Writes Jonathan Malesic, in "There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore" (NYT).
I remember "vibes" as a hippie word, so I have trouble seeing how it functions these days in the speech of the young, and so, it annoys me. I wish I'd made a tag for it long ago, so I could could keep track of how it annoys me — at least in its usage by mainstream media. Do non-media young people go around saying it? I don't know. It just irks me when I see it in media.
For example... I wrote a post on September 4, 2024— "Mainstream media helps Kamala Harris maintain the nothingness" — where I was complaining about the no-substance strategy of the Harris campaign, and I quoted a New Republic piece("Kamala Harris Doesn’t Need Policy to Win/In fact, a detailed platform will hurt her campaign more than it will help"): "Harris’s vibes-based, personality-based approach to the first six weeks of this mad dash of a campaign is clearly working.... Harris should hang out in the coconut tree and not release any economic plans that can’t fit within a Venn diagram. To win, Harris doesn’t need policy. She just needs vibes."
Ugh. How did that work out? She's running on fumes, not vibes.
And then there was the time Ezra Klein said to Tim Walz, "You’ve got real good Midwestern dad vibes." That was August 2, 2024. Remember when they acted as though they believed that America's men could be bought through real good Midwestern dad vibes and that Tim Walz has them?!
And to go back to before Trump won an election, to June 25, 2016, the venerable political analyst Jeff Greenfield tweeted "I put no stock in 'portents' and 'vibes,' but I can't help wondering if what's happened already this cycle is just a hint of what's to come" and I'm proud to see that I said it made me laugh "precisely because of the seriousness with which it was intended."
ADDED: That phrase "The vibes will provide" is a mocking twist on the once-common expression "God will provide." So I do have a tag — a longstanding tag — for that: "Religion substitutes."
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The vibes will provide sent to the young Isaac Bible story… ‘don’t worry son, the vibes will provide.’
I can't see a lawyer, engineer, or doctor winging it on "vibes".
I get the vibe Kamala’s vibes are for the birds.
The good reason college students don't read is because many of them are not in fact qualified for college. But that's fine: increasingly it's looking very stupid to take on debt for worthless credentialism.
I-I love the colorful clothes Kamala wears
And the way the sunlight plays upon her hair
I hear the sound of a gentle word
On the wind that lifts her perfume through the air
I'm pickin' up good vibrations
Kamala's giving me the excitations (oom bop bop)
I'm pickin' up good vibrations (good vibrations, oom bop bop)
She's giving me the excitations (excitations, oom bop bop
Educators generally failed at business or didn't even bother and fell back to a career with unclear metrics for success.
Marketers generally failed at sales and fell back to a career with unclear metrics for success.
College students get degrees in fields with unclear metrics for success.
Patterns.
Kamala’s vibes are more like sur-babel
With the decline in standards, that surgeon will vibe that appendix right out of you within a decade.
Btw. I have a good vibe for a meme but I’m very busy right now. I’ll give it away later tonight… at the sunset vibe. Yes it’s political.
I doubt 5% of the people ages 18-22 today could read a novel like "Crime and Punishment" and comprehend it at even a most basic level- and that is me giving them credit for even having the willpower to finish it if they didn't like it inside of the first 5 pages.
Have you looked at marketing lately? If anything, the metrics are too well-defined: if you're not constantly driving engagement upwards, your job isn't secure. These days marketing is one of the most data-driven fields in the world, at least if you have a halfway competent marketing department. Sure you need cute creatives to pull in eyeballs: but someone has to study how effective it is.
“ Sure you need cute creatives to pull in eyeballs: but someone has to study how effective it is.”
And if you aren’t effective, your brand is dead.
Flying from Seattle to LA last night, I engaged a young mom in a political discussion. She had two kids in college. Hubby worked for AMZN. She was bright but she firmly was invested in the MSNBC narrative of Trump as a facist. She didn’t go deep into the facts and just followed the vibe of Harris as a kind person and that she isn’t Trump. She had no idea why we have inflation. She worked in mental health and attributed that crisis to social media.
I remember "vibes" as a hippie word, so I have trouble seeing how it functions these days in the speech of the young, and so, it annoys me.
Agree almost 100%. My main takeaway is that it implies a lack of substance, as in “who cares about inflation, or the border, or freezing to death in the dark?” Putting a “vibes” campaign up against a realty-based campaign is almost as insane as being a Jew who supports people who turn around and support people who scream “Death to Jews!”
"To win, Harris doesn’t need policy. She just needs vibes." Ugh. How did that work out? She's running on fumes, not vibes.
Very funny ! It has that painful burn of an unfortunate accuracy to it......
Vibes vibes with post-truth
Jonathan Malesic uses a great many words to say his job is bullshit.
God that’s stupid. Apple doesn’t design test and manufacture with “vibes.” They do it with planning and research and testing and a lot of that is condensed to executive summaries but actual people with or without AI produce the raw text and summaries. Ditto most industries. At the very least instructions and plans are read by people. Even coding is a language that must be “read” to debug. Especially if it’s not a problem previously encountered. AI is not creative. And not all work product can or ever will be reductive.
They don't read (especially not the textbook), but they also can't write coherent sentences (I don't know if that's cause or effect). They are functionally illiterate. My wife teaches at the high school level, and she says students have been taught learned helplessness. They expect to be given the answers rather than find them because that's how the K-12 system treated them in order to be sure they passed the assessment exams.
As a marketing executive for 25 years I have a far different opinion. Also I never wanted to be in sales but from hiring and managing sales guys I can state unequivocally they are a breed apart. Salespeople are born not made. And I’ll second the take above that marketing managers either produce tangible results or get cut. Well some progress upwards per Peter Principle but if they don’t do well as BDM or EVP they don’t stick around long.
I’ll add one more thing. The ability to read comprehensively and write well also helps one learn to speak coherently.
That vibes with me.
Do young people say 'vibes' any more? I seem to hear more about 'energy' and 'energy levels.' Also: 'My truth.' 'Healing journey.' And 'Best life.'
Kids, literacy will help you stand out from the competition if there’s still an economy in the future…
Perhaps this presidential election will serve as an object lesson--one way or another. It may show that "vibes" are not enough. Or it may show that the cool kids in middle school will have a free ride through life, so why bother to read the book if you can deliver word salad. Kamala been working on that second theory. We shall see.
Don’t mind me I’m just garnering vibes
RCOCEAN II has won the thread!
Young people don't read any longer because their entire world is videos. Look at a younger person today and their faces are in their phones. Or tablets, possibly their computers. Everyone is a 'creator' now and what they're creating are images and videos, not words, pages, books.
The written word will not die out. But it is being largely ignored these days.
Someday they'll discover, or rediscover books and reading. They'll find it's not as much of a dopamine rush, but that it does stimulate parts of the brain TikTok and Instagram, and more photos of people showing you where they are at some random moment in time, cannot reach.
I like that, "the vision of professional life". Totally disconnected from reality. I suppose, though, that reading skills are not so important when one is working in retail or food service.
People here talk about vibes have never heard of fast fourier transform. What no Beach boys reference?
Anymore? People have never read. A large percentage know how to now but it's probably a consistent small percentage of people who do it.
Exactly right. Reading has always been a minority taste, even among those who present as intellectual (I'm looking at us, librarians and professors).
"the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed."
I suppose it is worth noting that the idiots working for the NYT have come to the point of writing articles about inane Apple advertisements. All the news that's fit to print. But are actresses now called actors? And her pronoun is "they"? I suppose he's right, he's clearly illiterate, and he has a job as a writer.
Reading is a solitary act. People at this point in history don't like to feel solitary.
Book groups or read-aloud sessions aren't popular now, but chat forums and MMORPGs and video views are. The internet has created pockets of community, such as Althouse's little wooden world.
The linked Bama Rush article was very interesting. While I'm confident that the writer, Tressie Cottom, and I are planetary systems apart on political and cultural issues, her article was restrained and remarkably well-written coming from a leftie black woman on the Chapel Hill faculty. The Bama Rush thing is certainly a vibes thing, and is a clear reaction to the current leftie vibe to "haphazardly reach for the diversity hammer in [their] progressive tool kit".
The key educational issue today that cannot be excused is that nobody is being taught how to nor required to.... think.
- Krumhorn
Red Norvo and Lionel Hampton did very well with the vibes.
Sgt. Oddball https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm6yYvKbPt4
You could try reading the thread, Howie, before commenting.
In the FWIW department (h/t Paul Harvey), the query in Google search "is vibe still used by young people?" responds under Ai Overview:
Yes, "vibe" is still used by young people:
Common slang term
According to a survey by the New York Post, 48% of 18–26-year-olds use the word "vibes" to describe how a place feels.
Popular in Arkansas
According to KATV, "vibe" was the most popular slang term in Arkansas for 2022.
Darn, ya beat me to it!
"They'll find it's not as much of a dopamine rush..."
I don't know how much of a rush you can get, watching videos of females sitting in their cars, bitching about their lives.
But that's just me.
"And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes."
Human progress requires that humans create, invent, suppose, propose and impose that which has not come before. Would AI have invented the automobile, refrigeration or open-heart surgery?
On the other hand ... "AI. I have seen many patients that experience chest pain for some weeks or months and then die. Autopsies show that their coronary arteries are often blocked. How can I help these patients?"
AI: Before they die, anesthetize the patient and using sterile procedures, expose the heart and look carefully at the patient's coronary arteries. If any appear blocked, open the artery, remove the blockage and close the artery. Close the chest. Oh! I almost forgot; we must first invent a way to oxygenate the patient's blood because on your way to the patient's heart you will be opening the patient's chest rendering the lungs useless. Let me know how it works.
Perhaps you should practice on some animals first."
did not Israel put pagers on vibes? how did that turn out?
Listening to MJQ right now. Not offended.
"In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed."
My vibe is all messed up because I can't figure out how many people haven't read the pitch.
Ramsey, just use him or her for your pronoun. I don't care, but 'they' keeps making re-read to see if I skipped over a person in the story.
"For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else." I am calling bullshit on this. I've heard the "a liberal degree is important for a functioning democracy" argument or "the college 'experience' is a crucial phase of young adult life" argument for years.
The numerate "numbers people" colleges turn out do well in business today, and the illiterates who know nothing major in communications and hopefully will learn something about how to write sentences and paragraphs. Presumably, others will be able to read the articles and abstracts or digests in their respective fields. That still doesn't leave much of a future for the humanities or novel-reading, but it's an age of information overload.
I don't see much of a disconnect between use of the word "vibe" in the 60s and now. Maybe young people back then believed that the moods and sensations and feelings that they had were different from those created by Madison Avenue to sell products. Today, a more cynical age thinks otherwise.
I originally said: ""Their" could also be plural, but after Cisco invested a fortune in ads with their spokeswoman Ellen Page and found they had Elliot Page on their hands, nobody's taking any chances with pronouns." But now I see that Bella Ramsey (who wasn't who I thought she was) does indeed identify as a they/them.
I feel a name change vibe coming. Stay tuned.
doctrev
Have you looked at marketing lately? If anything, the metrics are too well-defined: if you're not constantly driving engagement upwards, your job isn't secure Engagement is eyeballs, not sales. Or any kind of measurable profit. Why just today I got another "Contribute to me through ActBlue!" ad on facebook. With no party ID of course. But all of us here - unfortunately not everyone- knows ActBlue is a liberal demoncRAT activist organization. I have yet to see a targeted as for a candidate I would sup[port. And lately- to see any posts from the Republican elected officials I follow- I have to go to their feeds directly. Almost like they're being shadow banned or something... And I agree that salespeople are different, but they are made, not born that way. Anyone can be trained to be an acceptable salesperson. Retail does it all the time. Just follow the script. The people who sell the most? They follow their own script. As a part timer my sales per hour in appliances for a big box were routinely in the top 10- in the district. And also in the top 10 in total sales. Sometimes #1- as a part timer. Had a fellow associate tell me one time- "If I said to customers what you said- they'd slap me." Key #1 is- you have to approach the customers. And remember it's a game. I even told the customers that. I would tell them when they said "I'm just looking." that no, they weren't Either they need a new appliance- and my job was to help them find the right one here and sell it them, or they wanted a new appliance, and my job was to get them to say first "Yes" to themselves then "Yes" to me. Honesty works.
"And remember it's a game. I even told the customers that. I would tell them when they said "I'm just looking." that no, they weren't Either they need a new appliance- and my job was to help them find the right one here and sell it them, or they wanted a new appliance, and my job was to get them to say first "Yes" to themselves then "Yes" to me. Honesty works."
That approach wouldn't work with me. If someone tried it, I'd leave the store and not come back. When I say "I'm just looking", I'm not lying. If I have questions or I'm ready to consider a purchase, I know how to ask for help.
I understand that not everybody is like that, but still...
Mason G, I've spent the past 40 years selling. 22 years selling capital machinery (a small sale was under $100m) and since the 90s selling myself as a changeover wizard.
I absolutely guarantee that the approach will work with you. Every single time. There's 100 ways to do it and many salespeople can't judge correctly which version to use on you. But when they do get it correct and can execute it properly, there is no way you are getting out with your wallet intact. I don't care who you are, what you think, how resistant you think you are.
There are not that many people that are really, really, good at it. The ones who are are invincible.
My job as a salesman is to help you get what you want. Even when you don't think you want it.
"You can get everything in life you want if you just help enough other people get what they want." Zig Ziglar.
Zig became a multimillionaire selling pots and pans retail. Door to door and at house parties. Then became even wealthier telling people how he did it.
John Henry
Students won’t read Crime and Punishment today because it doesn’t have any characters who “represent” them.
"I absolutely guarantee that the approach will work with you."
You're free to believe whatever you like.
Students won’t read Crime and Punishment today because it doesn’t have any characters who “represent” them.
As someone who has read both Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, I find Dostoyevski both histrionic and long winded. Gogol is mostly boring. I am not a fan of Russian literature except for Tolstoy.
I am currently reading a very long, sometimes tedious French novel (Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo) and find it far preferable to Russian literature.
I think one has to be depressed to read most Russian lit. Of course, our current students are too depressed to read anything.
Althouse is supporting a guy who doesn't read to be leader of the free world.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/americas-first-post-text-president/549794/
I didn't know who Bella Ramsey is, so I checked her Wikipedia entry. I stopped after the second sentence: "THEY are known for . . ."
Of course they cannot because, thanks to the teacher unions, curriculum now only consists of:
A) 2+2=5,
B)if you are a young girl you need to take suppressants and cut your breasts off,
C) "All Jews must die!"
Kids cannot read, but they can chant "From the River to the Sea, Hamas for me!"
Isn't the 'Atlantic' owned by Jeff Bezos wife?
It isn't enough to just know how to read. You also have to comprehend what you read. The Mutamans and Ingas and Gadflys can obviously read. They have an idea about who Hitler was. Their lack of comprehension leads them to believe that another person who they disagree with is "just like Hitler". The critical thinking skills that come with voracious reading are lacking. Pity.
Have worked in white-collar professional world for a long long time.
Have come to realize that probably half the high-earners don't work particularly hard, have a great deal of slack time, and didn't need a college degree to execute the work they actually are tasked to perform.
Have also learned that family connections and social-class backgrounds have huge impact on initial job opportunities, and on future career advancement. Ditto on financial compensation. No longer think we live in a meritocracy.
Now know many white-collar professionals who are deficient in their reading skills, certainly deficient in their writing skills, entirely rely on others to complete actual "work" component. Have worked with people who "float" through their workday, have reported to people who "float" through their senior-management responsibilities.
Have also worked with lawyers who are profoundly inept, arrogant, unfamiliar with laws and state statutes, who made substantial errors in their work-product.
Have work-experience overseeing work-related court-cases where circuit court judges are profoundly inept, arrogant, and unfamiliar with state statutes, who also made substantial errors in their rulings. Had one case where circuit court judge entirely ignored entire chapter of state statute law, to rule in favor of defendant in fraud case, noting that court ruling disregarded state statutes and legal incorporation documents.
No surprise, I’m getting a Trump vibe from reading the comments. He’s the vibemaster. A great many of us are not buying it.
There is another reason kids can not red... they have not been taught to read. Look at the dismal scores on math and reading from the educational system. The gap is specially apparent at the entry to college point. These are the kids told 1) A college degree is the only way to success - YOU must GO, and 2) YOU are the best of your class.
But when the best can not read at grade level who can blame them for not being confronted with their own lacking. So much easier, and non-threatening, to watch 30 second tic-tok videos.
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