Should we aspire to be featured in or write for the New Yorker?
Hello everyone, I'd like to thank Ian and Bernard for their thoughtful contributions. Here's a bigger question that comes to mind as I ponder all the issues raised over the last few days in this stimulating conversation. Just for the moment, let's assume that whatever outrage anyone might be feeling is just a product of submersion in an unworldly academic culture. Let's assume that Evgeny Morozov and Janet Browne are entirely correct. That this is just how highbrow journalism works. The New Yorker does things in a particular way. Call it editorial determinism. There could only be one mention of Eden Medina, "entertaining" was just the right word, and it had to come in the tenth paragraph. The New Yorker prose aesthetic provided no alternatives. The Tumblr and twitter responses from Morozov resolved the matter. There will be no apology. There should be no apology. Let's assume that these are indeed the only terms on which the work of an award winning scholar can be popularized in the New Yorker. That these are the only terms on which a pugilistic public intellectual who is also a Harvard graduate student can or should engage with the work of an award winning scholar on the pages of the New Yorker. Take it or leave it. I'd bet that many historians dream of one day having their work profiled at length in the New Yorker, or, even less plausibly, of themselves being invited to contribute to its hallowed pages. Having that happen might seem like winning the lottery. But if nothing at all went wrong here, perhaps it shouldn't. Maybe the dream is more of a nightmare. Perhaps the New Yorker and scholarship are best kept apart. Best wishes, Tom
B On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 9:34 AM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh@computer.org> wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'd like to thank Ian and Bernard for their thoughtful contributions.
Here's a bigger question that comes to mind as I ponder all the issues raised over the last few days in this stimulating conversation. Just for the moment, let's assume that whatever outrage anyone might be feeling is just a product of submersion in an unworldly academic culture. Let's assume that Evgeny Morozov and Janet Browne are entirely correct. That this is just how highbrow journalism works. The New Yorker does things in a particular way. Call it editorial determinism. There could only be one mention of Eden Medina, "entertaining" was just the right word, and it had to come in the tenth paragraph. The New Yorker prose aesthetic provided no alternatives. The Tumblr and twitter responses from Morozov resolved the matter. There will be no apology. There should be no apology.
Let's assume that these are indeed the only terms on which the work of an award winning scholar can be popularized in the New Yorker. That these are the only terms on which a pugilistic public intellectual who is also a Harvard graduate student can or should engage with the work of an award winning scholar on the pages of the New Yorker. Take it or leave it.
I'd bet that many historians dream of one day having their work profiled at length in the New Yorker, or, even less plausibly, of themselves being invited to contribute to its hallowed pages. Having that happen might seem like winning the lottery. But if nothing at all went wrong here, perhaps it shouldn't. Maybe the dream is more of a nightmare. Perhaps the New Yorker and scholarship are best kept apart.
Best wishes,
Tom
Dear Colleagues, I don't think one bad experience, or even several, should make us give up on engaging with more popular or widely-read media. We've probably all had bad experiences with academic peer review as well. The point is not to excuse these occurrences but to "censure and move on," as the saying goes. I for one would welcome sharing of information on how to be published in these more popular outlets. I don't mean general writing advice, but practical information specific to each publisher: whom to contact; what sort of topics, length, format they are looking for; what they want to see up front (an idea or an entire draft), etc. I appreciated Ian Bogost's post about the Atlantic, for example. Having this type of information would give me a more concrete goal to shoot for than just "write something popular." Cheers, Janet Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS
Hello everyone, I second Janet's plea that we not give up on popular publications too soon. Tying together Janet's email and Ian Bogost's, I am pasting a bit of text below regarding a publication opportunity that a friend sent me a few months back. The publication on Medium, Re:form <https://medium.com/re-form>, is edited by Sarah Rich, who has written some nice pieces on technology in the last few months. (Rich also happens to be married to Alexis Madrigal, so the two of them make a dynamic tech duo.) My friend, who is a comic artist, and I are dreaming up short graphic novel-esque stories illustrating (pun intended) lessons about the history of technological change, mostly drawing on my work on auto history. While the bit I've pasted below focuses on graphic stories, I think Re:form is also interested in textual ones. Best, Lee * Medium has just launched a new publication called Re:form <https://medium.com/re-form>, edited by Sarah Rich, that focuses on design. I worked with her to help get a Rich Stevens comic <https://medium.com/re-form/phoning-it-in-b6a9c237fad6> in there and we're now looking for something longer and more journalistic from a cartoonist.* * I'm sending this out to some of you I've worked with before to see if you might pitch us.* * The focus is fairly broad. Rich explained some about her vision for the section in her inaugural pos <https://medium.com/re-form/a-field-guide-to-the-designed-world-4a15edf8f3a7>t a few weeks ago and wrote me this about what she is looking for in a piece. * *I'd love to have stories that look at an object either from the perspective of its history or its current cultural context. Could be a totally ordinary thing like a ball point pen or a beer bottle opener or a seatbelt. If someone wanted to do research it could relate to how that thing came to be a common object, or if they wanted to just do cultural commentary (like with the iPhone) it could be more about how it plays in current environs. I could also see something that shines light on an object of design that is so "hidden in plain sight" as to vanish unless a writer or artist puts it in front of us. For example, I have someone writing about the tags that are embedded in city sidewalks to indicate to municipal utility workers where they need to do repairs. It's a language and a way of reading the city that most of us completely overlook because we don't speak the language, but if someone gives us a little lesson, suddenly we can read the city in a new way. * *Re:form can pay pretty good for something too. Frankly, it's higher than what I can pay for on The Nib.* *If you have any subjects in mind that you think could work, put a pitch together and send it my way.* *Thanks!* On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate@vt.edu> wrote:
Dear Colleagues,
I don't think one bad experience, or even several, should make us give up on engaging with more popular or widely-read media. We've probably all had bad experiences with academic peer review as well. The point is not to excuse these occurrences but to "censure and move on," as the saying goes.
I for one would welcome sharing of information on how to be published in these more popular outlets. I don't mean general writing advice, but practical information specific to each publisher: whom to contact; what sort of topics, length, format they are looking for; what they want to see up front (an idea or an entire draft), etc. I appreciated Ian Bogost's post about the Atlantic, for example. Having this type of information would give me a more concrete goal to shoot for than just "write something popular."
Cheers, Janet
Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
-- Assistant Professor Program on Science and Technology Studies College of Arts and Letters Stevens Institute of Technology Hoboken, NJ 07030 AmericanScience.Blogspot.com Twitter: @STS_News
On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 10:59 AM, Lee Vinsel <lee.vinsel@gmail.com> wrote:
My friend, who is a comic artist, and I are dreaming up short graphic novel-esque stories illustrating (pun intended) lessons about the history of technological change, mostly drawing on my work on auto history.
On a slightly related note to this and to the idea of historic events in popular media, G.T. Labs publishes comics about various scientists, including one online now about Alan Turing. http://www.gt-labs.com/ I don't recall this being mentioned in this thread before, though I may have missed it. Comic books certainly qualify as popular media, though not as widespread as they used to be.
Hi Justin: On 15 Oct 2014, at 17:25, Justin Sherrill <justin@shiningsilence.com> wrote:
On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 10:59 AM, Lee Vinsel <lee.vinsel@gmail.com> wrote:
My friend, who is a comic artist, and I are dreaming up short graphic novel-esque stories illustrating (pun intended) lessons about the history of technological change, mostly drawing on my work on auto history. On a slightly related note to this and to the idea of historic events in popular media, G.T. Labs publishes comics about various scientists, including one online now about Alan Turing.
I don't recall this being mentioned in this thread before, though I may have missed it. Comic books certainly qualify as popular media, though not as widespread as they used to be.
You might be interested in the Newcastle Science Comic - which was commissioned by Newcastle University in connection with last year's British Science Festival, run by the British Science Association, formerly known as British Association for the Advancement of Science or the BA, (founded 1831 by a group of scientists that included Charles Babbage). Large numbers of the 44-page newsprint comic were distributed by the University to all the local schools. It was written and designed by a group of local cartoonists, mainly amateur and connected with Newcastle University. It was based on ideas and suggestions from a whole set of University scientists. My own involvement came as a surprise to me - one of our CS students turned the Youtube video of a lecture I had given at Bletchley Park about Turing and Colossus into a one page comic, and then asked if I was willing for it to be included in the Newcastle Science Comic! I negotiated some changes in a few of the text bubbles, and then happily gave the go ahead. You can see the whole comic at: http://hollowearth.co.uk/comics/asteroid-belter-newcastle-science-comic/Aste... My lecture is on page 35. My understanding is that reactions to the Newcastle Comic, from schools and school pupils, have been very positive. Cheers Brian Randell -- School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 222 7923 FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell
Sarah Rich is terrific as is her re:form channel (I wrote a piece for their launch, which I hereby immodestly link: https://medium.com/re-form/welcome-to-dataland-d8c06a5f3bc6). It’s also a great way to reach a substantial audience (somewhere around 100,00 readers in the case of my piece). The Medium crew also does a bang-up job with design and art, the likes of which are basically inaccessible to scholars. Obviously, I also urge everyone here not to give up on popular publications but to take this opportunity to reinvest in them. Ian On Oct 15, 2014, at 10:59 AM, Lee Vinsel <lee.vinsel@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello everyone,
I second Janet's plea that we not give up on popular publications too soon.
Tying together Janet's email and Ian Bogost's, I am pasting a bit of text below regarding a publication opportunity that a friend sent me a few months back. The publication on Medium, Re:form, is edited by Sarah Rich, who has written some nice pieces on technology in the last few months. (Rich also happens to be married to Alexis Madrigal, so the two of them make a dynamic tech duo.)
My friend, who is a comic artist, and I are dreaming up short graphic novel-esque stories illustrating (pun intended) lessons about the history of technological change, mostly drawing on my work on auto history.
While the bit I've pasted below focuses on graphic stories, I think Re:form is also interested in textual ones.
Best,
Lee
Medium has just launched a new publication called Re:form, edited by Sarah Rich, that focuses on design. I worked with her to help get a Rich Stevens comic in there and we're now looking for something longer and more journalistic from a cartoonist.
I'm sending this out to some of you I've worked with before to see if you might pitch us.
The focus is fairly broad. Rich explained some about her vision for the section in her inaugural post a few weeks ago and wrote me this about what she is looking for in a piece.
I'd love to have stories that look at an object either from the perspective of its history or its current cultural context. Could be a totally ordinary thing like a ball point pen or a beer bottle opener or a seatbelt. If someone wanted to do research it could relate to how that thing came to be a common object, or if they wanted to just do cultural commentary (like with the iPhone) it could be more about how it plays in current environs. I could also see something that shines light on an object of design that is so "hidden in plain sight" as to vanish unless a writer or artist puts it in front of us. For example, I have someone writing about the tags that are embedded in city sidewalks to indicate to municipal utility workers where they need to do repairs. It's a language and a way of reading the city that most of us completely overlook because we don't speak the language, but if someone gives us a little lesson, suddenly we can read the city in a new way.
Re:form can pay pretty good for something too. Frankly, it's higher than what I can pay for on The Nib.
If you have any subjects in mind that you think could work, put a pitch together and send it my way.
Thanks!
On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate@vt.edu> wrote: Dear Colleagues,
I don't think one bad experience, or even several, should make us give up on engaging with more popular or widely-read media. We've probably all had bad experiences with academic peer review as well. The point is not to excuse these occurrences but to "censure and move on," as the saying goes.
I for one would welcome sharing of information on how to be published in these more popular outlets. I don't mean general writing advice, but practical information specific to each publisher: whom to contact; what sort of topics, length, format they are looking for; what they want to see up front (an idea or an entire draft), etc. I appreciated Ian Bogost's post about the Atlantic, for example. Having this type of information would give me a more concrete goal to shoot for than just "write something popular."
Cheers, Janet
Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
-- Assistant Professor Program on Science and Technology Studies College of Arts and Letters Stevens Institute of Technology Hoboken, NJ 07030 AmericanScience.Blogspot.com Twitter: @STS_News _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
I second Ian's plug for Sarah Rich—and Lee Vinsel's plea for reaching across unfortunately-drawn boundaries as well! As Thomas Haigh's counterfactual suggests, this is a problem of boundary work (at least, that's what it suggests to me). I'd like to resist is the agonism of rigor v. immediacy, or public impact v. knowledge production. Indeed, both journalism and scholarship have their standards with respect to rigor, sourcing, and claims to truth. They're articulated in different rituals and craft practices in each respective domain (and there's a good deal of diversity within the domains as well)—but in each domain, the best work offers much that practitioners from the other side can admire. While scholars covet the seeming impact and audience of popular cultural journalists, the journalists desire and idealize many markers of the academy: time & license to pursue questions wherever they lead; the fellowship of intellectual community; the imprimatur of the ivory tower. (As someone who resides fitfully in both camps—or, in the estimation of a more jaundiced eye, divigates dilettantishly between the two—I make bold to compare.) We're all knowledge-makers, myth-talkers, and storytellers in the end, with much reason to make common cause. I risk appearing Pollyannaish or Panglossian here; I do know that we're far from the best of all possible worlds. But I remain reluctant to sort work into the esoteric and the exoteric, or the scholarly and the popular, as I think such invidious comparisons tend to diminish and discipline work of varied tempers. Rather than sorting ourselves into a received bicamerality, we might look for ways to bring our stories, and the epistemic virtues by which we structure them, into richer resonance. Whatever THAT means! On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 12:25 PM, Ian Bogost <ian.bogost@lmc.gatech.edu> wrote:
Sarah Rich is terrific as is her re:form channel (I wrote a piece for their launch, which I hereby immodestly link: https://medium.com/re-form/welcome-to-dataland-d8c06a5f3bc6). It’s also a great way to reach a substantial audience (somewhere around 100,00 readers in the case of my piece).
The Medium crew also does a bang-up job with design and art, the likes of which are basically inaccessible to scholars.
Obviously, I also urge everyone here not to give up on popular publications but to take this opportunity to reinvest in them.
Ian
On Oct 15, 2014, at 10:59 AM, Lee Vinsel <lee.vinsel@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello everyone,
I second Janet's plea that we not give up on popular publications too soon.
Tying together Janet's email and Ian Bogost's, I am pasting a bit of text below regarding a publication opportunity that a friend sent me a few months back. The publication on Medium, Re:form, is edited by Sarah Rich, who has written some nice pieces on technology in the last few months. (Rich also happens to be married to Alexis Madrigal, so the two of them make a dynamic tech duo.)
My friend, who is a comic artist, and I are dreaming up short graphic novel-esque stories illustrating (pun intended) lessons about the history of technological change, mostly drawing on my work on auto history.
While the bit I've pasted below focuses on graphic stories, I think Re:form is also interested in textual ones.
Best,
Lee
Medium has just launched a new publication called Re:form, edited by Sarah Rich, that focuses on design. I worked with her to help get a Rich Stevens comic in there and we're now looking for something longer and more journalistic from a cartoonist.
I'm sending this out to some of you I've worked with before to see if you might pitch us.
The focus is fairly broad. Rich explained some about her vision for the section in her inaugural post a few weeks ago and wrote me this about what she is looking for in a piece.
I'd love to have stories that look at an object either from the perspective of its history or its current cultural context. Could be a totally ordinary thing like a ball point pen or a beer bottle opener or a seatbelt. If someone wanted to do research it could relate to how that thing came to be a common object, or if they wanted to just do cultural commentary (like with the iPhone) it could be more about how it plays in current environs. I could also see something that shines light on an object of design that is so "hidden in plain sight" as to vanish unless a writer or artist puts it in front of us. For example, I have someone writing about the tags that are embedded in city sidewalks to indicate to municipal utility workers where they need to do repairs. It's a language and a way of reading the city that most of us completely overlook because we don't speak the language, but if someone gives us a little lesson, suddenly we can read the city in a new way.
Re:form can pay pretty good for something too. Frankly, it's higher than what I can pay for on The Nib.
If you have any subjects in mind that you think could work, put a pitch together and send it my way.
Thanks!
On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate@vt.edu> wrote: Dear Colleagues,
I don't think one bad experience, or even several, should make us give up on engaging with more popular or widely-read media. We've probably all had bad experiences with academic peer review as well. The point is not to excuse these occurrences but to "censure and move on," as the saying goes.
I for one would welcome sharing of information on how to be published in these more popular outlets. I don't mean general writing advice, but practical information specific to each publisher: whom to contact; what sort of topics, length, format they are looking for; what they want to see up front (an idea or an entire draft), etc. I appreciated Ian Bogost's post about the Atlantic, for example. Having this type of information would give me a more concrete goal to shoot for than just "write something popular."
Cheers, Janet
Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
-- Assistant Professor Program on Science and Technology Studies College of Arts and Letters Stevens Institute of Technology Hoboken, NJ 07030 AmericanScience.Blogspot.com Twitter: @STS_News _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
-- matthew battles associate director, metaLAB (at) harvard <http://metalab.harvard.edu/> fellow, berkman center for internet and society <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu> twitter = @matthewbattles <http://twitter.com/matthewbattles>
participants (8)
-
Brian Randell -
Ian Bogost -
Janet Abbate -
Joshua Weiss -
Justin Sherrill -
Lee Vinsel -
Matthew Battles -
Thomas Haigh