Rolling NYTimes "fake trends" and other style section-type nonsense that doesn't quite fall under the "quidities and agonies of the ruling class" thread thread

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/nyregion/06reading.html?_r=1&hpw

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Media/Pix/pictures/2008/07/22/TheWireS5460.jpg

THE middle-aged woman with the black cardigan around her shoulders had assumed a meticulously calibrated posture: feet shoulder-width apart, arms slightly bent, fists loosely clenched, muscles relaxed yet alert.

She was not preparing for a tae kwon do bout, but performing her personal version of the underground battle engaged in daily by millions of New Yorkers: reading, intently, on a sardine-can D train hurtling swiftly toward Brooklyn in the evening rush. Without holding on.

“I am a New Yorker,” the woman, Robin Kornhaber, 54, told me as if those five crisp words explained everything. “I can do anything on the subway.”

the ny times bugs me, too. i'm just not sure how many threads we need about NYT BS

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc275/thehousenextdoor/2008/WIRE%20RECAPS/57%20Wire/vlcsnap-14629266.png

this article doesn't even seem to be about trends, a trend that i find troubling.

i love articles about people reading and i will defend them to the death

where you do you like to read such articles

yeah, I guess this is being put into the "other nonsense" category, but ... eh, I dunno, it's just talking about people reading on trains. which people do. which if you find uninteresting you can just turn to the next article.

i like to read articles about people reading on the subway on the subway

while eating a subway

sandwich

interesting. do you have any friends that do the same thing, and can i set up some phone interviews with you all this afternoon?

wow New Yorkers are the most amazing people...

but why is she reading a sardine can? wait

actually, reading over this, I think the writer did a pretty good job of making this assignment/idea work okay. it's one of those stories that doesn't actually inform people of much, and is meant to just talk to you about some banal texture-of-daily-life thing you've noticed too -- but I guess it's mildly interesting to hear the people you see every day (like actors going over their scripts) say something about it. (I guess it's sort of the newspaper article as idle chit-chat.)

yeah it was sweet and informative, i enjoyed it

infomative in the sense that it talked about ordinary people and what they were doing & reading, something i find interesting

Yeah, I can't get too worked up. My friend who's a writer said that he loves visiting NYC b/c everyone reads on the subway; I think he thinks it's charming. But he's from Detroit, where everyone drives.

yeah, I guess this is being put into the "other nonsense" category, but ... eh, I dunno, it's just talking about people reading on trains. which people do. which if you find uninteresting you can just turn to the next article.

― nabisco, Friday, September 4, 2009 1:59 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

I guess, it's just that every time an article like this gets published, which is often, it makes the Times seem a little dumber and cheaper. I mean this is not only a blatant filler piece but the writing is godawful. I was also going to post the recent Virginia Heffernan piece on how there's a supposed "exodus from facebook" even though the numbers don't actually show any such thing (as far as I can tell, it's based on a personal grudge plus a couple of anecdotes). At least this piece ostensibly involved some reporting, I guess.

truly a sad day when nabisco is reduced to the "if you don't like it just turn the page" argument

hey man, he can't be on ALL the time

And then there are those reading the readers, imagining their story lines. That man in a suit studying “Rosetta Stone Level 3 Italian” on the No. 2 train must be preparing to meet his fiancée’s family in Tuscany. The woman reading a young-adult novel at 81st Street is probably a teacher preparing for class. We are usually left to wonder, but I recently spent 12 hours crisscrossing four boroughs underground, asking people what they were reading and why.

Bob Alderson, 46, the man learning Italian, is a patent lawyer, with no imminent overseas travel plans, but aspirations. “Someday I want to visit Italy, so I’m studying,” he said.

And the woman reading “City of Glass,” an urban fantasy involving a slavering demon and several warlocks? Kimberly Nessel, 26, a dog walker with a graduate degree in forensic psychology, said she became addicted to young-adult fiction with dark plot lines when she worked in a bookstore.

This is called reporting.

i am puzzled by that because he could post that on every thread about newspapers/magazines xp

i mean, why this one

(I can see why you'd hate it, though, Hurting. And I hated, very much, that Facebook article.)

Sorry, I meant at least the subway reading piece involved reporting -- the facebook one did not.

haha btw if you want to find something in this article to use to mock NYers for being self-centered and provincial, it might actually be the correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the state in which Grinnell College is located.

xpost - high five Monsieur Queueue
xpost - oh man we went over Heffernan/Facebook for a while on the other thread
xpost - I didn't say "if you don't like it," I said "if you're not interested in the topic"

I liked it, too. I've actually often thought about cataloging all the books that I see people read on the train (there was that period a couple years ago when everyone on the el seemed to be reading Devil in the White City), but then that would get in the way of my own reading.

We already covered the Heffernan piece; where were you? xxxxp

I was also going to post the recent Virginia Heffernan piece on how there's a supposed "exodus from facebook" even though the numbers don't actually show any such thing (as far as I can tell, it's based on a personal grudge plus a couple of anecdotes).

Didn't we already have a long thread about this?

Aw, drats! What thread?

i don't like these types of articles at all but i guess lots of people do

Ha sorry, xpost

Hurting:
ok the dangerous teenage hug epidemic - another important new york times trend piece

haha btw if you want to find something in this article to use to mock NYers for being self-centered and provincial, it might actually be the correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the state in which Grinnell College is located.

totalllllllllllllllllllllllllly! this is such an East Coast vs. Midwest thing

I mean there's a big difference between "this article is evil and wrong and worth getting worked up over" and "I guess I don't find this interesting, so I'll read the next thing" -- I almost don't want to imagine the person who finds every article in a big-ass late-in-the-week newspaper relevant or interesting! you just figure some of it is of note to someone besides you; newspapers have to be big-tent publications that way

it would be funny if tomorrow's nyt had an article about people reading this article on the subway

ok i understand, xp

Hey Grinnell! That's where my Grandma went to college!
And I would certainly not know where it was located otherwise.

lol, I was the one who posted it there.

Checking citations is frying my brain, apparently.

this is almost--dare I say it--an old school Talk of The Town-esque kind of piece?

I guess I also just have a problem with that kind of puffed-up personal-essay-workshop kind of writing, but it's not exactly shocking to find that in a soft news feature, I guess.

i don't know what's wrong with me, i bet 9 times out of 10, i would hate this sort of thing, it would drive me crazy, i find it totally endearing today, i mean human panini!!!!!!

Even without a seat, even while pressed with strangers into human panini, even as someone plays a keyboard harmonica and rattles a cup of change, even when stumbling home after a party.

I'll have to check the print version when I get home to see what the original error was, like whether the reporter misheard/misremembered it as "Ohio" or mixed it up with some other grain-filled state or what. (Obviously I don't know where the reporter is from, and maybe it's just a regular error, but there is sometimes an east-coasty thing where various midwestern states are mentally indistict and interchangeable.)

as a side-note, sometimes I really envy having "reporting" as an excuse to ask people questions about stuff like what they're reading -- but as it turns out, the fact that I wouldn't just ask them anyway is probably part of why I'm not super-comfortable with reporting

(oh and let me also say that while I totally know and understand why it can be bothersome to read writing that seems overwrought, I worry that standards seem really low sometimes, like it's not even about good-or-bad anymore and we're somehow trying to discourage people from even attempting a little metaphor or colorful description. I know that stuff sticks out more in a newspaper, and sometimes just doesn't work, but I do like when people try; I'd hate for people to get so scared of seeming pretentious that they're afraid to use language in a way they thing is interesting.)

dude do you ever get tired of saving a ho

ILX: beating a dead ho

Obviously I don't know where the reporter is from

Me neither, but she got married in the Berkshires and used to work at WGBH, the PBS affiliate in Boston. For whatever that's worth.

dude do you ever get tired of xlsing a ho

it may not even be her mistake, you know? could have been a printing error. it's still creepy

i mean i have a bunch of databases at my disposal i could throw her name into right now but i don't. . . do you see the difference?

Oh sure, we don't know what the error even was. But Nabisco wondered where she grew up, and so I took that as a challenge to find out. I don't see how it's creepy unless I use the information to harass her family or whatever.

i mean i have a bunch of databases at my disposal i could throw her name into right now but i don't. . . do you see the difference?

Yeah, the difference is that your databases are probably not accessible to everyone in the world?

no the difference is i *could* either a) do what you are doing and find out where she grew up and stuff or b) i could go further and get even *more* information about her with my secret databases. . . either way i'm not doing it because it seems creepy and stalkerish to do so

and finding out where she grew up doesn't really solve the Grinnell problem, either--it's all guesswork

Well, I don't have any fact-checking work at the office this week, so.

and finding out where she grew up doesn't really solve the Grinnell problem, either--it's all guesswork

Oh, of course. But Nabisco suggested it might be the case that the error is because she's a native East Coaster, so I wanted to see if that might be true to lend any credence to the theory. Doesn't substantially prove anything, but it makes it more plausible.

i mean, let's be fair though, you are ilx's fact checkin' cuz

he is, so why are you acting like this is the first time you've noticed?

i'm not

ok, but i'm gonna research that

Anyway, where were you to put a stop to so not gonna happen ?

i think a correction is called for

lol

My dear friends! Isn't it nice how, despite all our differences and arguments, we can still find unity in a wonderful thing that unites us all: voyeurism and making creepy comments about strangers!

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Tuesday, January 31, 2006 3:15 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that might be the truthbombiest thing Tuomas has ever said

don't think i was posting yet when so not gonna happen happened. (THAT IS NOT A CHALLENGE TO YOU MR CUZ.)

I almost ... yeah.

lol

trend: people on the subway listen to ipods

Next time I see someone reading in the metro here in DC I'm going to ask them if they're from New York.

Next time I'm reading on the train in Sydney I'm going to be relieved that I'm too far away from nabisco to make him feel uncomfortable about wanting to ask me what I'm reading

that article makes we lose the will to live after like 200 words

it's like "new york diary" or whatever except without any wistful jokes!

You guys should check out the "trend" stories in the NY Post mebbe?

The Times should put in that pay wall already so we wouldn't have these fucking threads.

Then everything would be copy/pasted here anyway.

You guys should check out the "trend" stories in the NY Post mebbe?

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_GvFEduhv030/R-wEY8F3hLI/AAAAAAAAAEg/4yN2LMbB6i8/s400/headless.jpg

they still did SOME news back then under the headless headlines. Can you imagine "arms control pick" getting a front-page tease now?

“City of Glass,” an urban fantasy involving a slavering demon and several warlocks

O RLY?

https://twitter.com/NYTOnIt

hate that fucking twitter account

Really?

it's kind of witless

I guess it could be executed better. still serves as a good compendium of that kind of thing.

you know what also does, the new york times

yeah i just think it doesnt really know what its target is or what its supposed to be making a joke about

Was thinking about starting a fake trend rumor about people who have turned away from hardcore internet porn in favor of the "retro" charms of skinemax softcore

No that's a real thing now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/fashion/vamping-teenagers-are-up-all-night-texting.html

“I say, ‘How do you keep up? It’s stressful,’ ” the mother added. “And she says, ‘I know!’ ” But her daughter finds it wrenching to unplug after dark. “The phone beeps and they feel compelled to answer it,” the mother said. “It’s not like reading a book. The book wasn’t pinging you every moment, saying, ‘Read me! Read me!’ You can close the book.”

i would just stay up all hours and read books when i was their age (it was a moment of maturity when my mom caught me using a flashlight under the covers and said ok, if you're gonna do this it's on you, but at least turn the lights on so you don't ruin your eyes)

… at least before i got a modem

So some nights, mostly weekends, he snuggles under the covers with his laptop, the screen dimmed so his parents won’t see, and watches tutorials on YouTube about how to create hip-hop beats with a drum machine.

I am sure that is exactly what 15-year-old boys are watching on their laptops under the covers.

i remember how i couldn't put books down, and had to keep reading to find out what happened next. now... not so much.

oh, they all end the same way, something happens, or doesn't

yeah i figured that out eventually. maybe one day i'll find a book where something doesn't happen and also something doesn't doesn't happen. that's what keeps me going.

"i remember how i couldn't put books down, and had to keep reading to find out what happened next."

still totally do this

that must be the secret ingredient in tenure

Hmm maybe this goes here?

A few months ago, I flew out to Las Vegas to report a story about the boom of rich guys who secretly got leg lengthening surgery during Covid. Now they're re-entering the world 3 to 6 inches taller (and mostly not telling anyone lol) https://t.co/Kebl5AUsLV

— Chris Gayomali (@chrisgayomali) September 15, 2022

Ah, pulling a Rivers Cuomo

Didn't know he did that! At least it was because one leg was shorter than the other and not.. for some other reason

ok now all this scamdemic business makes sense

From an unpublished interview I did with Rivers Cuomo years ago:

"You also had leg extension surgery. Now that your legs are the same length, does the world seem more crooked?

RC: (laughs) No, everything is much straighter now.

How long does the whole, painful process take?

RC: It took 13 months. It’s like this cage that’s all around your leg, screwed in to your bone. It’s basically like having ten arrows shot through your meat, into your bone, and then they stay there for 13 months.

But you were all doped up on painkillers.

RC: For the first couple of months I was. But then they try to get you off of them, which is a very sad experience.

Supposedly little people consider leg extension surgery tantamount to treason.

RC: Really? Well, actually I would recommend it to anyone whose leg or legs were too short. It’s not easy, but who wants to have a bum leg?

Did you ever consider making your legs significantly longer?

RC: You mean one longer than the other one?

No, making both of them a lot longer, so that you’d be better at basketball.

RC: No, that wouldn’t be worth it."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/well/cannabis-weed-sleep-aid.html

gosh i don't know. maybe. don't rush into it. there's not enough research - the evidence is spotty. you might build a tolerance. some say it helps! others... aren't sure. in conclusion, weed is a land of many contrasts.