Researching... looks like they use they/them pronouns now. Left NYT last November.
They said "ran out of column ideas". Really?? (I mean, I admire this in a way, but other columnists seem ok with writing the same three columns for thirty years, and I'd be ok with "get rid of billionaires" being a regular Times feature.)
1: Interesting point of comparison for the Bouie thing on Bluesky.
Didn't a columnist* leave NYT a few years ago to pursue anti-woke passions? A clear case of running out of column ideas as well. I think a few others have left who were in the editorial side as well, but I'm not sure they had regular columns like Manjoo.
*Yes, I know the name of the columnist I'm referring to, no I don't feel like putting it in this comment
Just found the tweet in 2. Under a response to it, they wrote "I'm only half joking - at some point it starts to feel more drudgery than fun." So probably more than that but maybe not entirely untrue?
Oh, interesting: Their bio for the Times uses they/them pronouns but the headings on their Slate columns use he/him. Not sure what to make of that.
Presumably means that he used they/them when he was at the Times last year, but now he uses he/him.
7: The Slate column started April 2024, so probably a change there!
Probably just means either is fine, which is fairly common.
Still he/him on the June column, FWIW.
10: It would be very funny if they insisted the Times use they/them but told Slate it didn't matter.
It means we really need to make zir happen.
I'm always amazed that you all register and retain the authors of various pieces enough to form opinions of people. It's a big author soup to me. Although I don't read op-eds, so maybe that's part of it.
If you are confused, here's the explanation.
I am your stereotypical, cisgender, middle-aged suburban dad. I dabble in woodworking, I take out the garbage, and I covet my neighbor's Porsche. Though I do think men should wear makeup (it looks nice!), my tepid masculinity apparently rings loudly enough online and in person that most people guess that I go by "he" and "him." And that's fine; I will not be offended if you refer to me by those traditional, uselessly gendered pronouns.
But "he" is not what you should call me. If we lived in a just, rational, inclusive universe -- one in which we were not all so irredeemably obsessed by the particulars of the parts dangling between our fellow humans' legs, nor the ridiculous expectations signified by those parts about how we should act and speak and dress and feel -- there would be no requirement for you to have to assume my gender just to refer to me in the common tongue.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/opinion/pronoun-they-gender.html
Would it kill the NYT to put the byline above the thing that blocks your view of the rest of the article?
That kinda matches my internal feelings, but I nonetheless think it's a kinda shitty thing to say since so many people seem to genuinely care a lot about the centrality of their gender to their public interactions.
Especially with the direct emphasis on genitalia it comes across as kinda transphobic. Very "I got banned from stackoverflow for referring to everyone as they."
Wait, he wrote pointlessly argumentative and contrarian columns mostly about himself, and then he got a job at the New York Times, and now he's writing for Slate? Talk about an unexpected career path!
Why don't you ask him? Apparently you were once email buddies.
These candidates, Ogged and his fans concluded, must be running bots of their own, so they "decided to write our own to combat them ... might as well try to win, and to put Kriston over the top while we were at it," Ogged told me in an e-mail.
https://www.salon.com/2007/08/22/fishbowl_bots/
Otto!
How did you remember that article? That's a blast from the past.
17 years! My god. But we weren't buddies, he "interviewed" me over email about our hot-bot.
Interesting. A more theoretical perspective addressed, more or less, by Contrapoints as transcribed here - search for "Concern Three: Abolish Gender".
(Not that I'm calling it veiled transphobia as in that transcript, obviously. Mutatis mutandis.)
Unless it comes from the Trans region of Romania, it's just sparkling fear.
It's tricky. Manjoo is clearly coming at this from a position of sympathy with trans people and is trying to make things easier for them by lowering the salience of gender overall. That's different from the TERFs being discussed in 25 who are trying to invalidate their experience of gender. But is the effect the same? I don't know; maybe.
The post title is also now appropriate in an additional, ironic way.
What's "the Bouie thing on Bluesky"?
Jamelle Bouie was one of the higher-profile guys on Bluesky. He kept getting a ton of weird reply guys, & did some low level of engagement with them that was only sort of dunking. Most recently a bunch of people labeled as young and trans, but might have been a small group, started brigading him on his refusal to resign from the NYT over its anti-trans editorial stance. He ended up deleting his account, & it's being seen as a continuation of the pattern that led to Tressie McMillan Cottom deleting, officially progressive but practically harassing, & mysteriously most commonly seen against Black people. Bluesky is getting a bit of a reputation for this. However, Bouie also said on Threads that he might come back if they make it easier to filter replies in the way high-follower accounts need (such as, disable notifications for repliers who you don't follow), and Bluesky has apparently moved this up the priority list.
I was following Bouie on Bluesky but stopped a couple months ago because it seemed like every day he was lecturing some follower/responder "if you actually read what I wrote you would not have said that." Like, every day. I didn't understand why he bothered to engage with people in that way.
Still, he was an S-tier poster for that site. Now its a bunch of mids.
33: Yeah, that's what I meant by not precisely dunking but still a lot of engagement. Charitably, I think he was trying to model the identification of weird reply guys (on simple grounds like "I never wrote what you say I did") so others were less likely to become such? But still probably not great for the old mental health.