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Record W4416988799 · doi:10.1515/9780228026600

Nights in Fairyland

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueMcGill-Queen's University Press eBooks · 2025
Typebook
Language
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicSpatial and Cultural Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGossipQueerCommodificationRumorPublishingRomanceTricksterEphemera

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In 1925 the publishers of Broadway Brevities were tried for running an extortion operation targeting New York’s social and cultural elites. While the first version of the magazine whispered gossip in columnists’ suggestive innuendo, later incarnations shouted bold accusations in graphic tabloid headlines. On the pages of Broadway Brevities gossip was instrumentalized and urbanized, taking its place among the noisy, sensational features of city life. The life of the magazine’s long-time editor, Canadian-born Stephen G. Clow, runs through this story, connecting the different incarnations of the magazine and the circles in which they were published (in New York, 1917–34, and later in Toronto). Clow’s career took him from Manhattan’s literary world, in his role as a critic and book publisher, to notoriety as a scandal-mongering editor. Beginning in the 1920s Clow gathered – or fabricated – allegations about high-profile people in theatre, cinema, and enterprise, then threatened to publish unless they paid up. Clow would brag to Time magazine that he was “the most famous and wicked blackmailer in world history.” Broadway Brevities became infamous for sensational, vicious, and lurid coverage of gay life. Despite its mocking homophobia, Will Straw shows, the magazine can today help reconstitute the spaces and places of historical queer life in New York. Drawing on a singular collection of Brevities issues discovered over decades of research, Nights in Fairyland is a rich account of an overlooked form of periodical publishing and of urban nightlife, queer sociability, and the commodification of gossip in the 1920s and 1930s.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.967
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0030.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.229
Teacher spread0.211 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it