Lady Business: TinyLetter’s demise, Top Chef’s bad timing, and more reasons to love Iceland
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the twelfth issue, published January 4, 2018.
A Little Too Real
Happy new year, and welcome to my new readers! Thank you especially if you signed up after reading my (perhaps self-defeating) article about how the TinyLetter technology behind this newsletter is eventually going away. Whenever that happens, Lady Business will continue.
I hope you spent the holidays dancing long and hard on the grave of 2017, in whatever style you felt it most deserved. Personally, I tried to ignore the news by catching up on the newest season of Top Chef, which … well, has been having some timing issues with the news these days! There is, of course, the sexual harassment storm that came for the restaurant industry shortly after this season was filmed; I’m pretty sure one of the early episodes flashed a photo of Mario Batali, oops, and then there’s the whole editing-out-John-Besh saga.
But even without #MeToo, poor Top Chef seems particularly cursed this year. For example, a recent episode introduced me to the “social-media influencer” person that is Logan Paul … a few days before Paul committed the first big online #fail of 2018.
Fortunately for Paul, if not for the rest of us, others' online sins soon eclipsed his poor judgment. Filming a dead body, no matter how insensitive, seems so … small-scale tasteless these days. Certainly not like whipping it out and starting a button-measuring contest with a nuclear foe. Happy 2018, everyone!
Two Steps Forward, One Fall Back
I quite like the New York Times’ infographic tracking the men who recently have been fired, or who have been allowed to retire or resign, in the wake of rape or assault or harassment charges. However, I’d like to suggest an additional field, after the existing "Accusation," "Fallout," and "Response" columns. What about: "Who Replaced Him?"
The careers of these predators came at the explicit expense of the careers of many women they worked with--and there's been a lot of talk in recent months about how the downfall of these men could and should open doors for their qualified, undervalued female colleagues. So, with more than 50 predators forced out of high-profile jobs, who's taking over for them? Are women starting to get more of these high-profile, powerful roles?
In some cases, yes – often in the most visible fields, meaning (visual) media. Gretchen Carlson is taking over Miss America, while Robin Wright will replace Kevin Spacey as the star of House of Cards. Christiane Amanpour takes Charlie Rose’s timeslot on PBS, and "female journalist" Alex Wagner gets Mark Halperin’s job.
Of course, the devil’s in the details:
Hoda Kotb made history by officially landing Matt Lauer’s former “Today” show job — but she is still being paid around $18 million less per year than her disgraced male predecessor.
On Monday, Kotb was named co-anchor of the NBC franchise, making for its first-ever all-female-fronted lineup. NBC sources say Kotb landed a $7 million-a-year deal — the same as co-host Savannah Guthrie. Lauer, of course, was getting $25 million a year until he was fired in November for alleged “inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.”
Sure, this is an extremely first-world problem; and yes, Lauer had been in his job for decades, negotiating up his salary as he went. But it is at the very least terrible, terrible optics for NBC, which clearly has the millions of dollars to spare and should maybe not be looking at this Today turmoil as a time to be frugal. It all basically makes me want to move to Iceland.
Lady Bits:
--What I’m reading: As an end-of-2017 goal, I returned to and finally finished Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first of her intensely minute Neopolitan novels. That’s not necessarily a criticism; I’ve been a Jane Austen loyalist since childhood, and Ferrante’s description of the suave predator who's the father of her narrator’s teenage crush seems particularly timely these days; less showily, so does her description of the crush’s weasel behavior when he realizes the narrator is a better writer than he is. But I’m not sure I need three more books about the same characters. Any Ferrante stans care to change my mind?
--I’ve never been a big crossword puzzle person, but I’ve really enjoyed the obituaries and tributes to Maura Jacobson, New York Mag’s longterm crossword puzzle writer, who got into the genre when she was sick and then later recovering from a car accident:
She was a three-time winner on Jeopardy! when the show was just three weeks old, taking home $3,150, which was pretty good money for 1964. She once built an entire puzzle around punned names of countries after encountering the phrase “You go Uruguay, I’ll go mine” on a restaurant menu. She takes special pains to avoid those silly crossword-only words that make constructing easier but solving a bore: esne for “slave,” etui for “needle kit.” She delivers fastidiously, uncannily error-free puzzles, and until fairly recently worked sans computer, creating her grids with pen and graph paper.
There's a sanity lesson somewhere there.
--This Washington Post piece on the year of nuns depicted in film and TV omits two of my favorites: Lady Bird, as previously discussed here, and Call the Midwife, one of the best feminist, winter-binge, cathartic-cry series ever. (My childhood Sound of Music self really enjoyed the early CtM storyline about the nun slowly falling in love with the widowed doctor, but I also appreciate how much the remaining nuns are competent, ambitious, petty and fully-realized humans as well as Brides of Christ.)
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