Bill Cheng's Blog, page 104
April 26, 2013
April 25, 2013
This is EXACTLY the kind of book I would’ve loved as a...
This is EXACTLY the kind of book I would’ve loved as a kid.
I lost days reading the original Fiend Folio and Gary Gygax’s Monster Manuals.
therumpus:
DEAR WIKIPEDIA EDITORS,
BY AMY LETTER AND BRIAN...
DEAR WIKIPEDIA EDITORS,BY AMY LETTER AND BRIAN SPEARS
April 24th, 2013
Not all of you, just the ones who decided that it was a good idea to start removing women from the category “American Novelists” and putting them into a new category: “American Women Novelists.” You guys.
What the hell, man? What’s wrong with you?
It would have been bad enough had you decided to replace the one category with two separate categories, one for American Men and one for American Women novelists, since that division would have suggested that the gender of the writer is the most important distinction (as opposed to, oh, genre or era) and since it would leave out genderqueer novelists completely.
But you didn’t even do that. The dudes are going to get the default category “American Novelists,” while women get shunted off into a cozy little ghetto, the easier to ignore, which is pretty much been the case for most of human history. Men are the normal, everyone else is the other. Hey, good news for sexist readers: this way, a person searching for American Novelists on wikipedia won’t accidentally end up reading a woman’s writing. No, no. Now that can only happen if the person is searching specifically for women novelists. What a relief.
But here’s the thing that confuses us. It’s not like you haven’t been called out for sexism before or anything. You’ve had a problem with this for a while, and despite your claims that you want to change the culture among the editors, you really haven’t done much about it. Instead, you do this. You once again diminish women.
And you’re doing this at a time when we’re more conscious than ever, thanks to groups like VIDA, of the huge disparities in attention that books by men receive in terms of reviews in big publications over books by women, as well as the disparities in space that men receive to write reviews as opposed to women reviewers. We’re talking about massive inequalities here, and you’re aiding and abetting that. As Amanda Filipacchi said in the piece linked above, “People who go to Wikipedia to get ideas for whom to hire, or honor, or read, and look at that list of “American Novelists” for inspiration, might not even notice that the first page of it includes far more men than women. They might simply use that list without thinking twice about it. It’s probably small, easily fixable things like this that make it harder and slower for women to gain equality in the literary world.”
So Wikipedia Editors who thought this was a good idea, do us a favor here. Even if there’s something in your brogrammer code that refuses to allow you to undo this, at least stay out of the way of the editors who are cleaning up the mess you made.
thelifeguardlibrarian:
cincylibrary:
laserscrewdriver:
AVENGE...
AVENGE ME HAMLET
FOR I WAS KILLED BY YOUR UNCLE, AND MY BROTHER
A variation that would have packed the house in Shakespeare’s time.
Imma just stay in bed and laugh at this instead of work.
"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream..."
- Tim O’Brien; The Things They Carried (via wordpainting)
April 24, 2013
myimaginarybrooklyn:
togatherinc:
schoollibraryjournal:
Excelle...
Excellent question!
James Patterson’s full-page ad from the New York Times Book Review.
A great question from an unexpected source.
Sometimes if you want to get something done, you just have to do it yourself. Bring a friend to the library, if they haven’t enjoyed one in a while. Start a book club at work, and encourage everyone to buy from the bookstore down the street. Attend author events to support the writers you love, and to learn about the ones you’ll love next.
We like to think that the power lies in our own hands — not just the hands of avid readers, but any one of us who cares about ideas, learning, dreaming, and sharing those experiences with the people in our lives.
It’s no small task, but we can work together to make it happen. Saving books means saving creativity and innovation. Who wouldn’t want that?
