Episode description

In today's episode, the hosts zero in on an obscure, under-covered newspaper known as "The New York Times." Specifically, they discuss an explosion of employee anger over the paper's decision to publish a column by Sen. Tom Cotton, and what it can (maybe) tell everyone about internal dynamics in some media companies at the moment. Then, they shift gears to a Times article about a nonbinary 7-year-old and discuss the ways in which a certain subgenre of storytelling could be obscuring the nature of gender-identity development. In the show's final, patrons-only segment, Katie tells Jesse about an Instagram controversy involving white liberals trying to show how much they care about racial injustice, but digging themselves into a deeper and deeper hole as a result.

Show notes and links (* denotes stuff that happened after our episode went up):

"Tom Cotton: Send In the Troops" -  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html 

* "Senator’s ‘Send In the Troops’ Op-Ed in The Times Draws Online Ire" -  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/business/tom-cotton-op-ed.html 

* "New York Times Says Senator’s Op-Ed Did Not Meet Standards" -  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/business/new-york-times-op-ed-cotton.html 

* "The Inside Story of the Tom Cotton Op-Ed that Rocked the New York Times" -  https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/tom-cotton-new-york-times-op-ed-inside-story/
(An article in which Cotton's camp strongly denies the idea of an unusual editorial process)

* "Yesterday two dozen of us who make @nytimes publishing tools called out sick in solidarity with our Black colleagues & in protest of the Cotton op-ed. I was harassed on Twitter all day for it." - https://twitter.com/nzle/status/1268906487377801218 

* "The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. (Thread.)" -  https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1268628680797978625 

"The Hardest Part of Having a Nonbinary Kid Is Other People" -  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/parenting/non-binary-children-support.html 

"What Is Gender Identity?" -  https://arcdigital.media/what-is-gender-identity-10ce0da71999 

"Attention white people: Your #BLM memes are not enough" -  https://www.kuow.org/stories/a-letter-to-her-white-friends-on-their-blm-memes 

"Blackout Tuesday posts are drowning out vital information shared under the BLM hashtag" -  https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/2/21277852/blackout-tuesday-posts-hiding-information-blm-black-lives-matter-hashtag