Who is the most appalling: Pamela Paul vs Amanda Palmer

Both claim to be feminists. Both have a … questionable sense of what feminism is. ILX loathes both of them.

possibly would have been a different discussion a week ago

Opinion

Pamela Paul
My Farewell Column
April 3, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET

Lol it’s a hateread

pamanda paulmer

Pamplermousse

The comments from readers effusively praising Paul as their favorite NYT columnist and a voice in the wilderness, etc., make me feel insane.

A rare good comment: "I took the meaning of the Times’ slogan 'The Truth is Hard' to be about finding, not hearing or telling. That is, when it comes to journalism, the hard part is discovering the truth through investigation, reporting, research, and reflection. Perhaps this is a case of an opinion writer’s prerogative, but I think the author’s focus on the confrontation with her audience, rather than the work of, you know, truth-seeking, was evident throughout her tenure at Times Opinion."

haha I read it too, what a preening narcissist (and jaymc's quoted comment is so otm)

lmao

For a time, it seemed as though Pamela Paul was Kingsbury’s very own Bari Weiss, each of Paul’s woke-baiting columns on transgender issues and campus politics causing howls of derision to emanate from the New York Times Building. But Kingsbury has also made it clear that these positions are no longer lifelong sinecures, announcing in January that Paul and Charles M. Blow would be leaving. While there has been speculation that Paul was fired for her controversial views, she was let go for performance issues after undergoing a job review and a switch in editors that didn’t result in the improvement management was hoping for. (Paul denied she was let go for poor performance, saying, “I was hired as a columnist to report and opine on challenging issues, which became politically uncomfortable for the Times. The truth is hard, but these are the facts.”)

She's baaaaack (with an essay in the WSJ suggesting the "liquidation" of the entire field of sociology). Not even going to bother with a free link because I don't want to inflict brain damage on anyone, but here's the money grafs (emphasis added):

In interviews and on panels convened by organizations like Heterodox Academy, a nonpartisan organization devoted to academic reform, critics say that overt politicization—of research, of teaching, of practice—is killing the discipline. They refer to a discipline in disarray, write papers with titles like “How Sociology Can Save Itself” and blog about “Sociology’s Pervasively Dubious Assumptions.”

They describe an atmosphere in which to get ahead, you must consistently submit to political litmus tests, publish accordingly and pray that you make it to tenure without getting excommunicated. Specializing in a stodgy subject like religion, the military or law enforcement—especially if one has anything positive to say—is as unfashionable as flaunting a fur coat.

In their view, contemporary sociology’s relentless focus on race, gender and class, its emphasis on the need for social change over the benefits of social stability and its obsession with inequality amount to an abdication of scholarly duty, decreasing the value of sociological research, reducing its impact and undermining public trust. (According to one analysis, 80% of articles published in today’s flagship sociology journals touch on inequality.)

Why can't we have sociologists who just tell us everything is fine?

At first I thought you meant Amanda Palmer

gee I wonder why both the critical pieces she cites were published in 2024, has anything changed in the world or in academia since then?