Xenocrypt

One amazing thing is Baker keeps saying, "of course it was different when I started my career, now professional women are so accepted, funny how attitudes have changed, we're very modern today", writing in 1939!

(I won't screenshot the whole thing but it's very entertaining and a great historical document too.)

IIRC LITTLE WOMEN had one of the first modern fandoms with an obsession about who would marry who, so that also plays a part

www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

It's crazy how bad horses were for city streets. Their droppings filled everything unless cleaned and then the corpses of horses that died of exhaustion were just left there until a wagon equipped to pick them up could come. Linking a picture [content warning]

www.history101.nyc/children-pla...

Not going to be the easiest read.

Kellogg's made their own until they got sued so they changed the name to "granola".

Well good news Ma'am, people still love those books like, a hundred years after you wrote this, thanks to the time-honored technique of casting a bunch of beautiful people in a good movie.

Mmm granula.

Just took out:

Yes it seems like mental institution populations skewed old, I wonder if they weren't more replaced by nursing homes than by enlarged prisons...

@xenocryptsite.bsky.social finally found a comparative book on deinstitutionalization. You might find it interesting. THE WELFARE WORKFORCE, Perera, 2025
www.cambridge.org/core/books/w...

You've seen "Diarra From Detroit" I hope.

Depends on time and place I guess, in "The World of Yesterday" Stefan Zweig recounts the extreme reverence with which actors were treated in Vienna towards the end of the 19th century, although as he notes Vienna was far from typical in its appreciation for the arts

Black Mirror S7 really sings in E3 when… it's about movies and the difficulties of separating actors + roles, keeping the plot moving, how to use old studio back catalogs etc. (also they once again create a VR where the AIs are *gaining emotion* and will *kill you IRL*)

@xenocryptsite.bsky.social

Astor Place Riot - Wikipedia

There were definitely prestigious actors (I think William Macready is an early example - famously he sparked a riot by performing in the US at a time of nationalist fervour) but I think the profession as a whole was still maligned en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astor_P...

I think Carl Bernstein is the last journalist to basically take a joruneyman route, starting as a copyboy in high school and moving to papers where they were fine hiring journalists w/out college degrees when he flunked out, and then moving up from there as he built his reputation.

People try this today—I knew someone online who moved to North Dakota after college because they snagged an opening at one of the papers there (this was ~2013). In the 20th century one could do it locally, and earlier without a college education.

Though this is more in reference to fiction.

If you were a journalist there were definitely ways to move up, both to better and better beats and to better and better papers, possibly eventually becoming a magazine correspondent.

Oh, and civil servant. I think that's pretty exhaustive. A brewer also qualified as a gentleman for some reason, but I feel like it would be a bit gauche for the son of a duke to go into brewing. You could make passive income from real estate, as well, of course, which was the ideal.

Actual jobs you could have if you from a duke's family and need to work for a living, without it being embarrassing: army or naval officer, Church of England clergyman, lawyer, physician (not surgeon, surgeons are tradesmen), Oxbridge don (overlapping with clergyman), banker.

To be less snarky, there’s moments where barriers to entry have yet to be erected (1st dotcom boom, eg) but the US magazine writing market has always been super competitive. “We” “all” know Janet Flanner (longtime Paris correspondent f/the NYer), but everyone has forgotten Kay Boyle

Even then there was a mountain of submissions that never got published. It’s more in reference to book publishing, but the per The Awl (woah that goes back) it was already an issue at the beginning of the 20th century and “slush pile” probably dates to before 1952

www.theawl.com/2010/07/very...

"actor" is, like, a historically maligned vocation, you'd see documents from the Middle Ages that ranked them as practically subhuman - I think "stage actor" crawled out of spite and into prestige relatively recently in human history and "film actor" more recently than that

Lol it's a central metaphor for the pressures of a modern bureaucratic society, because it's a book and Hollywood is very literal-minded.

Or you hear about how every big actor in the UK these days comes from a family of dukes. Did those kinds of people just consider acting beneath them back in the day? "Gosford Park" made a joke of this with Maggie Smith turning up her nose at the Hollywood types but IDK if it's true.

Or you hear about how every big actor in the UK these days comes from a family of dukes. Did those kinds of people just consider acting beneath them back in the day? "Gosford Park" made a joke of this with Maggie Smith turning up her nose at the Hollywood types but IDK if it's true.

I think what you can sell as raw mechanical units obviously has a lot to do with it (like music has never made as much as it did in the CD era), but yeah, I have to wonder if there's a reason someone like Hunter S. Thompson was doing it at the time

(According to Wikipedia, Kenneth Fearing himself never really made a living as a writer, which uh complicates this argument.)

I heard something about how many a literary magazine today has more submissions than readers for example. IDK if that's true, but if so, when did it start, was it always like that?