Photo-illustration by Francisco Caceres for TIME
I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to post any more Dead Tree Alerts here. Recently, TIME stopped posting full articles from its print edition online, requiring people to buy the print or iPad editions of the magazine to read the pieces. There is—as of now—no option to buy articles or issues of the magazine through the Web, so it’s not as much a paywall as, well, a wall.
But while TIME is taking its most valuable print material offline, I am thrilled to learn that my Tuned In column is not valuable at all, and thus is among the articles still available on the Web.
In any event, my column this week is a further look at, yes, the women-in-late-night controversy, in particular how the dearth of female faces and voices in the time slot contrasts with the rise of women in so many other fields:
These times are not exactly a laugh riot* for American men. The economic downturn has cost them more jobs proportionally than it has for women, and long-term workplace shifts are taking away more heavily-male jobs, possibly forever. More women now earn college degrees and hold managerial positions than men do. (The current cover story in the Atlantic posits this trend as “The End of Men.”)
But there’s one field the “mancession” has not touched: late-night comedy, still (with exceptions like Chelsea Handler) a preserve of silverbacks. We spent much of this year wondering whether TV could make room for that one white guy who lost his show to that other white guy, in a field in which red hair counts as diversity…
If you haven’t read Hanna Rosin’s Atlantic cover story, by the way, I highly recommend it.
*I wish to note my objection to TIME house style here: in my mind, the term is, and always should properly be, “laff riot.”