Saturdays in Books

Lightspeed today announced that the third contributor they're bringing on for a rotating review column is Amal El-Mohtar. An excellent choice, to be sure. I'm very, very pleased with this. I mean, just look at her work for NPR Books. 

This is awesome.

Don't mistake this post for an apology for my previous post. My criticism about the gender distribution stands. There is a documented issue with the representation of women in professional review positions, and 1 in 3 doesn't mitigate that. 

Also, while I love this thing Patel tweeted today about the intended focus of his reviews, that hardly makes up for Lightspeed's responses to the above criticism (which were basically straight out of the Handbook of Propagating Dudebro Culture in Tech). Anger is absolutely an appropriate response to "we considered women but decided to hire qualified people we know" even if that's more about being bad at PR than being bad people.

So. Excited and disappointed in varying degrees.