For this week’s Jewish Currents newsletter, David Klion talks with New Republic climate writer Kate Aronoff about the new IPCC report, and how major news outlets’ despairing coverage of its contents—while understandable—misses the “full picture” and can contribute to dangerous messaging. Aronoff outlines specific inaccuracies in such coverage and elaborates: “The reality, according to the IPCC, is that every 10th of a degree [of global warming] translates to tens of thousands of lives lost, so every little incremental step we can take to mitigate climate change matters a tremendous amount. There’s no point at which you can say that we might as well just give up. There’s plenty of suffering that can be prevented.”
New York Magazine’s union has conducted an internal pay study, finding significant pay gaps in median salaries for women and people of color, and that the magazine particularly struggles to retain employees of these demographics. The union has shared their report with management at Vox Media in the hope that “this study will ensure that the company and our union finalize a contract that will make New York a more sustainable and equitable place for all, and for years to come.” Through their bargaining committee, the union has recommended that the company institute a minimum salary, annual livable wage increases, caps on healthcare costs, and address burnout by hiring more staff.
Lawyers hired by the New York Times mistakenly emailed a slideshow strategizing how the Times management might limit the scope of the paper’s tech staffers union, Maxwell Tani reports. The presentation included a chart estimating staff support of the union. “Staffers said the chart was a further demonstration of why they filed complaints with the NLRB over what they alleged to be surveillance conducted by some managers to gauge support for the union—a violation of labor laws prohibiting such polling,” Tani writes. On Wednesday this week, hundreds of Times tech workers held a work stoppage in protest.
At the London Review of Books, essayist and short-story writer Lydia Davis shares “part of an ongoing piece of writing which I can best describe as being the elaborated notes of what I have been discovering in my explorations of the history of the city of Arles—a history which goes back nearly three thousand years, so there is a lot to read.”
On August 17, The Point magazine and Plough magazine will co-host a conversation between two Point contributors, Elisa Gonzalez and Aaron Robertson, who have written essays considering Christianity, the Black church, and racial integration in the US. They ask: “Can the Christian church be a just institution? How effectively can interpersonal relationships help us stage a “new way of relating” to one another—as fellow believers, citizens, lovers and friends? In the U.S., why do we still speak of interracialism and integration so clumsily, without a clear sense of why we think it is a virtuous goal to pursue, or what it might mean?”
The Small Press Flea, hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library and BOMB, is happening tomorrow at Grand Army Plaza. This year’s participants include 8-Ball, Nightboat, n+1, Primary Information, Verso Books, Wendy’s Subway, and more.