How I Got Through This
The Gang’s chaos agents helped me understand what the hell just happened
At the end of every day, I slide three feet from the desk where I sit with my computer, to the couch where I sit with my computer. I’ve made something for dinner — at this point an exercise in calories, and boredom, usually over polenta — when my boyfriend turns to me and asks me the same question. “Time for The Funny?” he says.
It’s been a long day online, my brain has melted into a jiggly-wiggly blob. “One Funny,” I reply. “Maybe two.”
The Funny is 30 minutes of the only thing that has brought unfiltered, screaming, crying laughter into my life over the last eight months: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, all 14 seasons, 154 episodes. By the end of the year I will have watched it all — except for the five episodes that have been removed from Hulu for blackface and other offensive impressions. …
Black creators make the viral hits, but struggle to command the same attention and money as White creators in Los Angeles
Taylor Lorenz has made reporting on internet culture for the New York Times an enviable gig. She’s covered the petty dramas of L.A.-based influencers and their work-live situations in mega-mansions across the Southland, and the deals these predominately White creators bring to their respective collab houses, even under quarantine.
But Black influencers and creators in Atlanta have long been a juggernaut of the industry, responsible for some of the biggest viral hits of recent memory, including the Renegade, “Old Town Road,” and memorable trending challenges on TikTok. But not only have these creators not gotten the same attention as their White counterparts in L.A., but they’re also not making nearly as much money. …
‘We were shocked by the extent of the inequality once we analyzed the data’
When Toni Morrison worked as an editor at Random House from 1976 to 1983, about 3% of the books published during that time were written by Black authors. After Morrison left to focus on her writing career, that number dropped significantly: Between 1984 and 1990, Random House published only two books by Black authors, one of whom was Morrison.
After a summer when anti-racist books and books by writers of color climbed the New York Times bestsellers list, the newspaper decided to do a deep dive into racial inequity in the book publishing industry. This was always a portrait of astonishing Whiteness, but the study’s authors were still shocked by what they found. …
Brandon Scott is the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century
Baltimore has just sworn in a new mayor—a progressive, Black millennial who wants to redefine the office. Thirty-six-year-old Brandon Scott is the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century.
It’s a powerful office—in the last decade, mayors have resigned in disgrace due to corruption charges—and Scott aims to curb much of that power. A member of the city council for the past nine years, Scott wants to strengthen social services and combat the long history of redlining in the city.
“Am I going to wipe away hundreds of years of inequity in Baltimore? No,” Scott said. …
2020 may have been the worst for almost everything, but it was a great time for new words. Trapped at home, our brains buzzing, turns out to be a great crucible for word creation, explains Ben Zimmer. 2020 took away a lot, but it gave us doomscrolling, covidiots, quarantinis and much, much more.
At least we all got some nice tote bags
Want to feel a million years old? The last time I went to Book Expo, the largest trade show for the book industry in North America, the “Big Six” still existed. Then six became five, and very soon five will become four, with the merger of Penguin Random Schuster House. And Book Expo itself is now kaput, as the show’s organizer announced it would not be held in 2021, or in the foreseeable future.
Back in 2012, Emily Gould set off to the Javits Center for The Awl to investigate just what this spectacle of books was really about. Ah, to be so innocent in 2012! Back when our biggest worries were e-books and Amazon singles and iPad readers. Still, the stakes seemed to be, moderately high? …
Trump’s lawyers seem like they’re not super great at this law stuff. The worst legal team in history is currently failing to steal the election for Donald Trump and looking…
Ashley C. Ford has long been obsessed with teen magazines. She would buy them with her allowance from her grandma, hoping that one day he would see herself reflected in them. She was always disappointed but tried not to let her disappointment show.
Now she collects these 1990s-era magazines—Seventeen, YM, Teen People, even the Delia’s catalog—and she’s finally in possession of her Holy Grail, the August 1998 issue of Seventeen with Drew Barrymore on the cover, promoting her iconic girl-power twist on Cinderella, Ever After.
Twitter will transfer the POTUS handle to Joe Biden on January 20, no matter what. President Trump never used the handle, which is archived by the Library of Congress and…
Medium 101
You have more flexibility than you think with your new profile pages
We’ve been having a lot of fun experimenting with Medium’s new publishing tools at GEN. We publish a lot of different kinds of writing about politics and culture, including longform investigative features, opinion pieces, big ideas essays, interviews, series—anything from 500 words to 5,000 words.
But sometimes the news is moving fast and we want to respond in kind. Or we want to shout out a great piece from one of our fellow anchor publications or platform writers. We want to write short, usually under 100 words. Here’s how we’re going about it, and why.
Some goals for shortform
- Vary the writing on your profile page. Not all of our articles are created equal, right? Sometimes we want to respond to breaking news with a quick comment, other times we’ve seen a great piece floating around that relates to something we’ve already published. Think of your profile page as a feed. What’s long, what’s medium length, and what’s short? Your new Medium profile isn’t just a gathering of your writing — it’s a living, breathing thing. …
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