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Shouts and Murmurs and Bar Graphs

August 29th, 2007 by Patrick Lane · No Comments

An interesting item appears on The World’s Fair blog this month: someone has crunched the numbers and worked out that since 1992, The New Yorker has published only seventeen women in their “Shouts and Murmurs” section. That’s out of a total 133 authors. And they haven’t published any women in “Shouts and Murmurs” in over three years!

As one who has something of a deep and long-standing (and not particularly rational) prejudice against The New Yorker – beyond the milder love-hate relationship professed by many literary folk I know — I’m happy to pass along this news. I won’t go into my own feelings about The New Yorker here, but I do think this little factoid is good fodder for discussion. It would seem to suggest more than a mere statistical anomaly.

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