Welcome to the Monday edition of your open thread. Some of you are probably just getting back to work after a vacation. I feel for you!
The NYT has an article on the website Jezebel, which stirred up some controversy by calling The Daily Show sexist.
When Jon Stewart announced on the June 29 episode of “The Daily Show” that “Jezebel thinks I’m a sexist,” some viewers may have been wondering: who exactly is Jezebel?
A post about airbrushing on a Ralph Lauren model.
At least a million and a half people can answer that question; that’s how many visited the site, a women’s interest blog, last month. Mr. Stewart’s comment was a response to Jezebel’s recent report on claims by women who say they faced a sexist environment when they were “Daily Show” writers and correspondents. The post garnered more than 211,000 page views, over 1,000 comments and a sharp retort from 32 female employees currently with “The Daily Show.”…
And Mr. Stewart is hardly the first media heavyweight the site has taken to task. Jezebel also weighs in on the sexually predatory nature of the fashion business, skewers celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Elle MacPherson, and chronicles the doctored photographs in fashion magazines in a regular feature called Photoshop of Horrors. Jezebel’s audience is 97 percent female, and the site says it gets more than 37 million page views a month and about 200,000 unique visitors each day.
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With 50 to 60 posts published daily, Jezebel offsets weighty topics with lighter fare. One popular feature, Midweek Madness, is a tongue-in-cheek dissection of the week’s glossy tabloids; with all the chatter about celebrity pregnancies, the Jezebel staff sometimes refers to it as “Unsolicited Uterus Update Weekly.” Dress Code is a question-and-answer feature that functions as a sartorial Miss Manners; Beauty 101 provides inexpensive and practical alternatives to the cosmetic tips espoused by Vogue and Allure.
It’s like a funnier, edgier issue of Cosmopolitan.
Sad news. A Delaware man was among those killed by a bomb blast in Uganda. The bombs are thought to be the work of an Al Qaeda-affiliated group.
Invisible Children, a San Diego, California-based aid group that helps child soldiers, identified the dead American as one of its workers, Nate Henn, 25, who was killed on the rugby field. The group said Henn called Delaware home and had played rugby at the University of Delaware while studying psychology. Henn’s Facebook biography says he graduated from UD in 2007 and from Concord High School in 2003.
“From traveling the United States without pay advocating for the freedom of abducted child soldiers in Joseph Kony’s war, to raising thousands of dollars to put war-affected Ugandan students in school, Nate lived a life that demanded explanation. He sacrificed his comfort to live in the humble service of God and of a better world, and his is a life to be emulated,” the group said in a statement on its website.
Deepest condolences to his friends and family.