Author: dkrule
Teju Cole blog post
In Teju Cole’s essay, he talks about the previous prejudice that a lot of the world holds toward India (“Hindu festivals, men in turbans, women in saris”) and the difference between how photographers look at it differently through their lenses. The way many photographers look at India is solely through the lens of tradition, while the real India is a blend of the traditional with the modern. The Met Opera is also a mix of old and new. The institution has been around for well over a century, but in that time it has changed dramatically, not just in location but in atmosphere as well. It used to have a very exclusive feeling, and it may still seem that way from the outside. While the building is still luxurious (especially with the velvet wallpaper), anyone can now go, wearing pretty much whatever they want, and not necessarily feel uncomfortable. There’s also a ton of free events, making it more accessible than ever. Going to the Met Opera may still seem like a fancy night out, but it doesn’t feel exclusive to one group of people anymore. For my photos, I took one picture of the signature opulent chandelier and one of the people waiting in line for the women’s room during intermission. While some people were dressed to impress, others were just wearing jeans and a sweater, and no one was wearing anything like a gown or a tuxedo. I see this as a step in the right direction. I enjoy getting gussied up just like a lot of people, but not liking it, not to mention money issues, shouldn’t automatically exclude you from an experience you’d otherwise enjoy.
As far as the opera that we saw goes, I really liked it. I’ve always been a fan of Luis Buñuel and I thought that it was a thorough and entertaining adaptation of his work.
I’ve always been a firm believer that art is for everyone that wants it, and something as trivial as how you dress or what socioeconomic class you’d consider yourself to be from shouldn’t prevent you from having important experiences.
Open Letter to the New York Times
Open Letter to the New York Times
Dear New York Times,
Where are the women? The journalism profession has been overwhelmingly dominated by men as long as it has existed. As the second biggest newspaper in the country with almost 10 million readers (not to mention the endless quoting and partial reprinting in other publications), it is time for you to take action. How is it that 69 percent of the articles that you publish are written by men? How is it that women make up two thirds of journalism graduates but men make up two thirds of newsrooms? Women in journalism go to the same schools as men, get the same grades, but have to yell twice as loud just to be heard. Not only that, but the stories that women do end up getting published are more likely to be health and lifestyle, whereas their male counterparts are more likely to get articles published on crime, justice, and world politics.
Women’s opinions matter. Out of your thirteen regular op-ed columnists, only two are women. Women make up 52 percent of New York City and 48.6 percent of its workforce, and your paper doesn’t reflect that. To expand your readership to the next generation, you need to pay more attention to your internal structure. The readership of the future will want to hear stories from diverse groups. Women’s perspectives and stories need to be told and women need to tell them.
Diversity of thought is necessary for articles to resonate. Take, for instance, your Frugal Traveler column. He travels the world on a tight budget, often suggesting staying in hostels and walking around cities at night. This column, however, is irrelevant to half of the population because it is written without the fear of sexual violence or kidnapping. He has written about China alone 52 times, the country with the highest rate of human trafficking. And no offense to the author, but it simply is not possible for a man to truly look through the lens of a woman’s life. As your very own columnist, Charles M. Blow, says, “a personally lived experience is a far cry from a passively learned experience.” Even if a man knew every woman’s story, it would still not be the same thing as a woman telling her own story.
As a newspaper, I assume you want to publish powerful pieces. Empathetic people will write those emotion-inducing stories and, as has been proven by multiple studies, women are more empathetic. Whether that is nature or nurture can be debated, but it yields the same result: women care more about other people. In a world where human rights issues are becoming more and more abundant, don’t you want people who will care?
A woman has to be the best of the best to be hired over some mediocre man. You can’t tell me that the two-thirds of men on your workforce are all high performing go-getters. Of course you have to be good to work at the New York Times, but why is it that a woman has to be great? In a study done by McKinsey&Company, gender balanced companies were shown to perform 15 percent better financially. You should be actively trying to change your corporate dynamic for the good of your company. You need to make sure your staff understands their own biases when hiring. Take, for instance, a recent Yale study that showed a significant bias in hiring. When professors were given identical resumes, one with the name John and one with the name Jennifer, they most often chose John over Jennifer, as well as offered him a higher starting salary. The results of this study provide one example of why educating hiring managers about their own bias is critical. What many successful businesses also do is hire consultants specifically to find and hire diverse candidates. They search for talent across the country, and sometimes the world, to find a diverse group of great people. You need to stop resting on your laurels, waiting for people to come to you. You need to go out and find the many incredible women that work in journalism and actively recruit them.
If you have to fire some of those mediocre men to make room for those women, so be it.
It’s a matter of your own survival.
Good luck,
DK Rule
Sources
http://www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/downloads/pdf/gender-briefs-report.pdf
https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/still-talking-about-it-where-are-the-women/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19476221
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/opinion/checking-my-male-privilege.html
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters
Leslie Jimenez — Uptown Humble Heroes, 2016
I absolutely love the use of thread on what appears to be paper. It gives the pieces a slightly messy, almost chaotic effect. They look like sketches, not finished pieces, which I’ve always kind of liked. The subject matter appears to be mothers or other female caretakers with children of varying ages. There’s a lot of extraneous lines, which isn’t a critique, just an observation. The detail the artist was able to achieve is incredible, from the patterns on the clothing to the almost demon-like faces. The fact that the artist decided to use only one color of thread (black) is an interesting one. This combined with the loose structure makes it look as if it is decaying. Overall, I like the little collection of pieces; they are unique and eye-catching.
The plaque on the wall next to the pieces says that those depicted are representative of the underpaid female caretakers, often of Caribbean and Latin American descent or immigrants themselves, who can be seen walking around Manhattan. The art itself does not signify race due to the lack of color, but I could see what they were going for. The plaque also mentions, kind of like an afterthought, that the work is supposed to explore the roles of womanhood and motherhood. That actually comes through more than the race aspect for me. Personally, I have never met a male nanny or au pair. Not to say that they do not exist, but the overwhelming majority are women. This harkens back to the idea that women are the ones that take care of the children, that they have the “mothering instinct.”
I am sure the biggest issue that the artist was trying to highlight, however, is the fact that these women are underpaid. I’d be surprised if that wasn’t due to their immigrant status. In Coco Fusco’s essay, she talks about the idea of “otherness,” in that when something is unfamiliar, we tend to reject it or be fascinated by it in a fetishistic way. Whether conscious or unconscious, people may be underpaying these women due to their foreignness. They do not see them as part of their community, and therefore not as deserving of fair compensation.
I do not believe that these particular pieces would affect any unconscious beliefs due to the fact that the message was subtle and required context in order to be perceived as a political statement. These could just as easily be simple snapshots of women with their own children walking down the sidewalk. As far as what “unconscious structure of belief” the artist is trying to change, I believe it is what all decent people want: for things to be fair and for people to be as equal as possible. Here, they focus on the small subgroup of immigrant nannies, but that is just one thread in the tapestry of inequality.
Open Letter to the New York Times (and other New York media outlets)
Dear New York Times,
Where are the women? The journalism profession has been overwhelmingly dominated by men as long as it has existed. You’re the second biggest newspaper in the country and therefore have one of the biggest voices. So how is it that 69 percent of the articles that you publish are written by men? How is it that women make up two thirds of journalism graduates but men make up two thirds of newsrooms? Not only that, but the stories that women do end up getting published are more likely to be health and lifestyle, whereas their male counterparts are more likely to get articles published on crime, justice, and world politics.
Why don’t women’s opinions matter to you? Out of your thirteen regular op-ed columnists, only two are women. Women make up 52 percent of New York City and 48.6 percent of its workforce, so why doesn’t your paper reflect this? Women in journalism go to the same schools as men, get the same grades, but have to yell twice as loud just to be heard. When less women get to report, less women’s stories are heard. And don’t even get me started on female newscasters and the sexual harassment and problems that they face in being taken seriously, but that’s not what this is about. This is about you, a business that is struggling for readership and looking for ways to reinvent itself. Why don’t you start at the beginning? If you strive to make all people feel represented and heard, more people will want to listen.
Good luck,
DK Rule
Sources
http://www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/downloads/pdf/gender-briefs-report.pdf
https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/still-talking-about-it-where-are-the-women/
https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion/columnists
Guns
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0WSvOuWrvOrvrfNWb40r2Q?view_as=subscriber
This is a short video about guns in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre.
Rocky shore — DK Rule
There was a place I used to go in the summertime. It wasn’t very popular since it wasn’t sandy like the other beaches. It was covered in rocks and the water was full of dead man’s fingers seaweed. I would usually find myself alone for miles around.
After every big storm, I would walk down and look at everything the waves and the wind had brought in. More rocks and seaweed, driftwood, sea glass. Every once in a while I would find a washed up buoy and bring it back, slung over my shoulder, to add to the collection my father had begun thirty years earlier on the side of the weathered old shed. They were hanging on top of one another right beneath the peeling “DK’s Delicious Lemonade” sign.
On cloudy days, I would buy some fried clam strips, a Del’s frozen lemonade, and sometimes a new book from the Island Bound Bookshop, and go down to my rocky shore and just sit and read and stare at the sky and the birds for hours on end. The sun would inevitably begin to set. No matter how many times in your life you see a sunset, it will never get old and it will always be beautiful.
I’d walk back, flashlight in hand. Even though it was dark and I was alone, I never felt afraid. I felt safe, calm even. A rustle in the bushes was just a deer. Everything around me was illuminated by the night sky. Without light pollution, I could see what felt like every single star in the universe, but it never made me feel small. I don’t remember ever having that “I’m just a small speck of dust in the universe and I don’t matter” phase. If anything I felt lucky that everything lined up just so, that I came together, that I can look at the stars and the moon.
The next day might be golden and sunny, so I would go to the sandy town beach with the crystal clear, ice cold water. My friends and I would make sand castles and accidentally cut ourselves on the sharp dune grass. We’d go into town to get ice cream cones and walk out to the end of the jetty, and those are some of my fondest memories. But when I go back to the island today, those aren’t the places that I’m drawn to. I find myself going back to my rocky shore with the murky water.
It is different going back there today. It isn’t as familiar as it once was. I suppose that is true of most childhood memories and hideaways. But that doesn’t diminish its importance and the purpose it served me, as a respite, at the time. Things change, and that’s ok. Trying to force something into what it once was is a waste of time, in most instances. Life, I’ve found, is about moving forward and building new memories in new places.
I still love cloudy days, though.
