The Sorensen Monologues

Change the Brogram

A dust-up has been ensuing in the tech community over various tweets and statements made by the now-former Chief Technology Officer at Business Insider, Pax Dickinson. To make a long story short, Dickinson has displayed hostility — often crassly — to those who would like to make the industry a more hospitable place for women. It is obvious that this sort of rhetoric contributes to the lack of women in tech and unhappiness of women in tech, but I’ll let these Slate and Washington Post articles explain more.

Debut on Medium

My “Surveillence Bait” comic on the NSA is up on Medium today. If you haven’t heard of Medium yet,  it’s a new site for writers (and now cartoonists) started by the founders of Twitter. My colleague Matt Bors recently started a new gig there as comics editor, and will be posting his work and others’ to a section called The Nib. Check it out.

2003 vs. 2013

Shortly after posting this cartoon, a reader emailed me asking if I was saying that I wanted the US to bomb Syria. But this comic isn’t really about what we should do. I don’t have any good answers. What I find fascinating about this whole situation is how different our reaction was ten years ago to the idea of chemical weapons in the hands of a brutal dictator. In that case, of course, Americans had been knowingly misled to think Iraq had some connection to 9/11. Much of our nonchalance about Syria is clearly a reaction to the debacle of Iraq. But I can’t help but wish more of the skepticism and prudence people are exhibiting now (including many politicians who were gung-ho on attacking Iraq) had been around in 2003, when those of us who voiced such skepticism were pilloried.

Teddy Bear Devolution

Yes, I know there are more important things going on in the world, but hear me out. Miley Cyrus’s performance at the VMA’s didn’t strike me as offensive so much as painful to watch. Cyrus probably has enough money to buy herself a giant animatronic bear every single day for the rest of her life, yet she still apparently felt compelled to do a cringeworthy PR stunt that seems like the ultimate amateurish knock-off of the kind of thing Madonna used to do so well. Am I saying “If a woman does this kind of thing it’s bad”? No. If a woman does this kind of thing truly badly, it’s bad. In the end it is kind of sad that she felt the need to objectify herself so flagrantly yet could not pull it off successfully; it had a hint of desperation. (There was also the questionable matter of the African-American female-bear-dancer booty-pounding, which has been discussed on the internet at great length.)

I had some fun researching this one. Did you know that there was a real Smokey Bear who lived at the National Zoo and received so many letters from children that he had his own ZIP code? Or that there was a Soviet adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh called “Vinni Pukh”? You can tell a lot about a culture by its anthropomorphized bears.

Put a Panel on It

I commend Obama for returning solar panels to the White House roof after their ignominious removal by Reagan some decades ago. It’s a symbolic gesture, but symbolism goes a long way when you’re the Prez. What’s irritating, however, is his glaring inconsistency when it comes to actual energy policy. Obama recently criticized the influence of the fossil fuel industry on Congress. But the coal from the Powder River Basin that the administration has been planning to auction off would, as Grist’s David Roberts put it, “undo all of Obama’s other climate work.”

The first coal tract, which was scheduled to be auctioned off last week, had no bidders. Nonetheless, I find myself utterly confused as to where Obama actually stands on climate change.

Creative Disruption

A subtle point this week, but one I’ve been meaning to make for a while. This article about Amazon founder and new Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos served as a reminder:

“But then, few newsrooms have ever been confronted with a new owner whose zeal for disruption is matched by his obsession with tinkering until he gets it right.”

I’m not opposed to disruptive technology, or change in general. iPhones happen. But simply valuing market upheaval for the sake of market upheaval strikes me as a little self-serving. It’s an approach that tends to benefit the owners of a company and the financial industry, which thrives on churn, but not necessarily the public. If anything, it seems most people could use a little more predictability and stability in their lives — the comfort of knowing their mortgage will be paid, and their health insurance kept.

Commenters on Daily Kos pointed out an essay by Judith Shulevitz on this very subject that had coincidentally appeared in The New Republic just a few days earlier. Well worth reading.

NSFWCORP Comic Unlocked

For the next 48 hours, you can view an exclusive comic I drew for NSFWCORP #4: TWEETS IN MEATSPACE. Link will expire after that!

The Don’t Show Me State

For more on this absurd story, this NYT article explains it all. In short, Missouri’s health care gag rule came about as a ballot measure approved by voters. It seems to me that such a speech-limiting law would be in violation of the Constitution, so the local Tea Party should be up in arms about it, right? In any case, Missouri, be sure to check out healthcare.gov (or even better, enrollmissouri.org).

Handy Chart: Janet Yellen vs. Larry Summers

Ridiculously condescending comments have been made about Janet Yellen — that she lacks “gravitas,” or that choosing her to lead the Federal Reserve would be a decision “driven by gender.” But it’s a mistaken assumption to think that those who favor her over Larry Summers are only doing so because she is female, or merely because they are still smoldering over Summers’ questionable comments about women while president of Harvard. Many people (several prominent male economists among them) support her because she is clearly the more qualified candidate. To quote from Ezra Klein’s excellent post on the subject:

“If you take Yellen as an example, she has more direct Fed experience than Ben Bernanke did, or than Alan Greenspan did, or than Paul Volcker did. In order to be competitive for the job, she needed to be much more qualified for it.”

This is not to say Larry Summers’ titanic oafishness is not a factor. There are so many egregious moments from his career that I wanted to include in this cartoon, but couldn’t — the fact that he sided with Ken Lay and Enron during the California energy crisis, even after some economists were raising the possibility of market manipulation; his dismissive attitude toward climate change while Chief Economist of the World Bank, and subsequent opposition to the Kyoto Protocol; his opposition to the Volcker Rule as part of the Dodd-Frank banking reforms; his memo to Obama significantly underestimating the amount of stimulus needed. The list goes on and on. Seriously, no woman who has been as wrong about as many things as Larry Summers would ever be considered to lead the Fed.

Yet the meme of the “brilliant” Summers persists. I’m sure the man has written some smart academic papers and may well possess great intelligence, but that’s not the same thing as getting it right. If you want to understand what’s sticking in the craw of Summers opponents, it’s that we’ve seen this story before. It’s the simple unfairness of of having to work so much harder to reach the top, and if you do, you’re seen as the “gendered” pick. It’s symbolic of every time a highly-qualified woman hits the glass ceiling when forced to compete with a loud, arrogant blowhard with a strong sense of self-entitlement and undeserved mystique of greatness.

I hold out some hope that Obama will make the brave decision here.

Digital Housekeeping

A couple items of note regarding my various online activity portals. First, I have finally finished making this site fully-functional! The “Order a Print” button actually enables you to order a print, and the illustration portfolio now contains more than just a few items for your perusal. I’ll be adding more content and features as time permits.

Secondly, I now have a new Twitter handle, @JenSorensen, thanks to a very kind Jen Sorensen in Colorado who gave me hers. Apparently she was getting a fair number of tweets about my cartoons. Back in the early days of Twitter, I came close to grabbing the handle myself, but decided not to because everyone misspells my name, and how important could this Twitter thing be, anyhow? Now I see the error of my ways, and consider myself lucky to not be named Zach Galifianakis (although I’d take his job).

The Right to Bear Bags

I happen to live in a city (Austin) that passed a bag ban, but not without pushback from the American Chemistry Council, the benignly-named lobbying arm of the nation’s chemical manufacturers. The group has a penchant for meddling in local efforts; it also successfully fought California’s attempt to list BPA as toxic.

Here in Austin, the transition went smoothly, and commerce continues as usual. Not that you’d know that from the bloviations of a Texas politician (R, natch) calling for a Shopping Bag Freedom Act. Speaking for myself, I have enough canvas tote bags for a year’s worth of groceries.

More on New York’s unsuccessful efforts to reduce plastic bag usage here.

Comic on Immigrant Activist Danilo Lopez

I’ve been meaning to share a one-page comic I drew recently for Vermont’s Seven Days altweekly, which publishes a cool annual cartoon issue full of stories rendered in comic format. I teamed up with News Editor Andy Bromage to create this piece about a local activist for undocumented farm workers, Danilo Lopez, whom you could justifiably call the Cesar Chavez of Vermont.

Danilo was ordered to self-deport by July 6. Not long after the comic was published, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement granted him a “stay of removal” that postpones his deportation for at least another year. While I doubt that the comic affected the ICE’s decision, I’m right proud of it nonetheless.