Happy Bastille Day, or, as it’s known in France, “La Fête nationale de quelque chose ou autre.” Bastille Day is the French 4th of July, but it’s celebrated on July 14th because the calendar was on strike. As I’m sure you recall from lycée, the storming of the Bastille happened when a lot of French peasants rushed from a tennis court to arm themselves, much like readers of this awful NYT article about Serena Williams and “body image” in tennis. The fifth estate (Times public editor Margaret Sullivan) apologized to the third estate on behalf of the fourth estate, and after a brief but fierce struggle, J.K. Rowling’s tweet left hundreds of thousands ded:
.@diegtristan8 “she is built like a man”. Yeah, my husband looks just like this in a dress. You’re an idiot. pic.twitter.com/BCvT10MYkI
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 11, 2015
“It’s a big day for books!” said someone who really has his finger on the vital pulse of American cultural life. Kevin Nguyen stayed up all night to read Go Set A Watchman, but you don’t have to! You could just wait for the final book in the trilogy. It’s also release day for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me.” Tabs Senior Contributing Editor and Intern Emeritus Bijan Stephen reviewed it for The New Republic. Benjamin Wallace-Wells has a great profile of Coates in NYMag, and Isaac Chotiner interviewed him for Slate. Probably the highest praise I’ve seen for Coates’s book, though, is that Ryan Holiday didn’t like it.
PRESS CONFERENCE:
I did not mean
to imply
that Angular
is not garbage.
That was not my intention.
I apologize to anyone I’ve hurt.— Mark Wunsch (@markwunsch) July 13, 2015
Reddit, the Centralia garbage fire of the internet, continues to burn. Yesterday, ex-CEO Yishan Wong opined that Reddit co-founder and would-be “President of the Internet” Alexis Ohanian let Ellen Pao take the blame for his decision to fire Victoria Taylor. Then Bethanye Blount quit, after only two months as Reddit’s chief engineer, with a statement that translates to “lol noooooope!” “Bethanye’s departure had nothing to do with gender,” new CEO Steve Huffman confidently assured Re/Code’s Noah Kulwin about the third woman to leave the site in barely a week, instead touting the “opportunity to improve in… the number of women in leadership positions” this newest departure affords the healthy, growing organization. “Details Emerge About Victoria Taylor’s Dismissal at Reddit,” reported Mike Isaac, breaking out the New York Times’s most ominous headline formula. And in Feministing, Katherine Cross argued that Victoria Taylor was just as much a victim of institutional sexism as Ellen Pao, since community management is seen as “women’s work” and not valued in the tech bro-conomy.
just when you thought it couldn’t get worse on reddit (jk it can always get worse) pic.twitter.com/hYMpMXWl1Q
— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) July 14, 2015
Fusion’s Kevin Roose took a huge bong rip and predicted that 2016 will be “The Uber election,” instead of the Meerkat election, the Facebook election, the Snapchat election, or the Minion election. Follow Tabs Formulaic Journalism Correspondent Laura Olin for more on this developing story.
New Bloom County cartoon posted directly to Facebook. “It” grain clarified. Cat reviewed. New terribly written comic book movie advertised. Moths generated. Maybe Starsky & Hutch were the True Detectives. And, in honor of Bastille Day, Jenn Schiffer posted a new vart.institute about French neo-impressionist Georges-Pierre Seurat.
Very excited to see which blog pays for the natural, un-retouched photos of Pluto.
— Josh Gondelman (@joshgondelman) July 14, 2015
I Missed It: Last week Gabe Roth wrote about why children’s books make parents cry and it’s great.
Today’s Song: the new Lana Del Rey song “Honeymoon” seems to be about ghosts that cruise around LA and do it.
~It’s no wonder every tab in town had neither fought nor found you~
You can subscribe to Today in Tabs via the ancien régime of email or join us in the glorious Fast Company revolution for liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou l’onglet! Just come down to the tennis court, we’ll talk it up, like, yeah. (Yeah.)