"Is this blog actualizing Althouse in the way that her heart and soul are crying out to be actualized?"

Asked Ricardo, in the comments to a December 15, 2006 post of mine that asked, "What do you think is the single most important question about this blog?" — quoted in a December 16, 2006 post of mine, "How your mind looks on the web, part 2."

I found that this morning because in the context of writing the previous post — about Max Read's contention that the secret of blogging is logorrhea — I thought of the old slogan about blogging "How your mind looks on the web."  

I had thought the single most important question about this blog was "If Althouse is a liberal -- as she claims -- then why is she almost always picking on liberals and almost never on conservatives?" That's very interesting to me now, 17 years later, because it's still a live question. 

But Ricardo, the commenter, said:

"There are all kinds of things you can do to develop and retain [a blog] audience... but the single most important thing you can do is post regularly and never stop...."

"[The demand for content] is so insatiable that there is currently no real economic punishment for content overproduction. You will almost never lose money, followers, attention, or reach simply from posting too much. It’s this last part that is often most difficult for writers to accept.... Before they post, therefore, many writers mentally calculate: Is this post 'good enough,' or does it dilute the overall quality of my work, alienate my audience, etc.? But [WaPo's Matt] Yglesias profile’s very existence reminds us of an important rule of thumb for navigating the content economy in the 21st century: Under the present regime, there is no real downside risk to posting.... Even the most anodyne, mediocre writing fulfills the requirement of regularity. (What is the 'Wayne Gretzky' quote? 'You miss 100 percent of the audience conversion opportunities you don’t take'?)... What do the top text-based content-creation entrepreneurs of our time have in common? Logorrhea.... It’s easy to see why writers reared in the hothouse reputational marketplace of Twitter are desperate to avoid the shame of negative attention. But... people forget, or move on, or don’t really care.... Feeling shame that prevents you from doing or saying inappropriate things is maybe a useful way to navigate complex moral-social arrangements, but fearing shame that prevents you from adhering to the first commandment of blogging ('post frequently and regularly') is counterproductive. As Yglesias says, it's the best time there’s ever been to be somebody who can write something coherent quickly. Put things out. Let people yell at you. Write again the next day."

Writes Max Read in "Matt Yglesias and the secret of blogging/How to be a successful content entrepreneur" (Substack)(riffing on the WaPo profile of Yglesias).

Max Read doesn't mention artificial intelligence, but if his idea of successful blogging is right, then bloggers can set their blogs to automatically generate endless posts. And that's why he can't be right. But by his own terms, he doesn't need to be right. He just needs to load in more words words words. 

"Scientists have long theorized about a hypothetical 'most excruciating dinner party possible,' and now a potential breakthrough has been made: In October..."

"Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Donald Trump had dinner in Washington, D.C. NBC News confirmed the existence of the dinner, which neither Facebook nor the White House had announced," Max Read writes in "How Should You Feel About Mark Zuckerberg’s Dinner Date With Peter Thiel and Donald Trump?" (NY Magazine).

Not only is it normal for the CEO and a powerful board member of a major U.S. company to have dinner with the president, it’s normal for Zuckerberg to have dinner with right-wing pundits and conservative figures...

“It is unclear why the meeting was not made public or what Trump, Zuckerberg, and Thiel discussed,” NBC reports... So how should we feel? At best, I suppose, we should feel thankful that none of us had to be physically present as the trio chewed on well-done steak, Trump interjecting every so often to share his thoughts on Andrea Mitchell.

Hmm. I didn't expect the last 2 words to turn out to be "Andrea Mitchell." That surprised me. Did Trump tweet something about Andrea Mitchell just recently?

I wonder why the teaser "How Should You Feel About...?" worked on me. I'm not looking to be told how to feel. I guess I thought the article would be more manipulative and that would give me something to vocally resist. It didn't, and this post is what it is... a jumping off point for me to go look and see what Trump has tweeted recently!

I couldn't find anything about Andrea Mitchell in in Trump's Twitter feed. She was one of the debate moderators last night, but I don't think Trump said anything about the debate. So let me leave you with this tweet, which is tangentially related to Zuckerberg and Thiel:

During my visit yesterday to Austin, Texas, for the startup of the new Mac Pro, & the discussion of a new one $billion campus, also in Texas, I asked Tim Cook to see if he could get Apple involved in building 5G in the U.S. They have it all - Money, Technology, Vision & Cook!l

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 21, 2019

"Looking around lately, I am reminded less often of Gibson’s cyberpunk future than of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastical past, less of technology and cybernetics than of magic and apocalypse."

"The internet doesn’t seem to be turning us into sophisticated cyborgs so much as crude medieval peasants entranced by an ever-present realm of spirits and captive to distant autocratic landlords. What if we aren’t being accelerated into a cyberpunk future so much as thrown into some fantastical premodern past? In my own daily life, I already engage constantly with magical forces both sinister and benevolent. I scry through crystal my enemies’ movements from afar. (That is, I hate-follow people on Instagram.) I read stories about cursed symbols so powerful they render incommunicative anyone who gazes upon them. (That is, Unicode glyphs that crash your iPhone.) I refuse to write the names of mythical foes for fear of bidding them to my presence, the way proto-Germanic tribespeople used the euphemistic term brown for 'bear' to avoid summoning one. (That is, I intentionally obfuscate words like Gamergate when writing them on Twitter.) I perform superstitious rituals to win the approval of demons. (That is, well, daemons, the autonomous background programs on which modern computing is built.)... Stuck in a preliterate fugue, ruled by simonists and nepotists, captive to feudal lords, surrounded by magic and ritual — is it any wonder we turn to a teenage visionary [Greta Thunberg] to save us from the coming apocalypse?"

From "In 2029, the Internet Will Make Us Act Like Medieval Peasants" by Max Read (in New York Magazine).

Simonists, eh? Hint: They're in the 8th Circle of Hell. Looks like this:

Making fun of the "mancold" — it's sexist but it's okay because it's against men.

And a man is doing the fun-making, showing his alliance with women. It's Max Read in the "Style" section of NYT in "Have You Heard? This Guy Has a Cold":

“Men 10,000 percent are babies about getting sick,” one female friend told me recently. “It’s like no one has ever been sick before.” Everyone seems to agree: Men are drama queens about illness. When my girlfriend’s mother heard that I was looking into what she calls the Mancold, she insisted she be interviewed to provide cross-generational testimony to its existence. “We all roll our eyes when the Mancold comes calling,” she said. “All activities come to a halt, and, much like sports, there is a continuous update, sighing and groaning.” Under the name “Man Flu,” the phenomenon has entered the Oxford English Dictionary (“A cold or similar minor ailment as experienced by a man who is regarded as exaggerating the severity of the symptoms”), though all things considered I suggest the more clinical and less judgmental term “Masculine Flu Drama Syndrome.”

I'd never heard this idea expressed and, hearing it, I can't think of any experience with the phenomenon. And I don't relate to this style of comic writing. It feels like something from The New Yorker in the 1940s.

But I am going to check the assertion that "'Man Flu'... has entered the Oxford English Dictionary." I search the OED. Click to enlarge:



I search the language the NYT printed and found this, which is not the Oxford English Dictionary:



What is that thing? Here, the OED website explains:

The OED and the dictionaries in Oxford Dictionaries are themselves very different. While Oxford Dictionaries focuses on the current language and practical usage, the OED shows how words and meanings have changed over time.

From the Oxford Dictionaries FAQ:

OED: Once a word enters the OED, it is never removed so it has to merit its place. We consider a word for inclusion once we have gathered independent examples from a wide variety of sources and the word has demonstrated its longevity by being in use for a reasonable amount of time – ideally 10 years, but five is the minimum. We continuously monitor developments in the English language.

oxforddictionaries.com: The process for adding words to oxforddictionaries.com is similar to that of the OED, but the turnaround time can be much faster. We're particularly concerned with monitoring and adding high-profile new technical, lifestyle, and informal vocabulary derived from corpus evidence, and we are also very interested in new meanings of existing words as well as entirely new coinages.

I wonder what other playful sexist phrases oxforddictionaries.com presents for our delectation. But "man flu" is not an entry in the immensely venerated Oxford English Dictionary!

But let's look at the things that came up under "Widen search?" (at the bottom of the first image, of my OED search). These are both — it looks like 3, but one is a repetition — in a quotation that is offered as an example of how to use another word. First, under "flu":

2010 Church Times 19 Feb. 17/1 Think of the times when you have just had a filthy cold or ‘man flu’.

And, second, under "touch":

2014 Daily Tel. 19 Dec. (Sport section) 11/1 This week I returned from our final regatta of 2014..with a touch of man flu.

A phrase is very different from a word. When does a phrase get its own dictionary entry?  Lots of us may be putting the same 2 words together at a particular time, but when should that be treated as something worthy of an OED entry? As a test, I look up "me too." It's there. Going all the way back to 1745, when Lord Chesterfield wrote, "And me, too, sweet Jesus." I don't know what he was talking about when he wrote that. Nor do I know what Herman Melville meant in "Moby-Dick" when he wrote: "Me too; where's your girls?" (I don't think there are any females in "Moby-Dick," so I'm guessing the "girls" are whales. Ah, no!)