The best thing to happen yesterday

The Dixie Chicks retweeted me. Yes, those Dixie Chicks.


The link is to their "Not Ready To Make Nice" video, because I hear that song when crazy right-wing people attack me on the Internet a lot.




Anyway, some days, it's the little things.

More fun things to do with unemployment!

Write, write, write -- and I've done a bunch of it. My latest:

Latte-sipping liberals – it's time to grind some beans (Comment is free)
Budget 2011: What Will Women Gain? (Women's Media Center)

And, boy do I need some coffee right now.

formspring.me

Your take on Barack Obama's conference with the Republicans? I thought it was quite the smackdown.

It was great political television. But if the smackdown starts and ends there, it won't matter in 9 months.

Ask me anything

Budget Today, Russia Today

Here I am, talking Gitmo trials, "It's the economy, stupid" and the 2011 budget proposal.

I did my own hair this time, and you can totally tell. I wish I could pay the lovely MSNBC lady to follow me around and make me look polished.

The view from the other side of the economic crisis

This isn't the first time I've been unemployed, but it's the first time I've had to (or been able to) apply for unemployment. Props go to NY State for putting it all on the Internet, except for the need to fax my last paystub to Albany, which is just silly. Who still faxes?

It's also the first time that I've had a HD cable package with some ungodly number of channels and nothing to watch but, my goodness, daytime television is a vast wasteland. I would have thought that, with a 10 percent unemployment rate, there would be money to be made in making programming for people that don't normally stay home and watch "Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee," but apparently unemployed people don't have enough spending money to make it worth advertisers' time.

Anyway, I've been keeping busy, other than in just bemoaning the state of the American entertainment industry: last weekend, I guest-edited Jezebel with Moe Tkacik, and last night I live-blogged the State of the Union for the same (see the archives of both here). I've got a magazine piece I am writing, a bunch of pitches I need to send out and a stack of papers to go through. Since I often deal with stress by cleaning -- it's really one of the few times I go to town with regards to cleaning -- I have a feeling my apartment will look really nice in about a day. And I will probably even find room for all the stuff I cleaned out of my desk. The plushie flower from Target can, I'm sure, be worked into my decor.

formspring.me

Do you have any tips for overcoming the sort of (mostly unintentional) boys-club atmosphere that can (in my experience) hamper young women just starting out in political or journalistic careers?

Doing your job well is always great revenge. The axiom about working twice as hard for half the credit usually applies. Lots of studies and anecdotal evidence points to the fact that women tend to be less self-promotional and self-aggrandizing than men, and it works against them, so work on being your own cheerleader. And then don't take shit work or shit talk from people if the dudes around you would or do stand up to it themselves.

Other than those work-arounds, work for social justice and gender equality, because that's the only real way to "overcome" it in the end.

Ask me anything

formspring.me

Can you & Moe do a postmortem on DoubleX this wknd? Obviously, terrible to have jobs evaporate, but I admit I was really off-put by the site. I think Moe once said XX should try to cultivate a Carolyn Hax voice, but hooo boy did they go in a diff directio

Well, I think it's a leetle early for a post-mortem, as Double X did technically just get folded back into the Slate family, and not shuttered. I'm not totally sure that anyone lost their jobs-- I know, for instance, that Jess Grose still has one.

But if I were to make an assessment of why it never went through the roof the way I do think it had the potential to, it would be as follows. The founders said that they wanted to make it something like Jezebel for an older (read also: smarter, more erudite) crowd. And, let's be frank: my writing and Moe's (to a lesser degree, I think) wasn't necessarily aimed at nor read in great numbers by the 18-25 set, especially in comparison to Tracie's video clips, or the fashion coverage or the gossip coverage. I wrote about politics, feminism, international women's issues, the violence visited upon women and, when I got tired of the horrors of the world, what it's like being a single woman over a certain age. Moe wrote a lot about economics and politics and, even though she wrote more retail pieces, wrote in a voice and a style that was, say, more literary than conversation -- and I doubt that the readers who bitched about not understanding were women in their 30s.

So, if I had been planning for the Double X launch, I would have said: if it's my goal to get a more erudite, feminist readership and write about serious and less serious women's issues, the readers I should be trying to poach from Jezebel are the ones who read Megan and Moe, who are frustrated by some of the more fluffy coverage, etc. It wouldn't have been the most awesome business decision ever -- I was rarely the most trafficked blogger on the site, even for the few months I was full time -- but between that, the Slate brand and maybe targeting the millions of older women who want to vom reading wowowow's site, I think they would've been in a good place.

Instead, their splashy launch was marred by a personal attack on Moe and I, inspiring a backlash by our readers, friends and writers-in-arms that managed to tarnish its reputation among the very readers they wanted to attract (let alone some of the writers they wanted to attract) -- even the ones who might have felt the frustration at Jezebel for which Double X was supposed to be the antidote. Worse yet, it's a little difficult to play More-Feminist-Than-Thou with a name that denotes cis-gender privilege.

I certainly understand the attraction to trying to knock Jezebel down a peg, and brand yourself as different, but the kind of different the Hirshmann piece branded them as wasn't helpful. And then to follow it up with a couple of pieces about how feminism is dead and the writer hates feminism probably made it worse. Lots of people, me included, never added it to our must-read list and I rarely looked at it even for story ideas, despite liking the work of several of the writers and having worked with Jess Grose. I'd guess that I'm not totally alone in that, and, on one level, that sucks. I think there was totally room for both publications in the blogosphere, and for the competition, and I think having a publication that claimed to be feminist fail isn't the best thing for feminism or feminist writers.

On the other hand, if the number of people who write about why I'm a "bad" rape victim for whatever reason in order to generate traffic and publicity slows because it's proven to hurt more than it helps, hey, you know, hard to complain too much.

Ask me anything