Tuesday News: PayPal separates from eBay, legal challenge to revenge porn laws, Kirkus books prize finalists, and history of a marriage advice column
PayPal broke up with eBay so it could take on Apple – After 12 years together, PayPay and eBay are getting a divorce, so that PayPal can move on to bigger and better things. Unfortunately, PayPal’s growth was being overshadowed by its relationship with eBay, which has not been moving at the same pace. So by separating the companies, the hope is that PayPal can better compete with other payment systems (e.g. Google).
eBay’s leadership acknowledged this morning that PayPal has to be more aggressive and agile as it digs in for the battle ahead. “The pace of change accelerated in the past six months,” eBay CEO John Donahoe told the New York Times, citing the emergence of Apple Pay and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba as new competitive threats. Spinning off as a newly public company will likely give PayPal extra financial firepower in the form of stock that is expected to trade at a much higher price-to-earnings ratio than eBay’s current shares. PayPal will need that equity to make aggressive moves, including acquisitions and hires. –The Verge
Bookstores, publishers sue to stop law against “revenge porn” – This is very interesting. A lawsuit has been filed in Arizona against its new revenge porn law, which the ACLU, among others, believe to be too broad and vague to be effective. Moreover, there is concern that completely harmless images — such as breastfeeding mothers — could be caught up in the law, undermining the original intent and creating all sorts of unintended consequences against legitimate content and innocent individuals.
The plaintiffs-in-suit are several bookstores, as well as the American Association of Publishers and the National Press Photographers Association. Bamberger, a First Amendment specialist who’s working together with the American Civil Liberties Union in this case, added that librarians are concerned they could be held liable simply for providing Internet access. –Ars Technica
Kirkus book prize finalists vie for three new $50,000 awards – So Kirkus has created a new literary prize, and it happens to be one of the biggest of the bunch. It looks like the main categories are fiction, non-fiction, and YA/Children’s lit, from picture books to YA. You can peruse the finalists by clicking on the story link.
On Tuesday, Kirkus announced the finalists for its first prizes — 18 books in fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature. The winner in each of the three categories will receive $50,000, making it one of the largest literary awards in the world. (The Pulitzer Prize for fiction — perhaps the only literary prize that attracts significant reader interest — is a mere $10,000.) –Washington Post
Lock up your wives! Advice columns from decades past provide a chilling glimpse into the horrors of marriage counselling before feminism – A really interesting look at the history of “Can This Marriage Be Saved,” one of the most famous and popular advice columns in women’s magazines (it appeared in Ladies Home Journal, which is currently being downsized). The column started in 1953, and Rebecca Onion reflects on the ways marriage dealt women all manner of misogynistic blows and limitations.
When I heard about the demise of the Journal, I decided to look at the history of ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’. What I found, dipping into the columns published across decades, was the archive of unhappiness that I remembered, full of thrown dishes, turned backs and late-night screaming matches. But I also read a starkly misogynist vision of proper wifeliness that shocked me in its matter-of-factness. We’re used to thinking of the 1950s ‘housewife’ as a vague, happy caricature on gift-shop mugs and postcards – vacuuming in pearls, offering a post-work martini to the returning husband. In its intimate individual details, this advice column resurrects a sharper history, showing the array of cruelties that this kind of marriage could entail, the number of wives who resisted their roles, and the way that mainstream culture tried to put them in their place. –Aeon Magazine
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Reading the Lady’s Home Journal article I am struck by how miserable both partners sound. Women were not the only ones freed from such toxic relationships by the women’s movement. The author is quite correct, we are getting there, but I’d like to add that our hold on the partial rights we’ve gained is very tenuous. I was born in 1961 so I’ve been a part of the women’s movement first through my mother and then on my own. It’s been a long slog and sometimes it seems like we’ll never have true equality.