1.
"A 'Heat Dome' Is Coming. Domes Are Bad." This is an article about the weather that is mostly riffing on the word "dome" with stuff that's easy to collect by googling "dome." ("There’s
Mad Max’s Thunderdome, where gladiators died. There’s the Houston Astrodome,
one of the nation’s largest abandoned buildings — too big and expensive to be blown up.... In 11th-century England, there was the Domesday Book....") A comment there says:
Does this writer think he is clever? What are you thinking, New York Times? Either this is a serious meteorological event, in which case information about its cause, effect and what we might need to do to take care of ourselves in extreme heat and humidity. Or it is a non-event, and not worth the effort it took to write this article. More and more this paper feels like it's written by 20 something who approach every day as a chance to prove their cleverness, rather than to really think about what is happening in the world they live in.
2.
"Why Men Want to Marry Melanias and Raise Ivankas," by Jill Filipovic. This is an interesting idea, all summed up in the title, but it's full of godawful stereotypes and assumptions about 2 women and what one man thinks of them and women in general and what men in general think of them. "Maria Shriver’s Shriver Report" found that men tend to want their wives to be "attractive and sweet" and their daughters to be "independent, strong and principled," and "This dynamic seems to play out in the Trump family" in that "Mr. Trump’s wife is professionally attractive, anecdotally nice and by her own telling fairly traditional, while his elder daughter is a strong, independent and well-educated businesswoman." Never mind that Ivanka is just as attractive and sweet as Melania and that Melania has had her professional endeavors. And forget the obvious fact that whether you devote your efforts to the commercial world or the domestic sphere, you can be independent, strong and principled
or not. What do the NYT commenters have to say about that? Nothing! Because the NYT doesn't put up a comments section for this article. So let me just quote something from the comments to that Domes-are-bad article:
Why does... the NYT always allow comments on these rather juvenile articles but rarely on anything with political, elitist or racial overtones?
Posts
32 comments:
"Maria Shriver’s Shriver Report" found that men tend to want their wives to be "attractive and sweet" and their daughters to be "independent, strong and principled,"
Doesn't the left ever tire of pushing sexist stereotypes? Soooooo boring.
"Why does... the NYT always allow comments on these rather juvenile articles but rarely on anything with political, elitist or racial overtones?"
Because the NYT doesn't want flyover people to question the narrative and how clever they are.
I like how your hotness tag gets to do double-duty here.
Wonder?
They are chasing the Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg demographic.
It's all about the men...the rich men, that is. Targeting data is important to intelligent NYT readers.
And how is Ivanka converting to being a practicing Hasisdic Jew being an independent woman?
"Why does... the NYT always allow comments on these rather juvenile articles but rarely on anything with political, elitist or racial overtones?"
-- Because one is safe, the other isn't.
2 articles in the NYT that I happened to read one after the other that made me wonder if the NYT is tired of journalism and just wants to blab.
Only two? I would have though nearly every article for the last [I don't know] 30 years?
It's not so much wanting to blab I think. I assume that being a writer for a daily paper and having to constantly churn out a lot of content means that at some point your going to end up producing material that's repetitive, contradictory, or generally nonsensical. But pages have to be filled, it's your job and what-not.
I didn't bother to read the articles given your description.
It would appear that my perception of the people who write and edit the NYT as myopic, insular, provincials who haven't had a new thought since their indoctrination would appear to be spot on.
Huge opening for a new newspaper of record. Ditto for television news. Former a lot cheaper, so expect billionaires to try.
The ideal of a reporter gathering and verifying the facts of a story and stating them in succinct, readable English a la Clark Gable in Teacher's Pet went by the boards long ago.
What is journalism, anyway? I'll take reporters over journalists, any time.
The natives knocking Melania don't have any idea what it takes an immigrant to make it in a different world. Melania didn't start out being born a rich man' s wife.
Today, it is mostly about providing filler to wrap around the advertising.
@AA: "Why does... the NYT" Why, oh why. It's a mystery. It's a puzzle. Apart from a generation's worth of supplying prog propaganda and self-esteem boosts to middle-aged female teachers on the Upper West Side.
@Rick: "Doesn't the left ever tire of pushing sexist stereotypes?" Not if they serve the cause. It's situational journalism.
@TG: "Targeting data is important to intelligent NYT readers." Right. But Trump stumps lib women: he is obviously not a con, and he is a rich alpha male, therefore a great catch. But Ivana, Marla, and Melania also show he's out of reach, so the bimbos have to be denigrated or, umm, "critiqued" because they "deserve" it. At the margins, jealousy will outweigh attraction in November.
Sending journalists out to seek out stories and report back costs money, so the news stories just come predigested from the AP et al.
So what can you think of to write about just sitting in your office on 8th Ave.?
Not that much different from an early riser blogger in Madison, WI.
Because the New York Times' product is no longer news, news which traditionally contains a structure and meaning requiring examination and understanding, journalism has now become an anachronistic and costly irrelevancy.
Because the product has now instead become the clicks exuded from the butts of the larvae which feed on the generic "content" the NYT provides as larvae feed, that feed can now be anything, even the ground up remains of the larvae themselves.
Working for your daddy's company is not most people's definition of "independent." (Note that Donald Sr. did not do that, although he may have relied to some extent on his father's connections.) It's just amazing, the mad desire by Times' writers to exalt every woman who can walk and chew gum at the same time.
More and more this paper feels like it's written by 20 something who approach every day as a chance to prove their cleverness, rather than to really think about what is happening in the world they live in.
Being "clever" is a progressive and academic trait. It is most often demonstrated in friendly debates where one side comes up with a clever jab and declares the debate won. Never mind that the jab is often related to a minor side issue that does not really move the debate. The clever jab is also often used to change the subject.
"Why does... the NYT always allow comments on these rather juvenile articles but rarely on anything with political, elitist or racial overtones?"
Because the Times doesn't like people talking back on serious issues.
It's the Gresham's Law of journalism: bad media drives out good. On the internet, click-bait works, largely regardless of the underlying content, and a whole generation has been conditioned to think of this as news. But it only works if it's hyper-targeted, so the Times just doubles down on being the paper of affluent, educated, urban females. If you're not People Like Us (them), they don't really care about you.
Regarding the "Domes are bad" article, here's how Andy Newman describes himself on LinkedIn:
"I'm a journalist currently working primarily as a freelance reporter for the New York Times, where I have published more than 500 articles in sections including Business, Style and Arts. I have in recent years focused mostly on media, advertising and marketing, especially in its newest forms, including social media, viral and mobile marketing. For both the Business and Arts sections, I have written frequently about men’s grooming, including such curiosities as men increasingly using cosmetic products and adopting new behaviors like shaping their eyebrows and even having butt-enhancement surgery."
No wonder he lacks the scientific chops to grasp the public health risks of heat domes. FWIW I rather like many domes: the Parthenon, Thomas Jefferson's dome for the UVa rotunda, the dome on the Capitol building, and Brunelleschi's dome on the Cathedral di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. But a heat dome stalling atop a major heat island like New York City will place everyone in general and the elderly in particular at serious risk of heat stroke.
As to the second article, I see that the shaping is in full swing, painting an intelligent, cosmopolitan woman who is fluent in five languages as a bimbo. Hey Jill Filipovic! How many languages are you fluent in? But the "ovic" at the end of Jill's last name is a giveaway -- she's ethnically a Serb or a Croat, and Serbs and Croats hate Slovenians because Slovenians are more sophisticated than they are.
Why yes, I do have Slovenian ancestry. Why do you ask?
Where the hell is Laslo to describe his evening with both the Trump women? I need details, man, details.
We all realize the Domesday Book had nothing to do with domes, right guys?
Guys?
Uh-oh.
@policraticus,
We all realize the Domesday Book had nothing to do with domes, right guys?
And that it was pronounced, well, more or less, "dooms".
Come to think of it, it didn't have much to do with domes or doomsday, either.
I think it had something to do with zombies, though...
(I keed, I keed....it was taxes).
Obama has been briefed about THE DOME!
https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/755808216001294336
Attractive people are statistically more likely to be intelligent. It's an inevitable outcome of sexual selection over generations. But nobody mentions it because we already think life is unfair and that would be like the final blow.
Of course there are plenty of exceptions in both directions.
"...the Houston Astrodome...too big and expensive to be blown up..."
Nothing is too big nor too expensive to be blown up.
The Houston Astrodome is actually a good example of the incompetence of government.
- They owe $30 million on it.
- It was condemned in 2008
- It's been unused for eight years
- It costs $3 million a year to "maintain"
- Blowing it up would cost $128 million at most (contrary to the article, more recent estimates are actually between $29 million and $78 million and all indications are that there is no saving it--it HAS to be knocked down.)
- Doing anything else with it would cost at least two if not four times as much
When all the options were listed, one missing is to simply sell it and the ground it sits on. Let the buyer take care of the mess. It would save a huge amount of money and might even pull in enough to pay off the loan.
"Attractive people are statistically more likely to be intelligent. It's an inevitable outcome of sexual selection over generations."
I just assumed he was being funny and ironic. I've seen no correlation even amongst people who think they are smarter. If anything, there is a confirmation bias going on with the reverse being the causation--that is intelligent people are seen as more attractive.
(This is true of athletes as well.)
I often read Althouse and have for years but can't figure out why she wastes her time reading the New York Times.
"Independent and strong" generally leads to "attractive and sweet" in my experience. For men or women.
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