(1) LUKE SKYRANTER. Movie Banter brings you “10 minutes of Mark Hamill being HONEST about The Last Jedi.”
No matter what you think of the film and the way Luke Skywalker was portrayed, thank goodness Mark isn’t afraid to speak his mind. He is sincere and cares about the franchise as much as he cares about the fandom.
(2) THE BREW THAT IS TRUE. Inverse explains that “Ewoks Are Coffee Farmers According to Star Wars Canon”.
The upcoming Han Solo movie will, no doubt, make all sorts of changes to Star Wars canon, but a just-released book about Han and Lando’s adventures quietly revealed that Ewoks are actually renown coffee farmers. Yep, those cute little Imperial-killing teddy bears are responsible for the best cup of java you’ll find outside of Dex’s Diner.
The book, Last Shot: A Han and Lando Novel, came out earlier this week, and it follows the two coolest characters in the galaxy across three distinct time periods. In one of them, set after Return of the Jedi but well before The Force Awakens, baby Ben Solo kicks his dad in the face. Later in that scene, Han’s culinary droid, BX-778, brews up a mean cup of Endorian caf. (Coffee is called “caf” in the book because, well, that’s how Star Wars rolls).
(3) STURGEON ANALYSIS. At Rocket Stack Rank, Eric Wong’s analysis shows the Sturgeon Award nominees are highly correlated with other guides to outstanding short fiction: “Sturgeon Award Finalists Versus Other Top Stories of 2017”. Greg Hullender says:
Last year too, the Sturgeon Award Finalists were the most accurate guide to which stories would be broadly recommended (by serious reviewers, major anthologies, and prestigious awards). http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2018/01/2016-best-sff-short-fiction-guides.html
There’s definitely something special about this award. It should get more attention than it does.
(4) THESE POTATOES AIN’T GONNA PLANT THEMSELVES! Or will they? “All by Itself, the Humble Sweet Potato Colonized the World”.
Of all the plants that humanity has turned into crops, none is more puzzling than the sweet potato. Indigenous people of Central and South America grew it on farms for generations, and Europeans discovered it when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean.
In the 18th century, however, Captain Cook stumbled across sweet potatoes again — over 4,000 miles away, on remote Polynesian islands. European explorers later found them elsewhere in the Pacific, from Hawaii to New Guinea.
The distribution of the plant baffled scientists. How could sweet potatoes arise from a wild ancestor and then wind up scattered across such a wide range? Was it possible that unknown explorers carried it from South America to countless Pacific islands?
An extensive analysis of sweet potato DNA, published on Thursday in Current Biology, comes to a controversial conclusion: Humans had nothing to do with it. The bulky sweet potato spread across the globe long before humans could have played a part — it’s a natural traveler.
Likewise, ArsTechnica says “Sweet potatoes may have reached Pacific Islands 100,000 years ahead of Polynesians.”
“This finding is likely to be controversial because it calls into question the alleged contacts between Polynesians and Americans in pre-European times,” Oxford University botanist Pablo Muñoz-Rodriguez, who led the study, told Ars Technica. “[The] sweet potato was the only remaining biological evidence of these contacts.”
Muñoz-Rodriguez and his team sampled DNA from 119 specimens of sweet potatoes and all of their wild relatives, including a sweet potato harvested in the Society Islands in 1769 by the Cook expedition. With those samples, Muñoz-Rodriguez and his colleagues built a phylogenetic tree: a family tree that shows evolutionary relationships among organisms based on the differences in their DNA. For plants, researchers often build two phylogenetic trees: one for the DNA stores in the nucleus of the plant’s cells and one for the chlorophyll-producing organelles called chloroplasts, which have their own DNA. Genetic material doesn’t always get passed on in the same way for both, so it’s sometimes useful to compare the two.
The team used the phylogenetic trees to estimate how long ago each branch of the tree split off from the others. It turned out that the Society Islands sweet potato hadn’t interbred with Central and South American lines for at least 111,500 years…
(5) TODAY’S JOB LOST TO ROBOTS. WIRED Magazine reports “A Robot Does the Impossible: Assembling an Ikea Chair Without Having a Meltdown”. I’m beginning to suspect Brian Aldiss wrote the wrong ending for “Who Can Replace A Man.”
Researchers report today in Science Robotics that they’ve used entirely off-the-shelf parts—two industrial robot arms with force sensors and a 3-D camera—to piece together one of those Stefan Ikea chairs we all had in college before it collapsed after two months of use. From planning to execution, it only took 20 minutes, compared to the human average of a lifetime of misery. It may all seem trivial, but this is in fact a big deal for robots, which struggle mightily to manipulate objects in a world built for human hands.
(6) ALL IN A DAY. Initially, Patrick Nielsen Hayden made his feelings clear about a new book coming out which has the same title as an Emma Bull novel. (Jump on the thread here.)
https://twitter.com/pnh/status/986396778906910720
Later he apologized. (Thread begins here)
Patrick, I wasn't aware of the Bull book until about a month ago, & you've known my title since last summer. I wish if you had concerns that you'd just contacted me? You know me well enough to know I wouldn't intentionally step on anyone's toes. I'm sad this is how this fell out.
— zanzjan.bsky.social (@zanzjan) April 18, 2018
(7) DOG DUTY. The New York Times inquires: “Do You Know Which Dog Breeds Are in a Mutt? Scientists Want to Find Out”.
One of the favorite pastimes of dog people is guessing a mutt’s ancestry.
Is that scruffy little guy in the dog park a mix of Afghan hound and Catahoula leopard dog? Is the beast that bit someone really a pit bull, or a cocker spaniel-beagle potpourri? And how about your aunt’s yippy pillow on paws — Maltese/poodle/peke?
If you’re wondering about your own dog you can, of course, get a DNA test. But there’s a lot of open territory for that familiar figure in the canine world, the dog guesser. You know who I mean, they’re like dog whisperers, but louder.
Now all self-proclaimed experts have a chance to prove their mettle or meet their comeuppance. The MuttMix survey debuted on Monday. It is citizen science for people who are willing to be proven terribly wrong, a dog quiz that tests how good you are at figuring out what a mutt is made of.
The survey is being run by the Darwin’s Dogs program at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., a center for genome studies, and the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. Fellow dog guessers (yes, I confess) proceed at the risk of your exceedingly high self-regard….
(8) THE MODERN PROMETHEUS. Mary Shelley biopic opening in theaters May 25.
Starring: Elle Fanning, Maisie Williams, Bel Powley, Douglas Booth, Joanne Froggatt & Stephen Dillane She will forever be remembered as the writer who gave the world Frankenstein. But the real life story of Mary Shelley—and the creation of her immortal monster—is nearly as fantastical as her fiction. Raised by a renowned philosopher father (Stephen Dillane) in 18th-century London, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Elle Fanning) is a teenage dreamer determined to make her mark on the world when she meets the dashing and brilliant poet Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth). So begins a torrid, bohemian love affair marked by both passion and personal tragedy that will transform Mary and fuel the writing of her Gothic masterwork. Imbued with the imaginative spirit of its heroine, Mary Shelley brings to life the world of a trailblazing woman who defied convention and channeled her innermost demons into a legend for the ages.
(9) NEXT ON HIS AGENDER. Jon Del Arroz, worried there might still be a few people he hasn’t alienated this week, announced he is “Coming Out As A Woman” [Internet Archive link] – which is to say, adopting a pseudonym.
After serious deliberations, I will be only submitting short fiction to professional markets from a new female pen name. I’ve come up with the name, I’ve got the email address, it’s ready to go. I will be, for all intents and purposes, a female author. It’s the only way to get ahead in the business, and the smart thing to do. I won’t be broadcasting the name here in case of any inadvertent discrimination, but I will keep you informed as to how reactions change based on having a female name. It’ll be interesting to say the least.
(10) PRELUDE TO SPACE. NPR tells about “Antarctic Veggies: Practice For Growing Plants On Other Planets”.
…Now, the greenhouse project, called EDEN ISS, is fully operational. Bamsey’s colleagues in Antarctica harvested their first salads last week.
And while growing greens in Antarctica is exciting — for much of the year there’s no fresh produce at Neumayer Station III — Bamsey says the end goal of this project is much farther away. EDEN ISS is a practice round for cultivating food in space.
The eight-nation team of EDEN ISS researchers chose to grow “high-water-content, pick-and-eat-plants,” Bamsey says, “things that can’t normally be stored for long periods of time.” The crops include lettuce, cucumbers, radishes, swiss chard, and herbs — basil, chives, cilantro and mint. One-tenth of the yield will become research data, while the rest will help feed Neumayer Station III’s crew….
(11) SPACE DIAMONDS. “Inter Jovem et Martem”? “Meteorite diamonds ‘came from lost planet'”.
A diamond-bearing space rock that exploded in Earth’s atmosphere in 2008 was part of a lost planet from the early Solar System, a study suggests.
The parent “proto-planet” would have existed billions of years ago before breaking up in a collision and was about as large as Mercury or Mars.
A team has published their results in the journal Nature Communications.
They argue that the pressures necessary to produce diamonds of this kind could only occur in planet of this size.
Using three different types of microscopy, the researchers characterised the mineral and chemical make-up of the diamond-bearing rocks. The fragments were scattered across the Nubian desert of northern Sudan after the asteroid 2008 TC3 exploded 37km above the ground on 7 October 2008.
(12) MUSICAL INTERLUDE. Another Instant Classic by Matthew Johnson:
Yub nub, yub nub, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Well you tell by the way I use my spear
I’m a murder bear, I got no fear
Speeder bikes and Empire goons, I’ve been kicked around
My forest moon
And now it’s all right, it’s OK
I’ve got stormtroopers to slay
And way above, I think I spy
A Death Star hangin’ in the skyWhether you’re a Jedi or just a little yeti
You’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Feel the walkers breakin’, this tree trunk is a-shakin’
And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ aliveYub nub, yub nub, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Yub nub, yub nub, stayin’ aliveWell you might think I’m a teddy bear
My god’s a droid in a wooden chair
I may just have stone age tools
But I’m the end of those Empire fools
And now it’s all right, it’s OK
There’ll be some fireworks this day
And way above, I think I spy
A Death Star fallin’ from the skyYub nub, yub nub, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Yub nub, yub nub, stayin’ al-i-i-i-ve…
[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Carl Slaughter, Andrew Porter, Mike Kennedy, Daniel Dern, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editors of the day A.G. Carpenter, Ingvar and Cassy B.]
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(6) ALL IN A DAY.
Um, a novel that came out almost 25 years ago, was #4 on the Locus Fantasy Novel list, made the Hugo Novel nomination longlist but not the ballot, and was not shortlisted or longlisted for any other awards (AFAICT), is being equated with Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Demolished Man, and Mistborn?
Alrighty then. 😒
(12) I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
9) Actually, I think it’s a great idea for Jon to try writing under a pseudonym. Maybe he’ll finally realize that his writing really does suck under any name.
9)
I suspect he’ll find that many venues are no more willing to publish him under a female pen name than under a male one.
10)
The greenhouse project was developed in my hometown and Neumayer III is administered via the close-by town of Bremerhaven (and their phone number uses the Bremerhaven area code, though they’re in Antarctica), so yeah for them.
(2) I remain dubious.
(4) I sez to Mr. “They might have solved the sweet potato mystery” and he says “What mystery?” I summarized the article. He’s just lucky Red Wombat wasn’t nearby.
(5) The robot read the instructions. So do I. Heck, your average cat can help assemble furniture. Until they sit on the instructions b/c “paper! important to humans! must sit on!”
(9) At which point he’ll find out that bad writing by women gets published MUCH less often than bad writing by men. Petard time!
(12) Aaaand there’s my bedtime earworm. Thanks? (The Mr. has no comment)
Oooh! My second day back and I’m already Fifth!
@JJ
I saw that title announced a while ago and did actually think “isn’t that by Emma Bull?”, but no it certainly isn’t in the first tier of popular titles. Maybe there’s some sort of formula of popularity vs years elapsed vs iconic status that governs how long it is until you can reuse a title? 🙂
Anyway, pnh got dumped on in that thread and then quite rightly apologised, so that’s that.
More importantly, yay for Suzanne Palmer selling a novel. There’s something really nice about seeing a writer whose short work you’ve admired get to move into novels if they want.
I’d suspect s female name to give him a few chances that Jon del Arroz wouldn’t have, but that’s not bias, in favour of women.
Vaguely surprised he’s not also submitting as John Rice to check for racial bias.
I realize that, combining info from yesterday’s and today’s Pixel Scrolls, we soon will have robots that can both assemble furniture and break it down for recycling when it’s no longer useful.
It’s “The Midas Plague” by Fred Pohl!
(er, spoilers for 50+ year old story)
6) There’s also Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder comic….
9) I’m glad it’s just complaints about ‘misandry’ and not the transphobia I was expecting from the headline. Maybe he’ll even learn something from the experiment.
Reading: Graydon Saunders – “The Human Dress”, which I’m mildly enjoying though ’tis writ somewhat crabbedly and most damnably long. Vikings + dinosaurs + uncleftish beholding, with a little more detail in the descriptive passages than is really helpful.
Could be he’s realized he badly damaged his own name, and this is his excuse for trying to re-career himself with a new identity.
Edith Pilaf, maybe?
(5) I had hoped the robots had tried to interpret the assembly guide itself, without a human mediator.
(6) That some dickish behaviour of PNH, though I’m glad he realised it himself. But I’ve always had the impression that final say on the title of a novel lies with the publisher, not the author.
(9) On Usenet, no-one knows if you’re a dog.
6) I am glad Patrick apologized, because a senior editor of a publishing house crapping on a debut author for a book title that mirrors a previous book’s title really is punching down. As Karl notes, in a tweet I made commenting on it, the title is up ultimately to the publishing house.
9) Oh, for —-‘s sake.
I strongly suspect that the announcement tweet caught PNH off-guard and at a bad moment. IIRC, they had to move house recently (which is always enough to render me a complete basket case), and who knows what else is going on.
Of course he feels protective of Bull’s novel and that it was really important; he was her editor for that, and it would hold a lot more significance in his mind than in probably a lot of other peoples’. It’s one of those “oh shit, I should have taken a deep breath and backed away from the keyboard” moments most of us have at one point or other — and once done, it can’t be taken back. It’s good that he apologized, but of course that will not make it as though it never happened.
Like Mark-kitteh, I have enjoyed Palmer’s short fiction. I hope that Finder is some rockin’ science fiction, because if so, I will be all over that when it comes out.
@Kurt Busiek: my quatloos are on “Jan Rice”.
Ooo! Ooo!
“A repo-man must take the spaceship he’s been hired to steal to save a civil war-ravaged planet from destruction in Suzanne Palmer’s debut and series starter, Finder.”
JJ says Like Mark-kitteh, I have enjoyed Palmer’s short fiction. I hope that Finder is some rockin’ science fiction, because if so, I will be all over that when it comes out.
As do I. Finder as a novel title is far too generic to say that once it’s used, it should not be used again. (I loved Emma’s novel and have read it at least a half dozen times.) now had it been War for The Oaks, it’d been a different matter.
I once designed and printed (with her permission and creative input) Eddie and The Fey Tour t-shirts.
@Kurt Busiek:
“Gianna Risotto”
“Ryoko Raisukaree”
“Regina Rijsttafel”
“Sakura Senbei”
@JJ
Can I add a couple of extra Ooos to that? I think Palmer could write the heck out of that idea.
(5) How can the robot truly cosim to be replacing a human, if it can’t also nail the meltdown? That’s essential!
(7) Deducing a dog’s ancestry based only on appearance is at best just an educated guess. Shelter and rescue people do it because you’ve got to tell people a bit more than “it’s a dog.” I wish I hadn’t seen absurd results from DNA tests on dogs whose ancestry is known.
(9) He’s in for a surprise.
6) Cue my disappointment, upon seeing “Emma Bull” and “new novel” in a post, that it’s not an announcement of the sequel to Territory. Ah, well, agree that it was bad form by PNH.
(6) This reminds me that on at least one occasion, the title of a well-regarded story by a leading author has been reused for an even more highly regarded story by an author who became far more famous than the original author (“I, Robot” by Eando Binder or Isaac Asimov). (and a few years ago, there were two Hugo nominees with the same title – a title previously used in the 1980s for a novel that I liked a lot).
6) Although I admit it does bother me every time I go to Amazon and look up Roger Zelazny, and the search results pull in a totally unrelated book by someone else called Lord of Light.
Joe H. I admit it does bother me every time I go to Amazon and look up Roger Zelazny, and the search results pull in a totally unrelated book by someone else called Lord of Light.
The other day I marked Simon Morden’s new science fiction novel One Way as “I own this” on Amazon (which I do with every book I read and enjoy, whether I own it or got it from the library), and my Recommendations instantly became full of YA relationship fiction books and Christian non-fiction… so somebody somewhere hadn’t set the system up to differentiate between different books with the same title. 🙄
12. Brilliant. Now I’ll have “yub nub, yub nub” wafting through my brain all day, It is officially an ear worm. (Pushed out the musical I’ve had playing for the past couple of days…anyone else get instrumental only ear worms?)
9. there are SO many things I could say….
@Andrew:
Hasn’t Cory Doctorow put an end to this by publishing “I, Robot” and “I, Row-Boat”?
9) Women writing under a male or indeterminable name have generally done so because of (historically indisputable, now diminished but still remaining) reader bias selecting against women. Arroz seems to suggest publishers now have the opposite bias, a notion which a swift perusal of Scalzi’s regular “New books and ARCs” posts should be enough to dispel. But maybe he doesn’t follow Scalzi.
If he’s realised he’s drawn his own once-good name in the mud, and is attempting to start afresh, that’s one thing, but this smacks of a stunt.
(On a personal note, I elected to write my Twitter stories under an initial and space egg rather than full name and photo simply to avoid unintentionally giving a face/ethnicity/race/age/gender to any first-person character I write about. If you read a first-person story next to a picture of a person, you will read it as told by them. But this is less of an issue off Twitter.)
John A Arkansawyer: Hasn’t Cory Doctorow put an end to this by publishing “I, Robot” and “I, Row-Boat”?
He’s also published a novella entitled The Man Who Sold the Moon.
@JJ
He posted a snapshot of mostly unpleasant things happening to them a while ago:
https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016616.html
Still should have known better than to make this argument, and, to his credit, he pretty quickly seems to have come to this conclusion himself.
O. Westin: Arroz seems to suggest publishers now have the opposite bias
You’re missing some context.
Don’t sprain your eyes reading that. 🙄
JJ: Thanks, that was… certainly a take that was taken.
(9) Since JDA announced his plans publicly, I assume it is okay to “out” him once someone discovers his pseudonym?
Another entitled-yet-mediocre man tried something similar to this in the poetry world a couple of years back. Michael Derrick Hudson published poems under the pseudonym “Yi-Fen Chou”, after the poems were repeatedly rejected while using his own name.
All of this reminds me of the quote which floats around Facebook from time to time: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
(9) Yeah, good luck with that. Here’s what happened when a woman tried the opposite:
Homme de Plume: What I Learned Sending My Novel Out Under a Male Name
Judging from responses to queries sent to agents:
9) $10 says that a new female poster whose hard liberal views don’t seem entirely consistent or honestly held shows up on File 770 in the next month.
(12) I actually came up with my favourite bit after the edit window closed: https://file770.com/?p=41769&cpage=3#comment-795399
Dex: $10 says that a new female poster whose hard liberal views don’t seem entirely consistent or honestly held shows up on File 770 in the next month.
My money’s on either:
1) he won’t quite manage to quash his real political views, and his misogyny and neo-conservatism will poke their heads up in what he writes without him realizing it, or
2) he’ll try so hard to write what he perceives to be “SJW fiction” that it will be blindingly obvious to anyone who reads what he submits that it’s a pisstake.
I mean, this is a guy who’s not terribly bright. I’ve been watching him pwn himself with every harassing and lying tweet he’s posted since he announced he was filing a lawsuit, because he’s apparently so damn dumb he didn’t realize that Worldcon 76 would have certainly had someone screenshotting them all. And then he deleted a bunch of them, making it clear to any judge who gets the case that he knew they would be incriminating! Seriously, how stupid can one person be?*
* apparently, extremely stupid
(2) Darn, I was hoping for a story about how coffee aficionados search for Ewok droppings, because… well, never mind.
Never mind Finder, a great book but a title that’s easy to end up reusing, but about a year or two after Emma Bull, a Canadian YA author released a novel also called Bone Dance. (A title I would have thought it much harder to see gracing two such different books)
There are reasons titles can’t be copyrighted.
It helps that Palmer knows PNH and he probably first thought of it as teasing a friend before being reminded of their respective positions of relative power.
Looking forward to her book.
9) Personality of the experimenter aside, I don’t see how you could draw any real conclusions from this experiment. To make a real comparison, you’d have to submit the same story to the same editors using different names. But you can’t do that—there’s a very good chance the editor will remember reading the story the first time (or at least will know that they’ve read something very similar). That’s if your story is read by the same person, of course. Many magazines have teams of slush readers, and the story may reach a different person than it did the first time, which adds another variable.
If you’re sending a different story under the feminine pseudonym, of course it might get a different reception than the first, but there’s no way to show that’s because of the pseudonym—it might be a better story, or a better fit for that magazine, etc.
Of course, many good magazines only accept like 1% or less of unsolicited submissions anyway…
9) Does he really think he’s actually going to get away with this charade? ESPECIALLY after he filed a lawsuit against Worldcon? Pass me some popcorn…
somebody somewhere hadn’t set the system up to differentiate between different books with the same title.
I’ve seen two authors with the same first/last name conflated. (I can definitively say that the Roberta Wilson who wrote Watching Fishes is not the Roberta Wilson who writes books on aromatherapy. I know the former, and I suspect she wouldn’t touch aromatherapy with a ten-foot pole.)
I’ve also read (& enjoyed) two entirely different books called Boneshaker — Cherie Priest’s and & Kate Milford’s (although Milford’s is called The Boneshaker).
2 – I think it makes Return more believable now that it’s canon that the ewoks were just really, really caffeinated.
Woot! My very first Contributing Editor of the Day! (Well, ok, 1/3 of one; I certainly wouldn’t be up there if it weren’t for A.G. Carpenter and Ingvar…)
If I have filed further it is only by scrolling on the pixels of giants.
Cassy B, I am perfectly happy to let you stand on my shoulders, but please don’t call me a giant. 🙂
I also need to start shopping my novel manuscript, Lord of the Stranger in a Strange Dune.
@ Lenora Rose
I’ve seen/heard this sort of explanation/excuse for behavior before in many different contexts, and the problem is that the vast majority of people who witness the interaction will not know the personal relationship between the two parties, but only the most obvious outward characteristics. And they will take away either that this is socially acceptable behavior between people with those characteristics (e.g., prominent genre editor & debut novelist) or that the specific parties involved believe this is appropriate behavior between people with those characteristics. The first generates bad behavior. (“But so-and-so said that sort of thing…”) The second generates bad reputation. (“Did you see that awful thing so-and-so said?”)
It’s not so much a case of “the failure mode of clever is a**h***” as “the failure mode of friendly teasing is bullying.” An awful lot of “friendly teasing” has the same semantic shape as bullying. And if the person doing the teasing has mistaken the mutual understanding of the relationship, it can have the same emotional shape as bullying.
(6) I wish we could adopt a rule that said that before you blast someone online, you first contact them privately to give them a chance to either fix it or to explain themselves. And if you do decide to attack them in public, at least link to them or otherwise notify them so they have an opportunity to respond.
Yep, there are real bad people out there who do bad things for bad reasons. That’s not an excuse for attacking good people who just made mistakes. Especially when (in this case) it’s not even a mistake.
I suspect the reason we see so much of this is that it gets people attention, and attention is the real currency in the online world. In my view, that makes this type of post itself a bad thing done for a bad reason.
(9) Del Arroz clearly has his own strategy for getting attention. If it’s just a stunt, at least it doesn’t hurt any specific individual. If he really does it and he’s wrong, then he’s wasted his time, but no harm was done. If he’s right (that pretending to be a woman significantly boosts your chances of being published) then in my view, he’s welcome to his success. But I don’t think this is going to work.
When I look at Rocket Stack Rank‘s list of outstanding stories for 2017 (so far), I find that they’re slightly more male than non-male, but it’s not statistically significant. What this suggests to me is that men and women are equally likely to write good stories, and that magazines are simply picking the best stories they get–with little or no gender bias. It also makes me skeptical of the claim that women are far less likely than men to make submissions in the first place.
(6) Yes, it’s bad behavior and bullying. Nielsen Hayden may have apologized but that kind of behavior from a publisher should not be excused or tolerated.