no way NYT

There’s Nothing Woke About a Tofu Burger
—Pamela Paul

finally read this about her: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-rules-according-to-pamela-paul

brilliant example of just letting someone explain how much they suck in their own words

i used to listen to the book review podcast which i always thought she did a nice job hosting, i was disappointed to find out that she is completely insane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI-8hst0bho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxcI4iaWHGk

Max Read wrote a characteristically funny editor’s note about her column. https://maxread.substack.com/p/editing-the-new-york-times

Who Wins the Language Wars?

—Nicholas Kristoff

*sigh*

If only Cindy Williams had gotten that part in Language Wars.

Ever since reading this piece on copaganda in the Times, it always jumps out. The latest: yesterday's The Morning, while discussing Tyre Nichols, kept referring to paramilitary units as "well-intentioned".

christ

What Liberals Can Learn From Ron DeSantis

fucking hell. might as well make this a Pamela Paul thread

I hope it has something to do with manliness.

"prison is appropriate for some people"

A Yale economics professor has some ideas for how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society. The “only solution,” he said, is mass suicide of the elderly, including ritual disembowelment. https://t.co/krlL3Ytd2e

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 12, 2023

"what did he mean?"

It's just metaphorical ritual suicide

We’ll be using that solution in the USA in a decade don’t you worry

Apparently this professor has become a cult figure among disgruntled Japanese youth who believe their futures have been impacted by the society’s aging demographics. They put his face on t shirts and things.

kudos to threadstarter for this important public service

I preferred quiddities and agonies of the ruling class

different topics imho, that one is "oh noes how will rich people cope", this one is more abt documenting their truly disturbing rightward shift

"their" being the NYT ofc

soon Bret Stephens will be the liberal columnist of the bunch

We’ll be using that solution in the USA in a decade don’t you worry

Some would suggest that American Covid response policy looks an awful lot like this even without trying

I preferred quiddities and agonies of the ruling class

― treeship., Sunday, February 12, 2023 4:31 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

different topics imho, that one is "oh noes how will rich people cope", this one is more abt documenting their truly disturbing rightward shift

― sleeve, Sunday, February 12, 2023 4:39 PM (one hour ago)

I like the quid-ag thread a lot too and will continue to post things there, but for better or worse I actually read those articles! and sleeve otm about the political bent

my sole regret wrt this thread is that I capitalized NYT, breaking from the past no-way thread convention :(

torn between the point of reporting on people like that Japanese Yale loon; like, guy hangs around with the person who runs 4chan, is clearly some edgelord discourse idiot, and doesn't deserve to be given attention by anyone, particularly the NYT and Yale. Yet maybe ignoring him isn't a good idea? Dunno.

There are ways to pay attention to him that don't involve writing articles about him

I thought this was an interesting article tbh. The “4chan edgelord” audience he panders to is a real thing, in Japan as well as the West. It’s worth keeping tabs on them.

also worth keeping tabs on ivy league/chicago-accredited economists, all of whom are latent genocidaires

and people who *wish* they were accredited so, like mcardle, yglesias and brett stephens's ex-wife

Yes, exactly.

that one is "oh noes how will rich people cope", this one is more abt documenting their truly disturbing rightward shift

Okay I get why ilxors respond to the content in the Times in these ways, and I have no serious counterargument.

That said, both of these characterizations fill me with cognitive dissonance though, and for different reasons.

First, my experience of salaries in print journalism was decidedly grim. My first journalism job paid $6 an hour. My second journalism job paid $16,000 a year. My third journalism job paid... $8 an hour. My third journalism job paid $12 an hour. My fourth journalism job paid $20,000 a year, which felt like a fortune. In 1996.

Referring to NYT staffers - or even its editorial columnists - as "the ruling class" is comprehensible only due to a perverse quirk of the economics of cultural production.

Basically, for most of my life, the ONLY people who could survive in NYC-based print-media industries (newspaper journalism, magazine journalism, and of course book publishing) were subsidized by wealthy parents.

Journalism - on its own - is not now, nor has it ever been, a path to riches. No one is getting wealthy from print journalism any more (and almost no one did so in prior decades either).

Truthbomb: if you are someone with one or more degrees in English, yes, you can work as an editorial assistant at Alfred A. Knopf (or the New Yorker, or whatever). But only if you have no student debt and your parents pay your rent. This has been true for half a century; it should not be news.

Now about the "disturbing rightward shift," please remember that approximately half the nation believes anyone involved in mainstream media - including and especially print media like NYT/WaPo - is essentially communist. Conservative media is clear on this point: the NYT is basically communist.

This disconnect is vexing. Ilxorz and lefties in general believe the NYT is center-right at best, and not to be trusted. Most of the conservasphere believes the NYT is hard left, left of Che Guevara, left of Lenin, left of Bernie, and not to be trusted.

Can both of these descriptions be true? I dunno. In the meantime I still feel like the NYT has a pretty good crossword puzzle app so I feel like sticking with it.

the way I feel about the Times is this:

it’s the paper I’ve been yelling at since i was a teenager, i don’t want to find a new paper to yell at. it has decent reporting on occasion, and the best online recipe depository.

i still think it sucks.

The ruling class experiencing quiddities and agonies are not NY Times staffers - it's the rich people being profiled in the lifestyle/real estate/etc sections.

Now about the "disturbing rightward shift," please remember that approximately half the nation believes anyone involved in mainstream media - including and especially print media like NYT/WaPo - is essentially communist. Conservative media is clear on this point: the NYT is basically communist.

This disconnect is vexing. Ilxorz and lefties in general believe the NYT is center-right at best, and not to be trusted. Most of the conservasphere believes the NYT is hard left, left of Che Guevara, left of Lenin, left of Bernie, and not to be trusted.

Can both of these descriptions be true? I dunno.

Why would the right's attitude be taken into account at all? They also think Joe Biden is a Stalinist baby blood-drinking pedophile or at least a Stalinist doing the bidding of baby blood-drinking pedophiles.

All major news media is center-right (at best) - they're capitalist enterprises who in the end have to protect their bottom line. This means 'printing the controversy,' an overwhelming focus on crime at every level, following the lead of American imperialism in anything outside our borders, dehumanizing anyone or anything that makes the upper-middle class anxious (the homeless, BLM activists, etc.), protecting fellow capitalist enterprises (ie advertisers).

The shift in the Times has been embracing deep reactionary takes on social issues - which is not new ground but a shift from the last couple of decades.

Referring to NYT staffers - or even its editorial columnists - as "the ruling class" is comprehensible only due to a perverse quirk of the economics of cultural production.

oh, i think there's a vast difference between NYT staffers and editorial columnists. it's a perverse quirk that the latter are accorded such attention, but, nevertheless, they are. (i was going to say 'fading quirk' but iirc the WaPo just fired a bunch of journalists while hiring a bunch of NRO/AEI columnists)

might be fading away now, but it's long been common knowledge that WSJ reporters can be relied upon even while the WSJ editorial page is fucking bonkers

i would first suggest that literally no one deserves a regular NYT opinion column -- no one has anything interesting to say twice a week for decades on end. but apart from that, who's left? a guy who just recently grasped climate change after a visit to greenland. a woman who thinks liberals should learn things from ron desantis. a guy who quit, to run for political office in a jurisdiction he didn't live, then came back. maureen fucking dowd. these people are all terrible, and obviously so. but they are voices that matter in the 'discourse' and the 'sunday morning shows'. and if they didn't suck so badly, perhaps those things would be slightly better

that all sounds right to me

wait which one of those is jamelle bouie

(to be clear i fully agree with you that there should not be such a thing as a regular NYT opinion columnist, and that nobody's 20th best opinion of the year is worth a damn)

jamelle bouie is grebt, and i suspect that as black man extremely well-versed in the last 300+ years of american history, he has almost endless things to write about twice a week

i have no idea what pamela paul will offer us on a weekly basis? ideally it won't be about the tragedy of taking her stupid friends to a sandwich place that offers soppressata, but i guess we'll see

This disconnect is vexing. Ilxorz and lefties in general believe the NYT is center-right at best, and not to be trusted. Most of the conservasphere believes the NYT is hard left, left of Che Guevara, left of Lenin, left of Bernie, and not to be trusted.

Can both of these descriptions be true? I dunno. In the meantime I still feel like the NYT has a pretty good crossword puzzle app so I feel like sticking with it.

trust fund kids have their own class politics. they resent the bourgeoisie (their parents) and feel guilty that they are part of it. so there is an incentive to evade directly dealing with uncomfortable questions of class. this accounts for the dissonance i think.

Not sure I understand how that is supposed to square the circle but OK I guess.

My final question is the extent to which the New York Times is actually influencing anything or anyone. That is, how many minds are getting changed because people type things and the NYT prints them or "prints" them?

I am skeptical. I don't think there are very many people being swayed to or from their preexisting attitudes because of something appearing in legacy print media. Maybe I'm wrong about this. As noted, I have been in the bubble since birth (child of journalists, journalism major, former journalist, etc.). But I have cultivated a humility about the influence of the field because I have been awake for the last quarter-century and see that it's only a tiny minority of weirdos who read anything any more, let alone something so dinosaurian as a printed newspaper.

Me? I have been read the Washington Post and New York Times all my life, but (a) I know I am an outlier and (b) Doing so hasn't put very many ideas in my head that weren't already there.

People who read, like, and believe newspapers do so because newspapers reflect a worldview they already hold, and which they probably inherited from their parents.

People who ignore, hate, and disparage newspapers do so because that course of actions reflects a worldview they already hold, and which they probably inherited from their parents.

What are you going on about?

so has the NYT always been center right? or did it execute a turnabout a few years ago? surely it was seen as much worse than center-right by the counter culture left in the late 1960s…

one difference from 10 years ago is that is not teetering on the edge of financial collapse: it is now a totemic product that the members of bourgie center left (such as me) use to signal their allegiance, their class, etc etc…and is calling it "center right" as a pejorative an ILX thing or is it widespread throughout the left internet?

so has the NYT always been center right? or did it execute a turnabout a few years ago? surely it was seen as much worse than center-right by the counter culture left in the late 1960s…

I'm pretty sure the Times came in for a kicking in Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent, which I read 30 years ago. And it definitely features prominently in Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media?, which came out in 2003. Calling it a "liberal" paper basically amounts to the broader public adopting a Nixon-era attack line.

Oh, it's just a viral marketing campaign

https://twitter.com/KimStimFilms/status/1625183907833430033

Shocking but this Yale prof says the quite part out loud suggesting mass suicide for old folks in Japan! This is the premise of Chie Hayakawa's moving, & unforgettable PLAN 75- a Cannes winner is set in a chilling, sci-fi tinged near future. Opens Spring!https://t.co/022TIc8heF

— KimStim (@KimStimFilms) February 13, 2023

The glasses are bothering me tbh

Yeah sorry, you can’t Gramsci your way out of this one, treeship— by any objective measure, the Times has been a center-right paper for my entire life, at least, and I am nearing 40. unperson otm.

Ugh it’s so insulting, like commenting that someone with a professional degree “speaks flawless English” or calling Obama “articulate”. It can be true and insulting at the same time.

^^

"He's so punctual!"

Sound like an early Bob Dylan song:

CINCINNATI, Ohio, Dec. 20.-Eugene Zimmerman, financier and the father of the Duchess of Manchester, dropped dead this afternoon at the Queen City Club. A few minutes before his death he had been laughing over the $100,000 breach of promise suit filed last June against him in New York by Icy Wareham.

An Emboldened Mamdani Sheds Conciliatory Tone

plus

Mamdani’s Victory Is Less Significant Than You Think by Ross Douthat

apparently when you win by 8.8%/get a majority in a three-person race -- which, yes, is *emboldening* -- you are supposed to retract all the things you said previously

Christ on a cracker. Have Cuomo, the ADL, and all the people who launched racist and Islamophobic attacks against Mandami last week now adopted a new, more conciliatory tone? Obviously, the NYT hasn't.

guys it will never happen. no left politician will ever “have a mandate”. they must always be careful not to overstep, not to poke the violent maga bear. stop wishing for this to change it won’t change! the nice news is, it doesn’t really matter

woof: https://bsky.app/profile/nytdiff.bsky.social/post/3m4xn6hsx2l2w

the nyt is run by some seriously sick people

i cannot bring myself to read that. the excerpts are horrific

saw that while scrolling the nyt homepage this morning. the video of douthat madlt grinning under that headline was like a jump scare.

my only silver lining is this kind of thing makes it much more obvious that this is the same politics behind transphobia. their ideas about gender extend to thinking that institutions and organizations have a gender, that gender should be masculine, and this gender becomes compromised when too many women are allowed access or are permitted to critique or change the institution.

but also yes don't read it, these people are slippery little fascists masquerading as something else

and of course Douthat begins the conversation by interrupting the woman

lol they've already rewritten the headline as "Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace." Not that that's much better. I gave it a glance but couldn't read past the first few paragraphs. I don't care what Ross Douthat or a couple of traddy right-wing women think about anything.

Instead, watch this 2010 video of Helen Andrews (back when she was Helen Rittenmeyer) being savaged by her ex-boyfriend on a C-SPAN panel: https://www.c-span.org/clip/public-affairs-event/user-clip-helen-andrews-roasted-by-ex/5137073

oh lol I thought she looked familiar, that clip is incredible

hilarious to me that anybody takes this piece of shit paper seriously

there's a podcast i used to really like, called Weird Studies. somebody on this board turned me on to it. they talk about all kinds of topics, from tarot cards to Lovecraft to John Carpenter movies. that kind of "weird." and i just thought it was great. but recently one of the two guys started talking about this Ross Douthat article on religion, and read from it rather extensively, and was kind of trying to make a whole episode happen around this Douthat article, and it just put such an awful taste in my mouth. i realize that not everybody is a terminally online hyperleftist dork like me. i also realize it's partly on me to not let things like this ruin my opinion of otherwise supersmart supersensitive superperceptive people. but idk

Ross Douthat is an absolute lunatic and if a podcast I loved mentioned a level of engagement with an article of his like that I would feel awful and pissed off. In the pre Trump era I could see maybe taking an interest in the right wing/Republicans but there's so much poison out there and so many horrible things to have to pay attention to, that yeah that would leave a bad taste in my mouth. especially if it was about religion, good lord

fwiw budo I also listened to that for a while. Found it interesting, but ultimately it felt like one thing you did need to buy into to really get on these guy's wavelenght is that good and evil self-evidently exist as spiritual forces and if you don't believe that you are fooling yourself. Well, I don't believe that, but also don't think ppl who do believe in these spiritual forces are automatically wrong or dumber than me...but it kinda felt like they thought I was.

I mean, their (and the wider magic community's) views on Crowley are, uh, interesting to say the least, but I agree with you that the Douthat thing is a bizarre misstep and calls their project into question.

hmm ... i'm kind of realizing that this might be the perfect place to talk about Weird Studies. not this thread but this board. i don't think i know anybody irl who listens or listened. i have a lot of affection for them, particularly Phil, and the things you've both said have made me want to hear more

i don't know how NYT ads work, but i had to lol when I got one for (no joke) the book Manufacturing Consent in the middle of an op-ed column. (the column -- Elizabeth Spiers on Andrew Cuomo -- is actually pretty good.)

(I mean, it's probably a targeted ad via Google AdSense, but I think the NYT still has some control over the kinds of ads that show up.)

huh I guess Ross didn't start this one: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/opinion/helen-andrews-feminization-compact.html

Opinion | How Women Destroyed the West
David French

(I wonder if they're testing the waters of giving Helen Andrews a column)

The French column is a direct response to an Andrews essay that apparently went viral on Twitter, which was also the occasion for Douthat to invite her on his podcast. Maybe an example of how Twitter is cooking the brains of elites who are still on it that French and Douthat see the ideas in the Andrews essay as worth bringing to Times readers.

ah ok thanks, I didn't bother evading the paywall for this one. I don't think I can agree that twitter is ultimately to blame for Douthat's pathology (i.e., surely Douthat is closer to being one of twitter's brain chefs than a victim?), but def interesting to note in terms of the nyt's general putrefaction

I guess I just mean that if you are on Twitter, and especially if you are a center-right pundit who follows other conservatives, the Andrews essay probably seems like a Big Deal that a lot of people are talking about. Douthat doesn't need to be convinced of the argument, but he may perceive it as more significant than it is because of Twitter discourse.

The Lyme really got to his brain, I’d say

meanwhile, at the washington post

https://i.imgur.com/75gUZ9q.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/Nzcj9F1.jpeg

really excellent essay on the Africana Studies article from a former chair of the dept: https://lithub.com/maybe-dont-talk-to-the-new-york-times-about-zohran-mamdani/

just came here to post that. god, fuck the nyt.

(immediately realizes it’s past midnight, fires up the new wordle to warm up for connections)

That's a great essay. This summed up the current predicament for me, with regards to representation and the complete abdication of responsibility from 'journalists':

Like so many other bits of Times coverage, the whole of the piece is structured as an orchestrated encounter. Some people say this; however, others say this. It’s so offhand you can think you’re gazing through a pane of glass. Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two “sides,” or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it. Instead, what you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labour of anything resembling “appraisal” surgically excised.

Yeah somewhere along the way journalists forgot that the most critical part of their job is to explain the context for the "some" who "say" - who funds them etc - and then actually go ahead and make a judgement about it, using their knowledge and expertise

Otherwise they are simply, in David Barsamian's memorable phrase, simply stenographers to power

https://archive.org/details/stenographerstop00bars

are you fucking kidding me with this headline

https://bsky.app/profile/nytimes.com/post/3m5kdkkn6xs2e

the headline or the skeet?

passive tense: 'Mistakes were made'

“An underage girl was had sex with”

https://i.imgur.com/W2uI17h.jpeg

The cache of emails includes exchanges about going to dinner at Rao’s, the uptown Italian restaurant where it was famously hard to get a table, and an invitation for Mr. Epstein to the 25th anniversary party for The New York Observer (it was a weekly paper, printed on salmon-colored newsprint and read by the city’s elite) at the Four Seasons restaurant (where the elite once power-lunched; it’s now closed) co-hosted by Michael Bloomberg (he was the mayor) and Jared Kushner (who owned The Observer). The guest list included Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein. You’ve probably heard about what happened with them.

so sad that new york is (theoretically) less accepting of rape now, which the story won't mention because 'you've probably heard what happened with them'

also wtf with ppl like marchman and scocca defending this

there is no rope involved and no one is being hung; this is just a pissant being sad that, because of pedophilia, the levers of power he needs to manipulate to get access are now different

thank you for posting that in this thread mookie, i couldn't believe they published that shit. author may have thought it was coming across as an objective observation about changing times, but the nostalgic tone came through loud and clear. ugh

hahaha wtf

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:waplkqr2wuy2c4qbge6h6ed4/bafkreicn7r62s5wewep2oveprf2t3alkjlrdwij6l62vutmxvlbmvtv4m4@jpeg

Well, that tells a story

incredible

who the fuck cares really

https://bsky.app/profile/nytimes.com/post/3mac64dalhs2a

everyone had already forgotten by now, but maybe in 2025 there's a way to monetize infidelity (???)

key sentence in that article is this one:

"Cabot hired a communications consultant to help her tell her story while minimizing further damage to herself and the people she loves — a high-wire act that felt, in her presence, at times anguishing and at times too pat."