***

The Rumpus: You’re one of the first women to hold an executive editor position at an online magazine. Is that right? And why is that so unusual in 2012?

Ann Friedman: There are some very notable women who beat me to the punch – Arianna Huffington springs to mind, as do the Mother Jones editors, who (like me) are at the helm of both the print and web publications – but I do think it’s a pretty small group. Too small. Someone said to me recently that we have to encourage more young women to want top-level editing jobs. I think that will happen naturally as we have more role models, more examples of boss ladies who aren’t sad and cruel and overworked and undersexed (*cough* DevilWearsPrada *cough*), but who are straight-up owning it and notable not for their gender but for their editorial savvy. A lot of this is about narrative. Writers and editors, we find ourselves fascinating. We like to write about what’s happening in our industry. And every time there is an article about the blogger generation growing up or about a forward-thinking crop of young editors that features only men, the narrative perpetuates. One way to make more women executive editors is to ensure the ones already doing the hard work are more visible. I suppose this is a very long-winded way of saying thanks for interviewing me!

Rumpus: Yes, this straight-up owning it, tell me about that. What do you love about the work you do at GOOD? What really makes your day?

Friedman: I love working with such talented writers and editors. I love telling stories and finding great ideas and profiling fascinating people. I love playing with words. The best feeling is checking the site first thing in the morning, seeing so much great content, and being unable to decide which of our pieces to tweet about first. That, and the day the new issue of the quarterly magazine arrives from the printer. Pretty fucking satisfying!

Rumpus: My guess is that your enthusiasm also has something to do with GOOD’s dedication—by design—to socially conscious articles and themes. This mission was built in by GOOD’s founder, Ben Goldhirsh, but you’ve taken it a step further, printing some edgier articles and riskier topics. How would you describe your impact on GOOD’s mission? What editorial wishes did you bring to the magazine when you joined in 2011?

Friedman: Absolutely, GOOD’s mission is a big part of what drew me to this job. However, the problem with a lot of journalism oriented around social good is that it’s boring as hell. One of my goals in assuming editorial leadership of GOOD was to build on the brand’s reputation for positive, solutions-oriented journalism while pushing it a bit—making it funnier, edgier. I’ve tried to make GOOD’s core series and products, like our Daily GOOD email, even better, while expanding into new terrain with pieces like Mac McClelland’s essay on PTSD or our Hustlin’ series.

Rumpus: Yeah I get the impression you wouldn’t last with “boring as hell” for very long. Last week our Rumpus Radar (*cough* IsaacFitzgerald *cough*) alerted us that you were the genius behind the Tumblr #realtalk from your editor. I was speechless when I saw it: every GIF is truth! Then I found International Slutty Women’s Day: a Story in GIFs on your blog. It’s like GIF paradise. You’ve raised it to an art form, Ann. How do you do it? Can you answer this with a GIF?

Friedman:

Rumpus: Dammit, that’s what I thought. You’re magic. You also bend time apparently because between being executive editor of GOOD and busting out GIF truths you founded and curate the LadyJournos! site, which is all about shining the spotlight on women writers. What defines great writing for you? What makes you say YES to something either for GOOD or LadyJournos?

Friedman: I know the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but being an editor is different than being a curator. For GOOD, I’m interested in pitches that have compelling people and ideas at the core—and a good news peg certainly doesn’t hurt. We look for stories that are solutions-oriented, but not irrationally upbeat, from writers with a strong voice. For LadyJournos, where I’m curating not editing, I’m looking for a balance of reported and essayistic work by up-and-coming women journalists. Often that means combing online-only sources or alt weeklies. I’ll feature the occasional New Yorker piece, but everyone reads the New Yorker, so that’s not super helpful. (Also, there aren’t a lot of women to be found in those pages. Zing!) The hope is that other assigning editors will use it as a resource, and the women featured on the site will make their way up the journalistic food chain until they’re freelancing for the $2/word outlets and getting the kinds of assignments that lead to National Magazine Award nominations.

I created the site so that lazy assigning editors would know how to put a steady stream of work by women writers into their regular feeds.

Rumpus: You’ve said on your blog that it’s the editors’ responsibility to achieve equity in publishing for women—a sentiment I totally agree with—and you prove this with balance at your own publication. Do you feel like you and your fellow editors have to work harder to get fantastic work from women? What does it take?

Friedman: I don’t have to work extra hard, but that’s because there are a lot of women in my professional network and I have hired a lot of women as full-time writers and part-time columnists. If editors truly want to improve their byline ratio, they need to stop lamenting the fact that few women journalists send them cold pitches and start taking a hard look at their stable of regular contributors. How many women are on the masthead? How many women columnists or bloggers are on the payroll? This is how real change is going to happen.

Rumpus: As someone who spends so much professional time on the Internet, how—and why, and when—do you disconnect? What’s the best thing about the time you spend offline?

Friedman: I have a dream of retreating to a #spinstercabin for a few weeks of respite from the Internet. In the meantime, I make a point of occasionally leaving my house without my phone. Or I drink enough whiskey that I am unable to operate it.

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The app will start out with 32 titles–including big names like the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Time, Elle, Wired, and Fortune, but hopes to gain more. An unlimited subscription of all monthly magazines costs $10, and a subscription including weeklies costs $15. The app is only available for Android tablets for now,  but Next Issue is working on a version for the iPad.  Next Issue is still figuring out how exactly revenue, circulation or advertising will work. But the “experiment” might be much needed for magazine publishers, whose digital circulations are increasing at nominal rates.

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“Where I grew up, most of the people gravitated to becoming criminals. I was surrounded by criminal elements and violence and things like that. And all the boys, they notched up quite a few years in prison, some of them for armed robbery, even murder. It was difficult to swim in that kind of pool without the infectious kind of necessity to prove yourself. And you had to prove yourself by fighting, stealing or doing something outrageous like armed robbery . . . So, you know, I grew up in an impossible place for me to graduate to where I am now.”

More on McCullin’s work can be found here, here, and he can be heard here.

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But my joy was short-lived. By the time I had even been made aware of the piece’s presence in cyberspace, it had garnered more than a dozen comments. The final tally was around 170. While some of the responses were positive, most were not. Over the next few days, I would be accused of self-hatred, self-importance, self-parody, self-aggrandizement, and more. Gawker, in perhaps a knowing gesture of ironic self-effacement, blasted the piece for its “pointless journalism.” Numerous blogs mocked my sententiousness and pretension. Commenters speculated on everything from my upper-middle-class upbringing (not true) to my poor performance in bed (hard to say—writers are notoriously unreliable self-critics).

Naturally, I was a bit stunned. An unpublished poet and fiction writer, and an occasionally published essayist, I had had relatively little public exposure to my work to that point. But the volume, not to mention venom, of the response to this piece was unprecedented.

Much of the haters’ enthusiasm seemed to derive from a seemingly innocuous paragraph, early in the story, in which I expressed frustration with certain cultural trends popular in places like Portland, where I used to live. The subhead of the article refers to “yuppie liberals,” a useful enough approximation of what I was trying to convey. Part of the motivation for leaving Portland for the farms, I explained, was our creeping frustration with what might be called mainstream liberalism.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that this was a message that some Salon.com readers did not want to hear—after all, at least one part of the website emphasizes the kind of partisan, self-congratulatory liberalism that I had been complaining about. And while I could understand, intellectually, that the attacks were not personal—that my stupidly-grinning mug on the cover of the magazine was simply an easy target for the rantings of frustrated lives—I still felt blindsided by the rancor my piece had provoked.

But then it did get personal. One of the haters acquired my e-mail address (probably through my personal blog), writing that since he had tried to addend an angry note to one of my Rumpus pieces without success, he wanted to make sure I got the message personally. (In summary: Get a Job, Hipster Scum.) All of a sudden my blog, mostly viewed by friends and family, saw a surge in traffic, the source another blog called, “Die Hipster.” In a comment thread there, the anonymous e-mailer had posted my personal e-mail address, my blog URL, and links to other articles I’d written. Someone else mockingly linked my father’s four-year-old obituary notice. Others opined about my girlfriend—her race and ethnicity as well as other, more intimate topics. Finally, someone else (hopefully not a Jewish relative of mine) called me the “opposite of a mensch” and a “perversion of development.”

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that some of this triggered deep-set insecurities. After all, what poet doesn’t sometimes fear that his development has been perverted? What writer doesn’t feel shame about the work she does? And what person on the Left doesn’t often feel like a fraud, “squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital,” as Adam, the poet protagonist of Ben Lerner’s excellent recent novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, puts it?

As I reflected more, I realized the nasty commenters had been right about at least one thing: I had been sheltered, as an author, at least. My previous web publications had appeared on literary sites like The Collagist and Bookslut, where comments are disallowed, and The Rumpus, which moderates their threads vigorously. As a result, I could write a personal essay, as I did for The Rumpus a year ago, about my state of demoralized unemployment and not worry that I would be pilloried as a slacker because of it. Or I could weigh in on the heady topic of the politics of work (or in my case, idleness), as I did ten months later, without feeling like I had to apologize for my lack of comprehensiveness. The essay would simply serve as the catalyst for a discussion, I knew, one that might very well commence in the comment thread below.

Which isn’t to say that Rumpus readers never challenged me. In response to the latter essay, for example, which shamelessly advocates for idleness, one reader pointed out that I had failed to take gender differences into account. Historically charged with child-raising and other domestic tasks, women often did not have the luxury to just be idle. Another reader took issue with Bertrand Russell’s prescription of four hours of work per day. How could one survive financially working so little? Both were valid points and obviously worthy of discussion.

At Salon.com, though, by the time I had even caught my breath, the conversation spiralled out of control. Hate had responded to hate. The pettiness proliferated. The story I had tried to tell was thrust to the backburner. Most disturbing, though, was that the points I had been hoping to raise—about the viability of organic farming, the problems with urban living, liberals’ complicity in systems they claim to abhor—were largely ignored. Instead, the argument centered around negative speculation about me: my privilege, my hypocrisy, my work habits and finances. I had become their punching bag, their piñata, the commenters flailing gleefully to score points against whatever kind of person they had imagined me to be.

“An unmoderated fray is no comments,” the blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates said recently in an interview on NPR, and I think that’s basically right. I can’t help but feeling a little cheated by the response my Salon.com piece received. I had spent a lot of time and energy on refining my argument and revising the language with the hopes it would resonate with readers fed up with their city lives. I had been looking forward to the discussion, even to a debate. What I got was an earful of errant hate and manifold attempts to discredit me personally.

As I look back on the experience, I mostly feel lucky. Lucky to have found an online community like The Rumpus, where voices that only want to harm are actively excluded. The result is a place that plainly attracts people who seek refuge from the petty, reactionary voices that dominate so much of our public discourse. We, those of us who frequent The Rumpus, come here to share our stories, art, and ideas among the online equivalent of friends—even those who respectfully and thoughtfully disagree. We expect others in the community to hold us accountable—after all, there is a converse danger in being too cuddly, too undiscerning, too automatic in our support. But the space exists in part because we exclude those voices who would infect it with hate. That’s how creativity can be cultivated—not only with gung-ho support, but with meaningful, relevant commentary.

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Bella Santorum is the eighth child (one prior child died when just two hours old) of presidential candidate and Internet punch line Rick Santorum and his wife Karen Garver Santorum. Rick Santorum, though charming and Midwestern on the campaign trail, though given to a humbling fashion tendency—the sweater vest—that has gotten most men a beat down in the middle school years, is among the more doctrinaire and dangerous politicians of the moment, right up there with Sam Brownback or Jon Kyl or Mitch McConnell. He never met a social issue that didn’t require from him a knee-jerk one liner that would turn heads with its oversimplification and vacuity. He never met an earmark he wouldn’t try to bring home to Pittsburgh. Though he is not as preening and narcissistic as Newt Gingrich, he is just as willing to say anything. And Karen Garver Santorum once wrote a book on children’s manners, called Everyday Graces. Before that, though, before marrying Rick, the guy whose last name also refers to a frothy mixture of lube and fecal material etc., she was living out of wedlock with an obstetrician who provided abortions. I’m betting that in those days she was a different Karen.

I find hypocrisy and mendacity among politicians somehow reassuring. It goes to show that anyone can be bought, and that in politics the price for which people can be bought is usually rather low. These things make the grim politics of the present less surprising.

However, when I think about how much contempt I have for Rick Santorum and how sure I am that somewhere in him lurks an anally-compulsive disco boy—why all the comments about how horrible it would be if people were allowed to do anything— I then start thinking about Bella. Bella is three years old and was born with Trisomy 18, which is a genetic condition not unlike Down Syndrome, but with more serious health complications. The list of potentially lethal effects of Trisomy 18, in fact, is rather terrifying. Half of children born with Trisomy 18 die upon birth, and 90% die within the first year. Santorum himself has indicated that while he was campaigning in Iowa at the end of 2011, Bella was having a lot of trouble breathing and had to be sent home to Virginia to be cared for by a nurse.

Now: when Bella was in utero Santorum and his wife presumably were able to have an amniotic fluid test to determine that Bella had a genetic abnormality, which Bella was more likely to have, because of Karen Santorum’s age at the time of the pregnancy, and they were able to decide to carry Bella to term because that is consistent with Santorum’s positions on abortion. More power to them. When my daughter was in utero, my wife and I decided not to get the amniotic fluid test because of the risk of miscarriage for “geriatric” moms, and because we agreed we would be content to have a child with Down’s Syndrome (Trisomy 21), if it came to that, which it did not. I commend the Santorums for carrying Bella to term and for caring for her now that she is here. Some people are not physically like the majority of us, and yet we can still love them deeply.

This is the sort of thing that bears repeating. Even when you are Pro Choice in all cases.

Still, Just as I found Sarah Palin’s use of Trig on the campaign trail in 2008 slightly sinister, so have I found Bella’s appearances in Iowa sinister, and I’m glad she is back in Virginia where her breathing problems can be monitored carefully. But as a parent myself I am afraid I am also thinking about how keen is the absence of a child especially during a professional year as demanding as what Santorum is going through now, assuming Santorum is capable of human emotions. Yes, he has six other children, one of whom, an older daughter, acts as a spokesman for her dad. This daughter recently indicated that the family carries around lapel buttons depicting Bella, so that she is uppermost in their thoughts no matter where they are. Publicity stunt? Or grief manifested?

And what does Bella think about exactly? And how often is she affixed to the breathing apparatus? Does she think about the discomfort of the mask? Does she miss her parents? Are there certain repetitive images, screensavers, let’s say, that are capable of keeping her mesmerized for hours? Will there ever be an age when Bella Santorum can understand party politics? Will she respond to love? Will she, like a friend of mine who has Trisomy 21, love Elvis? And when they say that those kids who survive a childhood with Trisomy 18 will “live into adulthood,” what does that mean? Will she live out a complete term? Or will she devastate her parents and her siblings down the road? Does she realize that there is something about her that is unlike other children? What will the Santorums do with her if her dad wins the nomination? (Unlikely, I know.) Does Bella feel the pressures of the campaign? Does she care what her dad does? Will she welcome him home when he loses? How did she feel in that one impressive publicity photo she did with her dad, where he seems to have John Boehner’s tan on? Was that love enough for her? And is she named after Queen Isabella? Or Isabella Adjani? Wouldn’t we all love Bella? If Bella were sitting in our lap?

Easy to loath Santorum. Easy to love that Internet buffoon that Dan Savage has made of him. But what about Bella? Have you thought about Bella?

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“Welcome to a place where even beer runs are a matter of life and death. As the Iraq War draws to an official close, Joshuah Bearman tells the funny and poignant story of the real-life Baghdad Country Club, a bar in the Green Zone during the conflict’s bloodiest years. Against all odds, its proprietors struggle to keep their raucous watering hole safe and well-stocked as the insurgency rages outside.”

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From childhood dreams to devastating addiction and brain damage, reporter John Branch’s bloody but beautiful profile of “The Boogeyman” is not to be missed.

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This ridiculous anti-piracy video (which compares bootlegging digital media to child labor & drug trafficking) is basically Reefer Madness, 2011.

Google’s revenue this year is more than the GDP of the 28 smallest countries combined… and other interesting tidbits.

Bacteria-powered lights. Bacteria-powered lights!!!

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Apparently your printer could be hacked and set on fire.

Facebook’s about to go public.

The British Library just opened its online archive of over 300 years of newspapers. Awesome.

If you look at one internet video today, it should be this inflatable soft undulating robot.

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