The author provided a summary version in footnote 1.

If you’d like an even shorter version, I am working on a bullet list and will update this comment soon.

EDIT: here you go. I think I’ve summarized pretty well the main points and arguments of the article:

• The open letter released on August 18th 2021, cosigned by Lyta Gold, Allegra Silcox, and three others, was misleading or dishonest about numerous things. Particularly, it stated that Nathan J Robinson (hereon referred to as NJR) had “fired” them when he had actually asked them to resign. This is an important difference. He did not have the authority to fire them, and he had not attempted to.
• Lyta Gold and the others affected led the public to believe that their financial situations were a lot less secure than they actually were. Yasmin Nair makes a compelling case that by August 18th when they published the open letter, they almost certainly knew they would be getting significant severance. Despite this, they created a donation drive on Cash App (and later Venmo as well) under a false pretext.
  • Per the article:

    • In a response dated August 13, Robinson, by now massively regretful and apologetic for how he had responded, heartily agreed with the idea of a year’s severance and also went beyond their proposal with a larger sum amounting to $234,352. There is no indication, in either the correspondence or even the statements by the department staff or the board, that he resisted any of the proposals. Since it was unlikely the magazine could pay out such an enormous sum, he said he would pay for the difference out of his own pocket, by any means possible—even if it meant paying in instalments.

    • Robinson never resisted any of the staff’s demands, and in fact offered them more than they asked for (though it was not in his power to do that, and the board had control and did not accept his offer of a large sum to be paid out over a one-year instalment)

    • In the end, including August and September payrolls, the magazine paid out $76,014, divided among seven people . This amounted to five months’ salary for most (and as we’ve seen, money was given out to people who were not even part of the staff).

• One point of tension leading up to the events of August 2021 was disagreement over which candidate to hire for the role of Online Editor. The final two candidates were Lily Sanchez and Sam DeLucia. NJR preferred Lily Sanchez, while some other people at Current Affairs (particularly Allegra Silcox) preferred DeLucia. At one point in the hiring process (slighly earlier actually, when there were were still four remaining candidates), Lily Sanchez asked the hiring team a clarifying question about an editing test assignment that was a step in the hiring process (clarifying questions were allowed). NJR answered her question, in an email that was also visible to the rest of the hiring team. After August 18th, Adrian Rennix recounted this event in a dishonest way that would lead the public to believe that NJR gave Lily Sanchez special and unsolicited advice because she was his preferred candidate and he wanted to get her in by any means possible, even unfair ones.
  • Eventually Lily Sanchez did end up being selected for the role, by a majority vote. After Sanchez was hired, some of the people who had preferred Sam DeLucia were unhappy and unprofessional about it, and looked for a way to bring on DeLucia anyway. In a virtual meeting that included the newly hired Lily Sanchez as an attendee, Allegra Silcox stated that “We need to bring Sam on basically as soon as we can because as far as we know, we love her and we want to give her work, bring her in full-time.” Yasmin Nair correctly states that being this overeager to hire a runner-up alongside the person who actually got the job “sets the stage for terrible office dynamics.”
• The people who had been asked to resign led the public to believe that NJR had done so because they had been trying to restructure the magazine as a worker co-op. This is questionable at best. A better way to describe the situation is that restructuring as a worker co-op was one of numerous ideas that were suggested to deal with two problems: that (a) Current Affairs was dysfunctional in numerous ways, and needed more structure and better-defined roles just for practical business reasons, and (B) it would be desirable for Current Affairs to be structured in a more egalitarian way as well. There was wide agreement that both of these issues existed and needed to be resolved, but converting CA to a co-op was only one suggested solution, and it was still only being discussed loosely and hypothetically. Certainly no formal demands had been made in regards to forming a worker co-op.
  • NJR was opposed to the worker co-op idea. His stated explanation for this is that he preferred the idea of converting CA to a registered nonprofit, without any owners. However, this idea ran into problems because nonprofits are prohibited from making political endorsements, and are legally constrained in their political commentary in other ways as well. Current Affairs’ website presently acknowledges this in its explanation for being a C-Corp.
  • One of the main proponents of the worker co-op idea was Allegra Silcox, and she also was a proponent of converting CA into a for-profit organization as well. It is possible that NJR’s opposition to the worker co-op suggestion was partly because it seemed to be joined with converting it to a for-profit as well.
  • Some media accounts described all of this in an even more inaccurate way, that they had been asked to resign because they tried to unionize the workplace. This was never true, there was never a unionization effort, and unions are not the same thing as worker co-ops.
  • Just as a note, at the time this happened, Current Affairs was collectively owned at the time by its board of directors, which consisted of NJR, Lyta Gold, Adrian Rennix, and three other people who had contributed significantly to the magazine.
    • One of the problems with the magazine’s management was arguably that the board of directors overlapped too much with the editors and contributors of the magazine.
    • Also, Yasmin Nair describes that the board of directors was rather inactive and did not operate with the same rigor as a typical company board of directors. Quote: “minutes were never taken, and meetings were sporadic”
• One of the people whose resignations NJR requested, Kate Gauthreaux, really was just bad at her job and even complained that it was boring. Allegra Silcox tried to create a new role for Gauthreaux that would be more enjoyable for her, but this raised the question of who else would do the administrative work for which Gauthreaux was initially hired.