"Elizabeth Wurtzel died nearly three years ago. Since then, silence: No announcement of a repository of her papers, no posthumous publications..."

"... no conferences for the countless writers indebted to her. And so her friends... were shocked to find out only after the fact that the writer’s personal belongings were sold off in an online auction last week.... The bargain-basement prices that resulted made it feel all the more cruel. There was the handbag that they knew Wurtzel would have wanted to go to a specific friend (and even with a reserve of $6,500, the Birkin did not find a purchaser). There went the entire contents of her desk (including three heaping cups of pens and pencils), sold off for $29. The desk itself, beautifully marked with use, had a bit of a bidding war and went for just $535, still way under estimate. A drawing of her rescue dog, Augusta, sold for $20. (I bought her coffee table for $100 — 'Needs Refinishing,' the listing claimed incorrectly — precisely because of the signs of hard use on it.)"

From "The Last Traces of Elizabeth Wurtzel" by Choire Sicha (NY Magazine).

"There is, so far, only one proven fact in digital publishing: The more you publish the more successful you are...."

"The most effective of the influencers turned commentators, like @houseinhabit’s Jessica Reed Kraus, know this. Kraus is a San Clemente, California, mother who got her start in the content mines as a lifestyle blogger (picture lots of wavy-haired sons, surfboards, pools, and exposed ceiling beams). Over the past year or so, she morphed into a trial-obsessed Instagrammer.

My commenters jumped when I quoted the word "Caucasity," but my question is whether the proper spelling isn't "Caucacity."

Here's the context of my quotation. NY Magazine writer Choire Sicha wrote "For obvious reasons (Caucasity), most of these reporters are on the joyless, scold-y White Twitter...."

In the comments, Lucien said: "'Caucasity'? Is that like 'whiteness'?"  And Clyde said: "'Caucasity'?! What bilge!" 

To answer Lucien's question, "Caucasity" clearly means "whiteness." Why use an odd word when there's a more common word? I'd say it's just for humorous effect. It actually takes race less seriously. "Caucasian" used to have a somewhat elevated quality, when race was palmed off as a biological science. To seize upon the big word and to further enlarge it with an ending is a standard humor move. It's actually quite old fashioned.

But I just want to question the choice of ending — "-sity," rather than "-city." I've googled Caucasity" and got thrown into the Urban Dictionary entry "Caucacity" — with the "c," not the "s":

"Today, New York Times honcho Dean Baquet ordered a company-wide 'reset' in how his staff should think about Twitter...."

"Most of the people who work for him are very bad at being on Twitter, and their tweets truly are just not good. And then their bosses are so obsessed with Twitter too, and on edge about it. A cycle of humiliation ensues. They spend all that money on editors and then people just write stuff willy-nilly online? Whatever for?! Twitter looms prominently for journalists because it’s how they get jobs, distribute their work, and make friends. Twitter also helps journalists feel and be seen inside a system that will otherwise make them feel invisible.... Reporters confuse their Twitter audience for the actual world. For obvious reasons (Caucasity), most of these reporters are on the joyless, scold-y White Twitter, which is the opposite of all this.... There’s a meme, certainly popular inside the Times, that Twitter instills some kind of self-feeding censorship. Baquet might hate this most of all; he despises fearfulness."

Writes Choire Sicha in "Journalism’s Twitter Problem Is the Journalists" (NY Magazine).

Does Sicha really know Baquet's motive? Here's more about Baquet's memo at The Hill. The memo made Twitter and other social media optional, and the reason given was that journalists were relying "too much on Twitter as a reporting and feedback tool" and creating "echo chambers." It said those who do stay on Twitter ought to "meaningfully reduce" the time they spend there.

There's also the question of disparate impact: If women are more likely to be harassed on social media — or even if they just worry that the are — then a requirement (or near-requirement) — to tweet is something management might want to avoid. If efforts are made within an organization to create an inclusive, comfortable climate for different kinds of workers, then perhaps it should avoid forcing them into the hostile environment that is Twitter.

There's a certain way that people talk at each other on Twitter — that is rewarded on Twitter — so a requirement to tweet favors the kind of people for whom that kind of talk comes easily. Why would you want that to infect the structure of success in your business? 

To return to Sicha's hypothesis: "Baquet... despises fearfulness." He could just as well be yielding to fearfulness. There is complexity to the fear of social media!

Facebook's new name is: Meta.

Eh.

I'm not making a new tag for this.

ADDED: At NY Magazine, Choire Sicha opines: 

Most notably, Zuckerberg and Vishal Shah, Facebook’s head of metaverse projects, made a big pitch about the metaverse to creators in this presentation. “Commerce is going to be a big part of the metaverse,” said Shah. Creators — funny people, famous people, game streamers, cooking influencers, just generally hot people, makeup and beauty trendsetters, momfluencers, rogue therapists, financial pitchbros — are the backbone of the TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram ecosystems. Notably, they’re absolutely not a part of Facebook....

This video presentation was preceded by a short video in which Zuckerberg vaguely berated haters.... Zuckerberg attended a virtual meeting on this “embodied internet” at a space station where people were dressed like aliens and robots (Zuckerberg put on a Zuckerberg outfit) and also couldn’t identify anyone.... 

The [leaked] documents... show that the company is panicked about how much young people hate Facebook — “The teen brain is stimulated by novelty,” one internal document asserted....

Let's find that video. Here it is, looking like a sequence in a satirical scifi movie:

"If you are unhappy, or if you frequently say you are 'exhausted,' if maybe you cry at work a little more often than you personally think is reasonable..."

"... if you wake up in the morning and consider dying instead of going to work, you CLEARLY owe it to yourselves to do something else. Will making a change maybe make you poor or scared? SURE. Could the change be bad? ABSOLUTELY. But the alternative — staying put, degrading like an old yogurt — is to become a worse person. You can’t solve your own burnout, you can only change the system or your situation. And while it seems like becoming a worse person is a pretty common choice, do you really want to be common?"

That's Choire Sicha (at Substack), where I went because it was linked at "Ex-New York Times Styles editor says he suffered from burnout, wished for death" (NY Post). Sicha had been the NYT Styles editor for 4 years. 

I don't know if Substack offered him better money or what really happened. He says he likened himself to  old yogurt. He thought of dying. And who are we to say he didn't?

Elizabeth Warren "speaks from that odd place of 100% overlap between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party."

Says Choire Sicha, after watching her in the Massachusetts Democratic Senator primary debate.

"The Most Hilarious Piece You'll Ever Read About Gays in the Military."

Choire Sicha points at a really, really bad effort at satire:

D.C. comedy site "The Daily Caller" has a hilarious piece today, extremely Swiftian and sophisticated in its humor and irony! It is by a former Tennessee District Attorney, named Joe Rehyansky. It goes like this: "I have never encountered my eminently sensible proposal, one that protects the patriotic urges of some homosexuals as well as the national interest on the basis of 'force readiness' arguments which should govern the thinking of those charged with implementing the defense of our country: Lesbians should be allowed to serve, gay men (hereafter 'gays') should not."...