"Every day I get phone calls from anxious Americans complaining about an ideology that wants to pull all of us into the past," writes former New York Times columnist and Substack's Little Nemo of anti-wokeness Bari Weiss, in a new post about the allegedly heartbreaking case of Jodi Shaw, an aspiring Smith College librarian whose dreams of Pelotonning the next generation of nice white ladies into their futures of polite, non-disruptive white liberalism were crushed when she was advised it would be embarrassing to perform a library orientation in the form of a rap. After this weekend Shaw’s GoFundMyself has raised more than four years salary and she's already booking her Bill Maher appearance. Kicking off her excellent investigation of all this, Liz Spiers asks the key question about Weiss’s framing: “why does everyone have Bari Weiss’s phone number?”
Here’s why: after leaving the Times, Weiss struggled with her first business idea, an app-powered Fabergé egg brokerage called Weiss Fragility. But this weekend's post is the first public hint at her next, far more successful business venture: a sort of call-in line for white people who had an extremely good reason to say the n word and frustrated plantation wedding planners called Weiss Grievance.
"Almost no one who calls me is willing to go public," Weiss intones darkly, but I have obtained actual transcripts of two of these calls from a whistle-blowing insider known to me only as “Billy Moles,” and I am exclusively publishing them here, in Today in Tabs.
If you followed last week’s Slate Star Codex tabs, you’ll want to read Elizabeth Sandifer’s explication of exactly how Scott Siskind’s writing functions to convince people that extremely bad ideas are smart and rational. Even if you didn’t follow the SSC mess, she surgically flays a particular style of rhetorical internet bullshit that it’s very good to know how to identify, so do read it. It helped me understand why anything more than a few sentences of so-called “rationalist” prose always makes me physically nauseous. Will Wilkinson also made a heroic attempt to explain to the rationalists in their own language why they should feel stupid about their reaction to the Times profile. It is crushingly long and tedious, so go nuts if you can stand that, I guess.
👀 👀 👀 Got something you’d love to get in front of 24,000+ pairs of 👀 here in Tabs, along with 14,000+ more in Study Hall and Deez Links? We’ve got classified spots open this week. They are NOT super-expensive! This is the kind of thing YOU can do to grow your own podcast, newsletter, or bespoke direct-to-consumer loungewear company. Hit this page, fill out the form, you don’t even have to talk to anyone.
Google fired another member of its AI ethics team, Margaret Mitchell. Previously, the company fired Timnit Gebru, apparently for a research paper they didn’t like. Bari Weiss has not yet commented on either firing. FL woman fucks around, finds out. Gwyneth Paltrow’s intellectual vibrator. 50 Let Pobedy’s nerfect voyage. New mannequin house just dropped. Tom Scocca proves there is no such thing as too many books.
Do you like words? Here are some words: Simp. Puss. Thong. Funk. Tube. Bar. SPAC. Berg.
Finally, a 139 year old Victorian house went for a drive in San Francisco on Sunday morning, creating one of the most satisfying Twitter threads I’ve ever seen. There are even videos! All houses should get at least one Sunday drive.
Today’s Song: The new Hold Steady is out! I know you are all excited about that. Here’s “Unpleasant Breakfast:”
~ Describe in single words only the good things that come to mind about your tabs ~
For real, snag yourself an ad. I tweet @fka_tabs and @TodayinTabs. I promise never to take a deep dive on anything. Shallow skims only.