Mar
22
2025

Not Appearing in the "Banned Books" Lists Either

Jacob Savage laments The Vanishing White Male Writer.

It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.

And then the doors shut.

By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.

Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).

I don't want to sound like an Angry White Male. But when I peruse the "New Fiction" table at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, there seems to be a suoerabundance of titles written by, and for, the ladies.

And, to a certain extent, that's to be expected. When I look at the patrons perusing the stacks: mostly women. I can't blame PPL for catering to their customer demographic. And, as implied by the Savage article, you can't buy books that never get published.

Side note: PPL's Staff page has 31 people on it, and I eyeball 29 females, 2 males. Uniformly people of pallor, however. This is New Hampshire, but …

Also of note:

  • Blame Canada! Or maybe not. Kevin D. Williamson looks at The Opportunity Cost of Trolling Our Northern Neighbor.

    One of the insufficiently appreciated aspects of the U.S.-Canada trade relationship is that the two nations’ bilateral trade has long been pretty close to being in balance. That doesn’t actually matter very much, economically—the United States could run a large trade deficit with Canada indefinitely with no ill effect—but, if Republicans are worried about bilateral trade balances, the U.S.-Canada relationship isn’t the one that they should be getting their dresses over their heads about. The United States does not run a particularly large trade deficit with Canada, and the negative balance of trade that does exist is driven largely by Canadian energy exports to the United States—mostly crude oil bound for Midwestern refineries where it will be made into diesel to power American trucking and transit. (Canada’s heavy oil is a more efficient source of diesel than is the light sweet crude pumped in West Texas.)

    There is also the matter of Canadian electricity exports to the United States, which come from both Ontario and Quebec. When Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatened to lay a 25-percent tariff on electricity to 1.5 million U.S. homes and businesses (or just switch off the juice entirely) as a response to Donald Trump’s idiotic trade war, he was only offering to do what could be done to eliminate the small trade imbalance that exists between the countries.

    But Donald Trump is, as he will tell you, the world’s greatest negotiator, and he feels the need to renegotiate the existing U.S.-Canada trade deal, which was negotiated by an utter incompetent: Donald Trump, whose administration oversaw the replacement of NAFTA by the (rather lightly modified) USMCA the last time he was president. And now Canadians have learned what banks, investors, vendors, small business partners, wives, ex-wives, and pornographic performers rapidly approaching their expiration dates have all learned over the years: If you think you have a deal with Donald Trump, you are a fool.

    I don't know precisely how many Eversource electrons coming into my house originated in Canada, but this WBUR article estimates 5-6%.

    (Yes, I know that those electrons didn't "originate" from Canada. They are neither created nor destroyed, and so each single one of them has been around for billions of years, in one place or another. Still gotta pay for them, though.)

    Our state's (very) senior US Senator recently looked at some local fallout:

    To add to KDW's observation: if you think Trump knows what he's doing on trade, you are a fool.

  • Who's the pinkest of them all? Peter Suderman reviews Disney's latest flopperoo: Forget woke Snow White. Disney's remake is more like socialist Snow White.

    If you've heard anything about Disney's new live-action Snow White remake, it's probably that it's woke, that star Rachel Zegler is a "DEI princess," and that the movie caters to cringe left identitarianism. The long-in-the-works movie, most of which was shot in 2022, has been embroiled in online controversy for years, and most of the complaints were made by people who hadn't seen the movie.

    But I have. And the movie is indeed a trainwreck. The problem isn't that it's woke. It's that it's awful—and lamely, bluntly socialist.

    The remake's big idea was to twist the idea of the word "fair." See, in earlier versions of Snow White, an evil queen asks a magic mirror, "Who is the fairest of them all?" It's always the queen, until one day the mirror responds that it's actually her stepdaughter, the Princess Snow White. The question, "who is the fairest," in other words, has always been a question about beauty. But in the remake, there's something else going on. The movie goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the queen isn't fair because she's not a socialist. I am not kidding.

    I read the WSJ's review by Kyle Smith. And (since this is Pun Salad) let me excerpt a bit of his wordplay, which got a chuckle out of me at the breakfast table yesterday:

    After fans seemed grumpy about the rumored storyline and the casting of Ms. Zegler, Disney became bashful about releasing it last March and ordered reshoots to make everyone happy. Unfortunately, the story is so dopey it made me sleepy.

    Yes, he got everyone in except Doc and Sneezy. That would have been pushing it.

  • In the "Good Riddance" department: Keith E. Whittington reports some good news: Diversity Statements Coming to an End at the University of California.

    The University of California is the godfather of the use of so-called diversity statements in faculty hiring. I have a piece forthcoming at the Nebraska Law Review arguing that such diversity statement requirements for general faculty hiring at state universities violate the First Amendment and violate academic freedom principles everywhere. It seems quite likely that in practice such diversity statement requirements are also used to facilitate illegal racial discrimination in faculty hiring.

    Let's check in with the University System Near Here. They have a jobs site, where you can peruse available positions, and their "Required Applicant Materials".

    It appears (for example) that if you're looking to be Lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy or a Clinical Assistant Professor, or … well, I stopped looking. But for those positions, you have to cough up a "Diversity Statement".

    Biggest surprise: they are looking for a Research Scientist in Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Which "will support the integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems with ecological research involving lands and waters held by U.S. federally recognized Tribes." And it does not require you to add a Diversity Statement!

    But UNH appears to not be totally out of the woods, as reported by NHJournal: Civil Rights Complaint Targets UNH Over Race-Based Faculty Rewards Program.

    A new complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights says the University of New Hampshire is part of a group that racially discriminates against faculty members.

    The Legal Insurrection Foundation filed the complaint Wednesday alleging the North Star Collective, an initiative operated by the New England Board for Higher Education (NEBHE), is breaking anti-discrimination laws by excluding White faculty from the program.

    Among the schools that fund and operate the North Star Collective: The University of New Hampshire.

    The complaint quotes the Collective's eligibility requirements: "… those who are Black/African/African American, Latinx/Hispanic, Native/Indigenous, Arab/Middle Eastern, Asian/Asian American/Pacific Islander, and Multiracial.” And the complaint helpfully adds: "Faculty members who are white need not apply. "

  • Nice try, Paul. I previously pointed to Robert Graboyes' I See Dead People (part 1 of 2), which offered AI-rendered portraits of famous historical folks as they might appear today, and invited readers to guess at their identities. Now he provides answers: I See Dead People (part 2 of 2).

    Executive summary: I made two guesses. I got one right (Emily Dickenson). And one wrong (Thomas Jefferson; I guessed George Washington).

    I (now) see a few I really should have guessed. But many others, not.