Sunday’s Times had yet another piece o’ crap trend article about women who make a pile of money and have trouble dating men who make less money. It was so clearly a piece o’ crap, but I had to read the whole thing on Sunday, because I’m a shallow being who reads the Style Section before the Week in Review.
I would love to know how many women the reporter had to interview before finding a couple of idiots who complained that their dates couldn’t afford the fine wine and pate.
I was disturbed by the article, because the underlying theme of this article was that successful women are materialistic bitches.
Becks at Unfogged linked to Megan McArdle who also hated the article. Megan wrote that the real problem was income disparity between the genders in the minority community and tut-tutted the liberal Times for overlooking this fact. It’s not really a surprise that the Style section is written by apolitical, bottom feeders for shallow creatures like myself.
The discussion thread on Unfogged took an interesting tangent. Does Megan get undue criticism in the blogosphere? Do many of the negative comments have an uncomfortable, sexist edge to them? Ann Althouse has complained that her critics too often make crass comments about her appearance, which never happens to the male bloggers. Of course, Althouse has made crass comments about the appearance of other women bloggers.
I have mixed feelings about that tangent. On the one hand, it’s the blogosphere. If you don’t develop a hard crusty shell quickly, you’re dead meat. On the other hand, I worry that successful women piss people off.
Apt. 11d 
MM does seem to get a lot of hate for being an attractive youngish woman with a successful writing career, a lot more hate than a similarly placed man would get. She’s occasionally a bit slapdash, maybe even lazy (read some history, woman!), but I love her Atlantic blog and am very pleased to see how productive she has been there.
By the way, can we agree that anyone who has ever been interviewed for a NYT lifestyle article should be deported immediately?
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Wow, Unfogged is a really vile place. It’s like “Mean Girls” set at a graduate department. What’s the attraction?
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It seems to me that a lot of the antipathy to McArdle is because progs see her as an apostate, one who OUGHT to be on the side of the true and beautiful. It is far more threatening to confront someone who is trying to puzzle things out from first principles and comes to different answers from yours than it is to deal with someone who is an adherent of some other orthodoxy and can be easily dismissed as, say, just a Republican, or just an evangelical.
The reactions to McArdle in some ways remind me of prog/feminist reactions to Caitlin Flanigan – again, an apostate.
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Unfogged is a tough crowd, but I like’em. They’re smart and witty, and there’s real back and forth. Plus people are willing to stick around for hundreds of comments because interesting things happen even deep in the threads. The only other place I visit regularly where that happens is Making Light.
On the NYT article, surely the key phrase in your description, Laura, is “piles of money.” I don’t doubt that there are hosts of articles about men who make piles revealing them to be materialistic assholes.
On MM, If you’re slapdash and lazy and getting paid to write by the Atlantic, you deserve quite a bit of criticism. In fact, you deserve to be replaced. There are plenty of equally good writers who are neither who would bring greater credit to the magazine. Laura, call your agent before Belle Waring beats you to the phone.
(On the other hand, maybe the Atlantic is just trolling for hits, maximizing for irritation with McAddle. It’s an interesting portfolio: Sullivan for personal drama and political preening; Yglesias for young and clever with a side order of basketball; Ross “I Would Do Anything for Love but I Won’t” Douthat for straight-up conservatism; and Fallows for erudition. Ambinder seems to be maximization for boredom, which is an odd editorial choice. I’d replace him, too, if it were my magazine.)
Speaking of slapdash and lazy, do people say things about Jonah Goldberg’s appearance? Or do they limit the personal attacks to nepotism, chickenhawkery and stupidity? (On the other hand, with that trifecta, is it necessary to talk about appearance?) That would be an interesting counterpoint.
There are also some vulgar things that I think are often said about men in the blogosphere but not about women; “has his head up his ass” comes to mind. Some insults are gendered, not that this is news.
A couple of folks at Crooked Timber (Henry in particular) have done back and forth with MM, and I think the tenor of their reaction is what McEnroe used to say, “You cannot be serious.” Knowing she had written for the US bits of The Economist was enough for me not to bother with her blog.
The bit that Becks quotes yields the same impression. First, apparently MM expects the Style section to be as earnest as the main news section. This is a stunningly stupid thing for a professional journalist to say. MM does not appear to be stunningly stupid, ergo, she is being dishonest here, she cannot be serious. Second, “as liberal as the NYT” is only true in conservative fantasyland. The NYT is an establishment paper. Second-and-a-half, the same quote sets up an imaginary standard for the NYT, of which MM is the sole arbiter, and then she pillories the paper for not living up to it. Straw man to the last stalk. And again, MM seems smart enough to know that’s what she’s doing. Since she does it anyway, the conclusion is again dishonesty.
So by my count, two-and-a-half pieces of dishonesty in 109 words. If the rest of the blog is anywhere close to that, the wonder is not that there is criticism, the wonder is that there are readers.
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I agree with Doug. The atmosphere in the comments section at Unfogged is almost always full of double entendre and jokes, so I don’t think Megan was being singled out. While I do agree that a lot of women get treated crappily by posters on teh internets, I don’t think that is the case here. Megan just moved her blog to the Atlantic, so she is getting a different readership (more progressive) and they are going to be more hostile to her particular brand of let them eat cake (or get their own healthcare) libertarianism. Her blog isn’t quite ready for this kind of prime time and I think it shows. She also doesn’t immediately appear to be a libertarian, so I think progressive readers can get sucked in by various entries and then are surprised by her politics.
Although the same is true of her comments section (the reading of which is often like sticking your head in a bucket of bugs)–the commenters are much to Megan’s right and get upset when she cares a little bit about global warming or sexism or anything like that. Check out the comments on her own blog to her global warming posts.
Perhaps there is something here about projection? Conservative readers and progressive readers both initially misperceive Megan’s politics? or want her to be something she’s not and then get upset about it? This might be about being a woman or it might just be something about Megan–Miranda
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Doug,
A few points:
1. “Straight-up conservative” is a weird way to describe Douthat. He’s a Catholic and a Harvard guy, who seems to score medium-high on the social conservative scale, but medium-low on the libertarian scale. He’s also a bit of a squish. In short, he belongs in the same political and temperamental zone as George W. Bush, without resembling him much otherwise. He hasn’t been very productive as an Atlantic blogger. In that respect, MM has earned her place, just by sheer output. I suspect that the combination of Douthat’s niceness and the instability of his political mix will lead him to change up or down the scales in a couple of years.
2. The NYT is a liberal establishment paper with an identity crisis. On the one hand, it is in love with wealth and serves a wealthy readership. On the other hand, it believes that it serves the poor and downtrodden. Hilarity ensues.
3. As a conservative, it is tiresome to deal with people who assume that as a conservative, one must be either evil or stupid, and are continually changing their minds as to whether one is the one or the other. You seem to be doing this to MM. Maybe she just sees things differently than you–it’s not a crime.
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re: the comment section at Unfogged. They may come off as mean, but it’s a small group of people who spend a lot of time talking to each other. They have their own inside jokes and style of banter. They’re harmless. And quite a number of the female commenters in that thread were uncomfortable with the tone of the criticism against MM and with the disturbing references to her physical appearance. I’m with them on that. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t critique her ideas. That’s what happens when you’re a blogger. You have to expect criticism and I’m sure that MM isn’t surprised at that. It’s just that some of the criticism against her is mindless, woman-hating crap. That does bug me.
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Yeah, Miranda, agreed, though I’m not sure that the Atlantic’s readership is all that liberal. If so, it’s a funny slate of bloggers they’ve got: Yglesias (“Yggles” as I’ve seen him called and can’t help thinking, like a bad song stuck in my head) is mostly liberal, Sullivan is not, Douthat is not, McArdle is not, Ambinder is too boring to tell, and Fallows might be but is not anything like orthodox. So one and three-fifths out of six. Like Atrios says, your liberal media, still not liberal.
Fair enough, Amy, I skimmed Douthat for a quick description. I don’t know what “squish” means in this context, but the rest of your description suggests I’m not missing much. I also think that the NYT is establishment first and liberal about tenth or twelfth.
The mismatch between its clientele (and many of its reporters) and any lingering spirit of fighting for the little guy was neatly illustrated by a story on Making Light some time back that, dammit, I can’t find right now. The gist was a murder of one of the Nielsen Haydens’ neighbors, TNH’s experiences with the reporters, their obvious socioeconomic backgrounds, and the stories that resulted. The NYT reporter was clearly Ivy or near-Ivy, and poorly suited to reporting on a shooting tied to a Brooklyn topless bar. So yes on the identity crisis. (Though no, of course, to the idea that people at the top of the pyramid cannot or should not do things for people further down; I give you FDR.)
McArdle is complaining that the NYT story in the Style section is about one thing and not about another. But if a newspaper is going to publish a fluffy story, it’s going to put that story in a section called Style or something very similar. How can McArdle work in journalism for years and not know that? Laura is much kinder than I am, but tut-tutting that a Style article doesn’t talk about poorer men’s prospects is much like tut-tutting that the NYT sports section is not filled with news of soccer and cricket. It’s like complaining that Sports Illustrated is full of pictures. It’s like … well, you get the picture. It’s either stupid or dishonest. Amy, you seem to think there’s a third way here; what is it?
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Doug,
1. By “squish” I mean a non-ideological conservative (George H. W. Bush is probably the paradigmatic squish). Being non-ideological means that one doesn’t have quite enough first principles, and perhaps that one wants a bit too much to be liked. (I’ve never seen anybody define the term, but that’s the feel I have for it.)
2. The NYT Style pages are an interesting phenomenon. They get e-mailed around and blogged about like crazy, but I don’t think people really respect them or give much weight to their factual claims. I’m sure the NYT folk are very pleased to see how much comment they get, but the net effect is to diminish the prestige and credibility of the NYT. It’s the journalistic equivalent of exiting an SUV without undergarments–it attracts attention, but not in a way that is good for one’s career in the long term.
I find it’s interesting that you don’t think that the concerns of the non-rich are suitable material for the style section of a newspaper. I don’t read the NYT in print, so I don’t know the range of topics covered by the style pages, but it seems to me that there are practically endless articles to be written on such subjects as how to live in a very small apartment, how to live on an entry level salary in an expensive city, things to do for free, etc. And the beauty of that kind of material is that it will attract a younger readership. From what I hear, NYC household incomes aren’t really that huge, and it makes no sense at all to alienate most of one’s potential readership with all these weird lifestyle stories featuring the woes of people earning mid-six figures. I suppose it’s entertaining in some sick way, but it isn’t informative, and I certainly don’t pay for it or click on any of their advertisers. And it’s not like I’m a cheapskate either–I buy books from Amazon just about every week, and as an aspiring homebuyer, I buy home magazines every week, too. And it’s not a question of location, either. Even if I lived in NYC, there’s no way I’d want to bring a big stinky pile of newsprint into my home every day.
3. As you probably know, FDR is a controversial example these days. There’s getting to be a large literature on the various New Deal debacles. I don’t know a whole lot about the era, but am planning to read Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression” one of these days. Here’s a quote from the jacket: “Shlaes also traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers themselves as they discovered their errors. She shows how both Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt failed to understand the prosperity of the 1920s and heaped massive burdens on the country that more than offset the benefits of New Deal programs. The real question about the Depression, she argues, is not whether Roosevelt ended it with World War II. It is why the Depression lasted so long. From 1929 to 1940, federal intervention helped to make the Depression great…” I have read one less measured take on the Depression (Jim Powell’s “FDR’s Folly”), and one thing that I took away from that book is that the US economy did not recover until the New Dealers stopped fixing it. The New Deal created such an unpredictable and chaotic regulatory environment that business people were afraid to risk new business ventures, so the economy froze up.
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Doug,
2. I reread your post and realized that I was unfair to say: “you don’t think the concerns of the rich are suitable material for the style section of a newspaper,” since what you’re saying is that if one is going to print tripe, it’s going to be in the style section. However, come to think of it, I think that the various sections of the newspaper are increasingly obsolete. An internet reader (especially one reading an e-mailed story) does not experience an article as being in a particular section the way a print reader does. So, there is a possibility that bad work in the style section shapes readers’ perception of NYT news stories more than in the past.
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The readership of the NYT is not the poor of NYC (a portion of whom might well prefer to read their news in a different language). It’s readership, more than ever, is the chattering class across the nation. I live on the west coast, but my regular news reading are the Wash Post & the NYTimes.
Their style section is devoted to navel gazing by people like me whose most significant worries are whether to _choose_ to work, maintaining their second homes, how to get their pampered children into ivy league preschools, and so on. I’ve never understood people who complains that the style section is devoted to precisely this kind of fluff.
I do have a complaint about a certain class of article (of which this one on the gender gap in earning was): the misuse of statistics. This article misuses statistics because it cites a statistic largely dominated by the working middle/class/poor, and then applies it to high earning women. The article cited that the (mean?) income among women in their 20’s (?) was higher than the mean income of men in their 20’s. To really talk about the issue the article was written about (navel gazing of employed female journalists and their friends compared to the artists they want to date) we need to know income ratios in the top quintile, or hte top 55 or whatever. And we need to know the distribution of men and women within those quintiles.
To defend MM against Doug’s charge of “dishonesty” ’cause she knows what the NYT style section is for, I think this was her beef too, not that they weren’t talking about the poor, but that they _were_ talking about the poor when citing statistics, but then talking about the rich when describing the anecdotes.
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bj,
Good catch on the statistics.
I didn’t have in mind articles for real poor people, but NYC poor (meaning having a good salary that would go a lot further elsewhere). A lot of the NYT readership diaspora must live in areas with high housing costs, so it would be suitable for those people, too. I think lifestyle stories can be treated a lot more rigorously than these bad examples, while still being entertaining. My list of bad examples would include this dating article, the one about women having affairs with their contractors, the continuing disaster at the Dream House blog (those people are headed towards divorce or bankruptcy, and maybe both), and an article two years back about SUV strollers (it seemed like the author probably couldn’t tell the difference between a stroller and a lawn mower).
As far as I can tell, Time and Newsweek identify trends when they are already over, while the NYT’s Style section identifies trends that never happen.
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“As far as I can tell, Time and Newsweek identify trends when they are already over, while the NYT’s Style section identifies trends that never happen.”
That’s some quality snark! Are you sure you’re not visiting from Unfogged?
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That’s very sweet of you, Doug. I will try to keep up my snark level!
I think there should be some connection between reality and the lifestyle pages. I know I have mentioned the Dream House blog at least 3 times, but it’s such a good example of the fantastic (in a bad sense) quality of their lifestyle writing. Paul and Alison are building a $700K (but who knows, really) third home on a $250K lot on a Florida barrier island, with little regard for Florida taxes, hurricane insurance (massive deductibles, I hear), or the horrid state of the Florida real estate market. It is not inconceivable that their house will wind up worth only half of what they are spending to build it.
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AmyP, you said “The NYT is a liberal establishment paper with an identity crisis. On the one hand, it is in love with wealth and serves a wealthy readership. On the other hand, it believes that it serves the poor and downtrodden. Hilarity ensues.”
They have more than an identity crisis. Their stock is down from $50 to $20 in the last four years. They have been desperately embarrassed by Jayson Blair and by their coverage of Duke lacrosse. They keep reporting what they think ought to be true and then undone when the actual intrudes. And Rupert Murdoch has bought two papers in their home town, and clearly has FAR more aggressive ideas about what to do with them than Pinch Sulzberger.
Their main strategy has been ‘steady as she goes’ and these are not steady times. And, yes, they are trying to attract the wealthy as readers which means they ignore much of non-wealthy New York/Jersey.
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Amy P: “As a conservative, it is tiresome to deal with people who assume that as a conservative, one must be either evil or stupid, and are continually changing their minds as to whether one is the one or the other. You seem to be doing this to MM. Maybe she just sees things differently than you–it’s not a crime.”
Considering that the bulk of Doug’s criticisms of MM were for things like facts, analysis and such, you seem to be projecting.
“The real question about the Depression, she argues, is not whether Roosevelt ended it with World War II. It is why the Depression lasted so long. From 1929 to 1940…”
Ah, that explains it – you’re in the reality-challenged sphere.
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I’m doing a quick hit here, so please forgive me for not finding a more authoritative source, but please check the GDP chart at:
Click to access growth.pdf
It matches or is close to what I’ve seen elsewhere. FDR’s first several years are characterized by yearly GDP growth beyond the wildest dreams of GOP presidents, and the wildest dreams of their speechwriters. By the start of WWII, the US had pretty much gotten back on the pre-Depression growth track.
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Who was saying recently that blogs are ephemeral? It looks like blogs have quite a bit more staying power than that if people routinely exhume 9 month old (and older) comment threads.
Barry,
What you are saying is essentially what I was saying–the Great Depression lasted a long time, basically from 1929 until 1940. I haven’t quite got around to reading Amity Shlaes The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, but there’s a spectacular bit at the beginning where Shlaes describes horrible Dickensian events (the suicide of a 13-year-old boy ashamed to be yet another mouth to feed, deep despair, “unemployment moving up by the millions,” durable manufacturing plummeting, etc.). Shlaes sets us up to think that the events that she is describing are from the beginning of the Depression, but she pulls a switcheroo, telling the reader that these events were all from 1937, when theoretically happy days were here again. Here’s what Shlaes says about the economic conditions of 1937:
“The story sounds familiar. It is something like the descriptions we hear of the Great Crash of 1929. But in fact these events took place in the autumn of 1937. This was the depression within the Depression. It was occurring five years after Franklin Roosevelt was first elected, and four and a half years after Roosevelt introduced his New Deal.”
One of these days I’m going to have to read that book.
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“Barry,
What you are saying is essentially what I was saying–the Great Depression lasted a long time, basically from 1929 until 1940”
Amy, the US experienced three straight years of catastrophic economic collapse, until FDR came to power. Then it experienced quite a bit of growth, with the exception of 1937, in which there was a recession. Due to GOP electoral gains forcing FDR to draw back a bit, IIRC.
Or another way to say it was the there were basically two phases to the Great Depression – the Hoover phase, nothing but down steeply, and the FDR phase, consisting of several good years and one bad year, before WWII.
That’s quite different from FDR being at fault for lengthening the Great Depression.
You taking time to fix a very, very bad situation caused by somebody else is rather different from you being responsible for lengthening the bad times.
I gotta say here – this is the sort of analysis which, when done by MM, gives here the rep that she has.
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I went back and re-read the starting material for this.
Amy P:
“…and one thing that I took away from that book is that the US economy did not recover until the New Dealers stopped fixing it. The New Deal created such an unpredictable and chaotic regulatory environment that business people were afraid to risk new business ventures, so the economy froze up.”
If by ‘the economy froze up’ you mean ‘experienced the first economic growth in three years, and rather steep growth at that’, then yes, the book is correct. If you mean by any honest meaning, then the book is wrong.
Do you realize that even a cursory glance at the economic statistics shows that the book’s basic thesis is incorrect?
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It’s interesting to reflect how very poorly FDR would fare in our own electoral environment. There is no way that contemporary Americans would give multiple terms to a president who took more than two years to “fix” the economy. It’s an open question whether this impatience doesn’t lead to short-term thinking and negative long-term results.
The New Deal was such a huge, contradictory undertaking and you’ve got to acknowledge that at least some of the policies were counterproductive. Take for example the idea that in a time of widespread hunger, the government should destroy crops to raise agricultural prices. (That policy makes a memorable appearance in The Grapes of Wrath, which came out in 1939.)
GDP or no GDP, I find your claim of a boom in the mid and late 30s extremely dubious. As a househunter in MD, DC and TX, I’ve often noted the quantity of homes built in the aughts, the teens, and the twenties, as well as the fifties and sixties. Between those two eras, one sees comparatively few houses (and a lot of those are shacks), and I’d suggest that the reason is that the thirties and the forties were times of uncertainty and want.
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manyFINANCIAL women do not play an active role in managing family financial matters till their husbands die or become sick or mentally incapacitated.
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