Book Reviews? LRB vs the failing New York Review of Books vs ... ?

James Redd:

http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=polder

doomed like the flying dutchman forever to sail the world's media, on his forehead a post-it note reading "dick" which everyone can see but him: the ian buruma story

his behavior is more simply explained by the fact that he is an old man and the apparent cultural consequences of polder model sound a lot like what you see everywhere else.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, September 20, 2018 5:16 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^ this.

See a lot of Dutch13s trying to appropriate what happened to try and explain this happened because he is Dutch. There's a black hole at the heart of the polder model, it has been used for eternity to cover things up or smooth things (hello racism) over. This particular case though seems reaching... He's an old white man, that's p much it in this instance imo.

very enterprisingly the NYRB, now that it has my email -- thx to me sending the message that toppled IB -- has begun spamming me with trailers for pieces not by jian ghomeshi

(i don't really mind this, i do think it's funny)

A publisher who once threatened me with legal action also simultaneously added me to their mailing list

Just got my digital copy of the NYRB: it has the offending article, no angry letters, and lists Buruma as editor, so no last-minute changes to this edition.

Posted in the LRB thread, but figured I'd also share here - one of the nice things the LRB does which I don't think the NYRB does (?) are publish 10K+ word essays/reviews.

I haven't finished this one from the new issue, but so far this is very moving and powerful.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n18/tom-crewe/here-was-a-plague

nyrb/buruma update, posted in the weinstein thread here (in case anyone missed it): Weinsteins step down as Miramax CEOs

"The article was shown to only one male editor. Most members of the staff (including six female members of staff...) were excluded from the substantial editorial process”
^^^so much for the polder model!!

1/ Just received email of letter from 110 NYRB contributors protesting firing of Ian Buruma “His dismissal in these circumstances strikes us as an abandonment of the central mission of the Review, which is the free exploration of ideas.” pic.twitter.com/XI84Fkwrob

— Cara Buckley (@caraNYT) September 25, 2018

*eyes roll out of head, onto floor, into the pits of hell*

nooo Luc Sante

he's going to be very put out when they run my email on the cover of the "reader's respond" issue

alfred brendel's response i'm less concerned abt at this juncture

lol i hope they actually call it "reader's respond": ALL DRIL ALL THE TIME

I wonder who organized this letter, and how many of the signatories read the "not my concern" interview, and who was asked to sign and refused.

Maybe some of the signatories know him well enough to discount a poor choice of words in an interview vs the guy they know.

it wasn't just a poor choice of words though, was it? He lied about the editorial process that led to the article

I don’t see much description of the editorial process in the interview. He says there was an office discussion but that seems to have taken place after the substantive editing had taken place. So “lied” seems a bit strong. Maybe disagreements were stronger than he let on.

Late to this, haven't read Mark's Burumabusting letter, am only familiar with "ponder" in its xpost Science Fiction Encyclopedia sense---"ponder modeling" is consensus-building, right? Normalizing etc. And he lied about consensus-building among the editors. re contributors' protest, don't see what the Ghomeshi piece had to with xpost ideas, or literature (he's not exactly the Celine of unrepentant sex offenders).

has anyone spotted the complete list of signatures anywhere? i've only found summaries and the cut-off alphabetical seen above

(my letter is not yet and may well never be publicly available, dow: it is merely one of i assume many emails sent to the nyrb)

Everyone is going to have one signatory in that list which is just going to cut you to pieces isn't it? Janet Malcolm re-think this!

The letter they signed isn’t really Trenchant enough for me to be that fretful about any of the signatories.

I still haven't recovered from learning Jan Morris love watching Mrs Brown's Boys, so not able to even consider looking at signatories to that list

I actually agree with the writers of that letter. It's such an overblown reaction to fire someone because of one stupid decision. Jonathan Haidt said on Sam Harris' podcast last week that the only correct way to deal with an internet mob is to ignore it. And here's Laura Kipnis in the New York Times:

Do we now live in such unforgiving times that one problematic essay (or interview) guillotines a job? If so, my fear is that no editor in America will be taking editorial risks ever again.

What’s painful about the stance of many now claiming the #MeToo mantle is the apparent commitment to shutting down voices and discussions that might prove distasteful or unnerving. What use is such an intellectually stifled version of feminism to anyone?

Again, i suspect it's not so much the article alone as the completely clueless follow-up interview that did him in.

Yeah, what will we do if no editor will take brave risks like getting a scumbag to lie in an article and then keep the article away from editors so that the lies aren't caught in the editorial process. I mean, if prestigious magazines aren't willing to do that, then what are they even for?

The letter is disappointing, but it seems a lot like a professional group closing rank. They would rather not let outsiders have the ability to determine if an editorial process was good or bad.

I wasted an hour looking up the ages of half the people on this list. the oldest i found was 93, the youngest was 42, and the average age was 69. https://t.co/C23ongVmPq

— t e whalen (@tewhalen) September 26, 2018

It's so revealing that they without a shred of evidence - and despite NYRB denying it - just assumes Buruma was fired because of the 'public reaction' to the piece. Elitist assholes who needs their right to write anything without the public having a say.

Lol @ "one stupid decision".

Jonathan Haidt said on Sam Harris' podcast last week

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.tenor.co%2Fimages%2F8e10cbf4afc08787dcfb915a1b88483c%2Fraw&f=1

interesting that garry wills -- who's been pressing extremely hard on the related problems in the catholic church for almost two decades now -- is not on that list

nor is joan didion

also they spelled jonathan freedland's name wrong lol

In all honesty I could see this go Kavanaugh and a bunch of them go 'He did what? Ok, I did not know that...'

Freedland beginning to write for it -- which I think is quite recent -- was a really bad move

agreed, tho since the 80s new york media has a bit of a history of hiring unsufferably glib london-media lightweights for its entire UK coverage (here we briefly mourn the passing of the great mollie panter-downes, a briton of another age)

The letter, I have to say, reads like a pro forma loyalty round robin: “we deplore this turn of events”. I think it fairly likely that a significant proportion of the signers aren’t aware of all the details — the Slate interview, perhaps even the publisher’s account (which took way too long to come out, ideally it should have preceded and certainly should have been put out within an hour of the resignation announcements). They will have signed for a variety of reasons, including:
1: friendship and personal loyalty (e.g. Margalit co-wrote a book with Buruma)*
2: a p much knee-jerk (and in most circs entirely correct) sense that in a dispute they have deeper craft ties to the editor than the publisher, and shd back the one they work with against the big bad boss…
3: I hope not but some may be straightforwardly onside with the piece ghomeshi wrote!
4: some will feel that Buruma was brought in (as per the letter) to bring some new energy to NYRB’s contribution to public debates, so shouldn’t be sanctioned at the first whiff of cordite
5: harsh to come down after just one mistake

But it’s not one mistake, it’s three.

A: commissioning the piece
B: denying it the routine editorial procedure
C: that interview

In my opinion it’s B and C that sunk him. A by itself was bad judgment but salvageable. This is what I wrote a week ago and I stick by it (not least bcz I called some the facts abt the editing based just on reading the piece):

it hadn't -- in my judgment -- been edited, beyond routine proofing for spelling and grammar: to be publishable at all in the context buruma claimed for it in the slate interview it need two or three more serious rewrites and rethinks, with tough editorial notes requiring a whole bunch of stuff (like -- minimally -- accurate descriptions from ghomeshi of what he'd been a accused of!) but clearly none of that had been done

who can say -- there would have been a furore either way -- but i suspect what truly sunk him was the interview, which was jaw-dropping to the point of being weird.

Re A:
Buruma wasn’t hired for his years of editorial experience (he had none); nor to radically and experimentally shake up the world’s ideas of good editorial process (inasmuch as I understand “polder model”, it’s what an editorial process at a mag like NYRB will normally be, with Buruma declaring at that pre-appointment point that he will happily take advice from his experienced team).

No, he was hired as a celebrity intellectual and storied author, who the contributors can trust even as he re-injects some pizazz back to the coverage of the more controversial elements in present-day politics (predecessors Silver and Epstein’s first decade had been notably controversial: they put a grenade on the cover at some point in I think 1968, to flag a piece by Andrew Kopkind abt the student revolt). Buruma was I believe heavily involved in Dutch debates abt free speech (the Dutch-knowledgeable ilxors can correct me here? — my main source of info has been Wilders-fantype crackpots on twitter cheering IB’s current plight…)

So, as a commission, this matches up with the reasons he was brought in. His error isn’t toying with the idea, or looking some way into it — “let’s see the piece” — it’s what he did next.

Re B:
There are two reasons you put a piece into the usual process of your magazine editorial. One is to make it better — you make use of the varied thoughts and expertises of a number of people at a number of levels, from the spellcheck and fact-check desks on up. It turns it from “any old piece” to “a piece this magazine is publishing”: it becomes a collective work and in that work, much value is added. The second is — frankly — covering your arse: if you make a mistake, and everyone else on the team has signed off on it also, then it’s not purely yours to own. They can’t sack the whole staff (well, obviously they can and sadly we’ve seen just this on dozens of other titles in recent years, but the NYRB has surely set its institutional face against that culture).

Again, setting aside issues of content, this act was just so reckless! What did IB think was going to happen — he was publishing a highly controversial piece and shut out most of the staff to do so. Did he think no one would notice or voice displeasure? Why would the staff still have his back in this most arrogantly dismissive od circumstance? Who was the one other man who saw it? Was he literally just the spellcheck desk? (It slightly makes me wonder if there hadn’t already been run-ins and ructions with the support staff he was supposed to be polder-modelling with…)

Re C:
OK, in “YOU HAD ONE JOB” terms, IB’s job was NOT GIVING THAT FUCKING SLATE INTERVIEW. He is the public face of the magazine: he should not be so utterly easily first-time ambushable (I know Chotiner is a master at this; all the more reason to dodge the call until you have yr ducks in a row and — ifs — have the contents and the background of the piece at issue AT YOUR FINGERTIPS).

It’s such a stupid and bad interview that I actually have some sympathy for O.Nate’s point. There’s no good reason to assume anything said in it is well said: in other words, that he gets across what he actually meant, courtesy the various ridiculously damning pull-quotes people have made. Again though: his job is knowing what he makes in that situation and getting it across. He couldn’t; he’s out. True it’s not quite fair in the blurred portrait of the process he gives to argue that he deliberately lied: more accurate say he misled by omission — by failing to state that the usual editorial process had not taken place. (Repeating: why he thought the staff wd back him here is baffling to me: it’s their professionalism he’s basically allowing to be impugned, for his blunders.)

*Re signing these types of letter our of collegiate loyalty: it kind of happens A LOT and ppl get caught out when the person organising them is a fool or not entirely on there up-and-up (we don’t now who organised this, but IB himself will have said all their emails!) (which is why I’m interested who didn’t sign). In the Avitall Ronell case, a bunch of ppl who really should have known better signed a substantially more problematic letter in which they extended their knowledge of her public behaviour (which they approved) into assumptions about her behaviour in an private intimate context (which by definition they knew nothing of). This case isn’t that case (the public vs private dynamic is there but it’s very different): still, as we are repeated learning in this dismal time, this extension of indulgence is a fatally easy move to make in respect of those you have a lot of time for (with good reason) in other circumstances. “Their prose is persuasive and intelligent, they can’t be this much of a dick; I like our phone chats abt my work, he can’t have taken leave of his moral senses” and so on.

And all in the high-speed world of email (which as noted is not the world many of these writers grew up with).

I HAVE OPINIONS

(which i have filled full of typos for yr decoding pleasure)

Yeah, I can't help but think of the Avitall Ronell case.

This is really good: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/24/male-cultural-elite-blind-me-too-nyrb-ian-buruma

shorter me above, this multipart jeet heer thread lol (which i hadn't read when i posted):

1. So, this letter on behalf of Ian Buruma raises an interesting question but doesn't persuade because it fails to grapple with why Buruma was actually fired (or perhaps forced to quit). https://t.co/4c0ymp9BLu

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) September 26, 2018

here's the silvers/epstein "grenade" cover i mentioned (ie not a grenade but a molotov cocktail, and 1967 not 1968):
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DoBlT9WX0AA6T28.jpg

good issue! (i have not read it as an issue)

alfred brendel and marina warner are the names on there that cut me the most in case anyone's keeping score

did brendel say something other than signing the letter?

the only independent comment i've spotted so far from a signer -- not that i've been looking very hard -- was joyce carol oates on twitter going in HARD abt how bad the JG essay is

(in fact, having done that, she also goes on to say this will blow over -- like remnick/bannon -- bcz no lasting harm done and later, when proved wrong, to lament that it's too harsh sacking IB for just a single blunder)

i did not previously have a fully formed opinion of joyce carol oates -- prolific! enjoys boxing! -- but her twitter has convinced me that she is Bad

It is not too harsh firing someone for a single blunder when that blunder completely undermines a leader’s ability to lead their staff, as I’m certain happened here. I think that’s what the letter’s signatories might not be sensitive to. That trust won’t come back and the organization would sink slowly if Buruma didn’t exit quickly.

Enraging dipshit thread from NYRB signatory Harry Shearer below this tweet

If you're designated a "sexually violent predator", does that mean you can't hang around kids and feed them Jell-O any more? #AskingForAFriend

— Harry Shearer (@theharryshearer) September 25, 2018