Twitter from liability for the vile comments of their users.

Meanwhile, Nicholas Tufnell notes that two people in the UK pleaded guilty to sending menacing tweets to feminist activist Caroline Criado-Perez:

One abusive tweet from [Isabella] Sorley, sent in July after it was announced that Jane Austen would replace Charles Darwin on the £10 note, encouraged Criado-Perez to “go kill [herself]”, before telling her to “Die you worthless piece of crap.” In a comparable deluge of abusive messages, [John] Nimmo threatened Criado-Perez, telling her to “shut up” and warning her “I will find you”. Nimmo also targeted Stella Creasy, Labour MP for Walthamstow with similar threats. Nimmo was arrested on 30 July after evidence was handed into the police by the BBC’s Newsnight programme. Sorley was arrested on 22 October after police discovered she had created three anonymous Twitter accounts for the purposes of abuse.

A doctoral student writes:

The only reason why there’s a glut of PhD graduates without jobs is that the availability of full-time tenure-track professorships has declined. Why is that? It’s not because of demand. There’s no shortage of students applying and going to college. The problem is on the supply side. Instead of filling tenure-track jobs with new tenure tracks, large universities have switched to using adjuncts.

He says many universities have no good reason to cut tenure-track positions:

At a time in which endowments, enrollment, tuition, and campus-building (including cruise-ship-quality dorms) are on the rise, it’s an absolute canard to say that universities do not have the money to create full-time professorships.  For example, my school just announced that it is halfway to its $4-billion fundraising goal – to be added to its already multi-billion-dollar endowment – and it has opened or restored a new building almost every year that I have been here. Yet they say there is no money to expand the full-time faculty and are in the process of cutting enrollments under the justification of raising student stipends.

I am a sixth-year student on the verge of graduating. We were told the first year that the demographics of higher education – the fact that a large number of tenured professors were at or near retirement age – meant that we would have jobs available once we graduated. I have no doubt that these faculties are indeed retiring, but they aren’t being replaced.

The view from the other side:

I am a recently tenured professor of history at a liberal arts college; my previous experience includes a tenure-track position at a second-tier state research university. I agree with McArdle that part of the problem is the proliferation of doctoral programs at institutions that arguably should not have them. My previous employer provides a good example.

Even the very best doctoral students from that program have had to settle, by and large, for the types of exploitative positions that McArdle and others rightly decry, even though in my opinion they would have made very fine faculty members at just about any institution that might have hired them. One young woman had substantial teaching experience, had presented at several major conferences, published articles in two first-rate journals, and already had a contract from Oxford University Press to turn her dissertation into a book. It took her almost a decade to land a tenure-track position.

That points to deeper systemic issues. Having served on a number of faculty search committees, academia is no less prone to the lure of the brand name than the rest of society. More than once I have sat in a room when a colleague argued – vehemently – for an Ivy League candidate who clearly didn’t fit the job description at the expense of other candidates who did, even ones from other top-25 programs.

The tenured prof continues by identifying another problem:

Administrators at R-1 universities tend to allocate resources, and peers tend to rank programs (back to brand-naming, again) based on the number of PhDs a department churns out, often with little regard to the actual employment outcomes for the students themselves. A lack of administrative imagination and a lack of any sense of real responsibility to the students a university has produced is a cultural problem for which I am at a loss to answer.

Any responsible faculty member should worry more about making sure those who would embark on the journey (or enter the tournament, to use McArdle’s description) do so with their eyes wide open. It is the one thing we can do in the face of a variety of factors utterly beyond our control as faculty members.

A tenure-track professor sounds off:

While I recognize that there is a major jobs crisis in academia, I don’t think that McArdle grasps the consequences and severity of what she’s proposing. Reducing the number of grad students means reducing the number of graduate seminars. Academic disciplines are dependent upon grad seminars, because grad seminars allow research-oriented professors to put their research in the classroom in ways not possible when teaching undergraduates.

The way I see it, reducing the number of grad students would have to encompass an across-the-board de-emphasis on academic research. Yet most universities are going the opposite direction: research and publications are prioritized even above committee service and teaching. As for the needs of grad students on the job market? That is the lowest priority of all.

A self-described “physics graduate-school refugee” reminds everyone that the picture looks very different for budding scientists:

In the STEM disciplines, graduate students and postdocs can easily drop out of academia and quickly be financially secure in technology industries. McArdle’s assumption that graduate school is only preparation for academia or other long-odds tournaments does not apply in these disciplines.

Lastly, a reader emphasizes the personal benefits of doctoral study:

People do not get PhDs only to be professors. For many of them, even if they hope to enter academia, the enormous personal value they gain from the education makes the experience worthwhile. As for their careers: these people are not going to be unemployable, even if their professorships do not pan out. They have skills that are easily transferrable in other directions. As a long-time professor – now aged 63 and still a visiting prof on year-to-year contracts who must say yes to whatever my college asks me to do and is certain to be the first one out if the college finances go downhill  – getting a PhD was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Kevin D. Williamson visits Owsley County, Kentucky, which he describes as “not the land of moonshine and hill lore, but that of families of four clutching $40 worth of lotto scratchers and crushing the springs on their beaten-down Camry while getting dinner from a Phillips 66 station.” Among his many depressing findings:

[I]t turns out that the local economy runs on black-market soda the way Baghdad ran on contraband crude during the days of sanctions. It works like this:

Once a month, the debit-card accounts of those receiving what we still call food stamps are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda. On the day when accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum – are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases — reports put the number at 30 to 40 cases for some buyers — of soda. Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash — a considerably worse rate than your typical organized-crime money launderer offers — or else they go into the local black-market economy, where they can be used as currency in such ventures as the dealing of unauthorized prescription painkillers — by “pillbillies,” as they are known at the sympathetic establishments in Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.” A woman who is intimately familiar with the local drug economy suggests that the exchange rate between sexual favors and cases of pop — some dealers will accept either — is about 1:1, meaning that the value of a woman in the local prescription-drug economy is about $12.99 at Walmart prices.

Dreher shakes his head:

What do you do with people like that? Many of us — conservatives and liberals both — are outraged at the idea that there is nothing that can realistically be done to ease their estate, to deliver them from this kind of grinding suffering. But what if, for some people, it’s true? What if the reality of the situation defeats idealism? What do you do then? Can you do anything that matters? I’m not asking rhetorically; I mean it.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzJ6RfcDato%5D

Asawin Suebsaeng and Chris Mooney compile a list of movies that have been shown to influence people’s political views. Among their discoveries:

The Cider House Rules turned you pro-choice.

In the Academy Award-winning 1999 film (directed by Lasse Hallström and starring Tobey Maguire and Charlize Theron), Michael Caine portrays Wilbur Larch, an ether-addicted abortionist. The movie is set in Maine during World War II, when the state was under a hugely restrictive abortion ban. The compassionate doctor performs the procedure for young women in dire straits. When screenwriter and author John Irving won the Oscar for penning the film’s script, he thanked “everyone at Planned Parenthood” and NARAL at the end of his acceptance speech.

So it’s not too surprising that a 2011 study by Kenneth Mulligan and Philip Habel at Southern Illinois University found that the “fictional framing” of the abortion issue in The Cider House Rules made audiences more supportive of safe and legal abortion. “[P]articipants who were randomly assigned to watch [The Cider House Rules] were more favorable toward legalized abortion in the case of incest than those in the control group,” the authors wrote.

A reader puts the hiring of Sasheer Zamata – the fifth-ever black female cast member – into perspective:

Complaints about the lack of talent may be legitimate, since only about 10-15% of comedians are female. Assume that rate holds constant among the 12.6% of Americans who are black and you end up with about 1.5% of comedians being black women. With 137 cast members in SNL’s history, the 15 black performers and 4 black women is more or less what you’d expect if they simply cast the funniest applicant available. You could try to change the ratios to improve diversity somewhat, but at the end of the day you can only find so much elite talent from just 1.5% of any population.

Tanner Colby looks back at the history of black comedians on SNL. He separates them into three categories: “a) The disgruntleds, the washouts, and the walk-offs. b) The ones who stuck around. c) Eddie Murphy”:

The disgruntleds and the washouts are the largest group.

Black performers who joined the show, never found their niche, and typically left in very short order or on not-great terms. Most of these players—Yvonne Hudson, Danitra Vance, Dean Edwards, Jerry Minor, Finesse Mitchell—barely even lasted long enough to make an impression before fading from cultural memory. White cultural memory, at any rate. Two of these performers, Damon Wayans and Chris Rock, went on to great fame elsewhere after chafing at the racial confines of the show’s characters and subject matter. Wayans was famously fired after ad-libbing in sketches against the express wishes of an enraged Lorne Michaels, and Rock left after two seasons as a main cast member, having never hit the stride he would find later as a stand-up.

Ellen Cleghorne [seen in the above video], the only black actress to last more than one season before Maya Rudolph, may have had the rockiest tenure of all. Hailing from the black housing projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn, Cleghorne endured the show at the height not just of its whiteness but of its frattiness, going up against the sophomoric boys club of David Spade, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, et al. After four seasons on the show, Cleghorne notched just one entry in the entire index of Live From New York, a reference from Molly Shannon simply noting the fact that Cleghorne was, in fact, part of cast.

Carolyn Edgar hopes that SNL’s 0ther new black women have a real impact:

The addition of [LaKendra] Tookes and [Leslie] Jones to the “SNL” writing staff is a positive sign that, despite the clumsy way “SNL” has handled criticism of its hiring practices, the show is looking to do more than just silence its critics. The importance of diversity in the writing room cannot be overstated. As wonderful as Kerry Washington’s recent guest host turn was, the Miss Universe sketch  – in which Washington played Miss Uganda, relying on broad African stereotypes and a terrible Ugandan accent – might not have left the writers’ room had writers of color been there. One of the most damning critiques of “SNL” is that it is stale and unfunny. If Tookes and Jones are permitted to have full voice in the writing room to offer a diversity of perspectives on comic situations – and are not dismissed as mere “diversity hires,” the show as a whole will be better off for it.