5 Things I Wish I Had Written About This Year
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Shutterstock
This year, I wrote a lot of newsletters that I’m really proud of. (My top 10, in chronological order: the wellness-to-white-supremacy pipeline, Awkwafina’s blaccent, how journalists humanized members of the trucker convoy, the war in Ukraine, that super racist review of Turning Red, historical accuracy in Bridgerton, Fire Island and the Bechdel Test, Kim Kardashian and whiteness, the monarchy and Kanye’s antisemitism.)
But there are some topics I didn’t tackle for various reasons. Sometimes something bigger or more timely happened (RIP all the things I considered writing about the week of April 1, when the internet spent way, way too long talking about The Slap). Sometimes I didn’t feel like I knew enough about a particular issue to write a thoughtful newsletter. And sometimes, I just didn’t realize how much I’d been thinking about a topic until now.
I didn’t want to end the year without touching on them in some way, though. So, here are five newsletters I thought about writing this year:
Snoop Dogg’s rebrand as hip hop’s kindly uncle
I’ve been thinking about this for literal years. As a person who was alive in the 90s and therefore remembers the way people used to talk about Snoop Dogg (and other rap icons), it is truly wild to see how mainstream he’s become. I mean, yes, the friendship with Martha Stewart has been hilarious for 14 (!) years now, and seeing a man who was once considered public enemy number one advertising Dunkin Donuts will never not be entertaining, plus “Affirmation Song” from his children’s album (!!!) is legitimately catchy, but there’s also some cognitive dissonance in seeing him so widely accepted, and even positioned as basically harmless. This despite being accused of rape by two separate women: in 2005, makeup artist Kylie Bell said Snoop and several of his associates raped her in his dressing room after a 2003 taping of Jimmy Kimmel Live. (She dropped the suit later that year.) And earlier this year, another woman known only as Jane Doe filed a lawsuit alleging Snoop and an associate, Bishop Don “Magic” Juan, sexually assaulted her in 2013. (Doe filed the lawsuit in February, dropped it in April, then refiled it in July.) Snoop denies both of these allegations.
I haven’t seen any reporting on these cases, and there hasn’t been a court case, so I’m not actually trying to determine the truth of these allegations. Instead, I’m stuck on how little attention they have received. In a post-#MeToo world, it feels like the kind of thing that might make some waves, you know? Especially since the initial Jane Doe lawsuit was filed days before Snoop took the stage at this year’s Super Bowl Halftime show, which means we were already primed to think and talk about him. Instead, this barely made a dent in the discourse at the time, and I’ve been thinking about that ever since—especially this week, in the context of Tory Lanez shooting trial and Megan Thee Stallion’s recent testimony. First, what news items take off and which don’t—and why did this one fly under our collective radar? And how much does this have to do with our calculations about who ‘deserves’ support, or at least the benefit of the doubt, which are often influenced by nostalgia and/or fandom?
The ‘shopping at Shein is ethical, actually’ discourse
In October, British broadcaster Channel 4 aired an investigation into fast-fashion retailer Shein that found the company’s business practices are, as The Cut summarized, far worse than we thought (and we already thought they were pretty bad): “In one factory, Channel 4 found that workers receive a base salary of 4,000 yuan per month—roughly $556—to make 500 pieces of clothing per day and that their first month’s pay is withheld from them; in another factory, workers received the equivalent of four cents per item. Workers in both factories were working up to 18-hour days and were given only one day off a month. In one factory, the outlet found women washing their hair during lunch breaks, and workers were penalized two-thirds of their daily wage if they made a mistake on a clothing item. The reported hours and working conditions violate China’s labor [sic] laws.”
Unsurprisingly, this led to plenty of conversation about the evils of fast fashion in general and how to shop more sustainably, but because the internet is nothing if not predictable, the discourse quickly descended into Shein superfans insisting that it was classist, ableist and fatphobic to tell people not to shop there. Two of my favourite Twitter follows—author, stylist and Elle UK contributing editor Aja Barber and author, lingerie expert and fashion historian Cora Harrington—unpacked this nonsense extensively, but as recently as this week, it’s still circulating online.
Obviously, you can’t convince people who aren’t interested in a nuanced conversation to, you know, have one, so yeah, if you want to believe the labour violations, poor quality, dangerous materials, etc. are not that bad because you like buying $10 dresses, there’s not much I can do. But I do think it’s worth paying attention to the way people are defending their choices: by using the language of social justice, which is clearly an attempt to give their opinions more weight and ward off critique.
Also, this is deeply nerdy, but the most recent iteration of this is a gross misunderstanding of a long-running piece of internet wisdom, which is the Sam Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness. It’s originally from a passage in one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, and it’s genius: “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
The takeaway is that being poor is (ironically) expensive because it means you can’t invest in higher quality items that will last longer and instead have no choice but to buy cheap crap over and over again. So, tell me why this nameless Twitter horde thinks Sam Vimes would be down with a Shein haul. Please, please can we have some reading comprehension? Just a little bit, as a treat?
The way we talked about Brittney Griner’s detention in Russia
Back in February, when Griner was arrested at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow because Russian customs officers found vape cartridges containing hash oil in her luggage, I was thinking a lot about why she was in Russia in the first place. That is: money. Like many WNBA players, she was playing for a Russian basketball team—UMMC Ekaterinburg—during the league’s off-season to supplement her income because there is a massive gender wage gap in professional basketball. According to NPR, “the average NBA base salary this season is about $5.4 million, compared with about $120,600 for the WNBA. The WNBA season is shorter — 36 games versus 82 in the NBA. But the average annual base salaries mean an NBA player makes 44 times what the average WNBA player makes.” In comparison, WNBA players who head to Russia to play for the winter, as nearly a dozen players did during the 2021-2022 season, can make as much as $1.5 million, according to Yahoo Sports.
I still think that’s super important, of course, but throughout her 10-month detention, my attention has shifted a little bit. As time went on, and especially since her release, I’ve been thinking more about the value people have assigned to Griner, how it differs by community and what that illuminates about American society. While she was imprisoned, it felt like the amount of attention her case received from mainstream news outlets and sports-focused outlets told a story about how much WNBA players, female athletes and Black women in general are valued by American society (that is: not enough). And honestly, that was even clearer after her release, when everyone on Twitter suddenly became a geopolitical expert with thoughts on whether swapping her for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout was ‘fair.’
I’m not sure I know enough about geopolitics or prisoner swaps to articulate this myself, so I really liked how MSNBC journalist Ayman Mohyeldin explained why this thinking is flawed in a recent Twitter thread: “It’s interesting to see the uproar implying it was not a ‘fair’ trade… that some how [sic] WE lost because we gave up a ruthless arms dealer in exchange for a black American female athlete. Moments like these can reflect what we value in our society. Russia wanted to release a ruthless killer. We wanted someone who made a mistake, either intentionally or accidentally. In other words, we valued the life and freedom of a black athlete. Russia valued a man who traffics in death… There is something profoundly strong in setting an example by saying we believe every American, even when they make mistakes, has incredible value and deserves our support when they are unjustly held... In other words, your importance and your value to our government are not derived simply by what function you play for the US government.”
Julia Fox’s transition from NYC art babe to Kanye hanger-on to feminist icon
I don’t know that I have a lot of analysis here, but I have been fascinated by Fox’s ability to leverage a two-month relationship with Ye into lasting fame—and by what she is doing with that attention. Namely: posting slightly unhinged but also kind of convincing feminist rants on her TikTok account. I find myself liking her far more than I mean to, tbh. (Though... this was weird.)
How media is covering the Iranian Revolution
This was going to be last week’s newsletter, but I had a family emergency and couldn’t actually write it, so I’m sneaking it in here. Like so many of us, I’ve been paying close attention to the women-led Iranian Revolution since it started in September. It is a super powerful movement that has been scary, emotional and heartwrenching, yet also inspiring to watch—but the way Western media has covered it has sometimes been, well, weird. First, there was the claim that 15,000 Iranians would be executed imminently, which stemmed from a single Newsweek article and was not strictly accurate, as BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh pointed out on Twitter. It trended for more than a day before other Western outlets began publishing articles that added further context/fact-checking—namely that, while more than 15,000 protesters had been arrested at that time, the regime’s parliament had not “voted overwhelmingly in favour of the death penalty for protesters,” as Newsweek reported. Instead, it had “issued a letter signed by the vast majority of members calling for harsh punishments of protesters,” which is absolutely serious, but not the same thing.
More recently, Western media ran with another inaccurate story: that Iran had abolished the morality police, the same police unit that detained 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September because she wasn’t wearing her hijab properly, leading to her death and sparking these protests. As CBC journalist Nahayat Tizhoosh reported, this was based on a vague—and unsubstantiated—comment by Iranian Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri. “Not only is it unconfirmed that the morality police have been disbanded,” she wrote, “but statements by officials since have made it clear that sharia law—and its restrictions on women's dress—will continue to be enforced.”
I think both of these stories illuminate gaps in Western media’s knowledge about Iran, though in different ways. The 15,000 protester story went viral because of a meme that circulated widely on Instagram thanks to shares from regular people and A-list celebrities alike… and because mainstream media didn’t address it right away. I don’t think that’s because journalists were ignoring the story or didn’t care; instead, I suspect they were scrambling to build relationships with credible sources within Iran who could help contextualize, fact-check or even help gut-check information, especially at that time. Meanwhile, the morality police story took off because it seemingly came from an ‘official’ source, but as Iranian-Canadian human rights activist and lawyer Kaveh Shahrooz told Tizhoosh, “Iran’s regime is not normal; its official statements are often lies designed to mislead the world. Our media should not take them at their word and must exercise extra caution when reporting on Iran.”
That is, I think, the key point. As journalists (and as people), we need to resist the impulse to say things first, and instead practice good media literacy to ensure that what we’re saying is actually true. When we don’t, it isn’t just that we amplify misinformation, or worse, disinformation‚ it’s also that we inadvertently harm the movement we’re trying to support. The John F. Kennedy School of Government, which is the school of public policy and government at Harvard University, recently hosted a conversation with Harvard prof Erica Chenoweth, who studies non-violent protests, and she made this point: “the temptation for movements to their supporters to essentially retaliate through their own disinformation programs is profound... But previous history shows that particularly for progressive movements, it can be incredibly costly for them to succumb to this temptation.”
Chenoweth’s example was a colleague, Mary King, who was the press secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement and was responsible for sending press releases to mainstream media after different events. “She said that when she would get a phone call about a certain number of people who were arrested or beaten or killed in the course of a match or a demonstration, that she would always triangulate and try to verify to the fullest extent possible. But she would always report the most conservative number. Because she was very worried that if she reported more, maybe exaggerated figures, that the movement’s credibility and legitimacy would be undermined. And that they were fighting a battle of legitimacy and politics and they couldn’t afford being accused of being liars or hypocrites.”
In other words, spreading information that’s not strictly accurate isn’t just bad because it’s incorrect. It may also lead to a decline in support. That’s the risk of getting it wrong.
OOO Alert
I’m taking a break for the rest of the year, so there won’t be any newsletters or social media posts for the next couple of weeks. See you in January!
(An Extra Long) And Did You Hear About…
Two year-end roundups: 1. All the micro-news stories you might have missed if you weren’t extremely online this year. (Embarrassingly, I had seen almost all of these.) 2. This delightfully snarky list of the year’s worst movies. Relatedly, this smart take on the phenomenon of even writing year-end lists.
This sharp and thoughtful review of CJ Hauser’s The Crane’s Wife. When I think about the type of criticism I most appreciate, it’s exactly this.
Three beautiful reads that use nature as a metaphor to explore deeply human experiences: Sabrina Imbler on self-sacrificing octopi, their mother and eating disorders; Imbler again on insects and transformations; and Guérin Kairu on seeds as abolition.
The 40something mom who stole her daughter’s identity.
Harper Bazaar’s thoughtful conversation with Black punks, facilitated by Kaitlin Greenidge.
Scaachi Koul on tattoos and grief.
Comedian Ryan Ken’s perfect take on the New York Times’ approach to covering trans issues.
The serial killer expert who turned out to be a fraud.
This beautiful, melancholy essay about home videos, immigrant families and intergenerational connection.
Writer Zoe Charlotte Greenberg’s allegation that journalist Leah McLaren sexually assaulted her as a teenager, then recently published a memoir that misrepresents the assault as consensual, despite Greenberg bringing the assault to the publisher’s attention. The publisher, Penguin Random House, released a statement on Twitter last week. (Massive content warning for this one, obviously.)
How books get on the New York Times bestseller list.
My favourite Christmas Twitter thread, which the original poster helpfully re-upped last week. Also: this amazing Christmas Twitter post.
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