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

Washington Times reporting that the epidemic began with 50 Cent's "In Da Club" with the infamous "so come gimme a hug" line, calling for a ban on rap music

hugging is a nice tender thing to do - i still hug all my friends

you never hug me

i wonder why newspapers are going bankrupt

looooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

next time i see u max i will hug u ;)

hug foods

hug life

the NY Times is quoting a parenting columnist for authority

smothered in hugs

is this what new york is really like or something

the nicest city on earth!

*hug*

this has me dreaming of a world where people are just kind and sweet to each other *sniffle*

huggest ban

hug u

huggest hug

hughug hug

hugging is a nice tender thing to do - i still hug all my friends

You always hug the one you love/ the one you shouldn't hug at all

what other fine articles has Sarah Kershaw brought us?

WOW PEOPLE BUY STUFF FROM SKYMALL EVEN THO THE COUNTRY IS BROKE
DADS ARE THE NEW MOMS
DRUNKOREXIA

now link to the respective ilx threads about the articles

Drunkorexia is not an official medical term.

THANK YOUS

being a nyt trend writer is pretty much the best job in the world as far as i can tell

it's like writing for the onion

I don't drink to offset the calories in my alcohol, I refrain from eating to make myself a cheaper drunk. This is called "creative problem solving" and is rewarded in any other walk of life. Certainly at my job, where they would probably lock any given assistant in a storage closet and wall it up, if they thought it would save money and the work would still get done.

haaa the today show is on the case http://gawker.com/5271997/today-investigates-high-school-hug-madness

Gah, I meant, I don't starve myself to offset the calories in my alcohol. Oh fuck it, you know what I meant.

i'm scared of an Al Queida attack now. remember the summer before 2001, everyone was freaking out about SHARKS. maybe it's

THE SUMMER OF THE HUG.

DADS ARE THE NEW MOMS

plz plz plz plz confirm that this is not a childbirth article

you'll have to click and find out

fwiw, i def know a dude who is a drunkorexic---like, "no I didn't eat lunch today, but I am going to have a million beers" and is very upfront about it. it's weird?

ok lol in the sidebar on the DRUNKOREXIA article:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/05/13/theater/Critics600.jpg

Find the one that's different!

DRUNKOREXIA HAS MANY FORMS

I am starting to think Geoffrey Rush has a "silly facial prosthetic" clause in his contract, similar to Samuel L. Jackson's "fucked-up hair" clause.

dont know if its been mentioned enough that this was a front-page story for the new york times

Va. School's No-Contact Rule Is a Touchy Subject

Fairfax County middle school student Hal Beaulieu hopped up from his lunch table one day a few months ago, sat next to his girlfriend and slipped his arm around her shoulder. That landed him a trip to the school office.

Among his crimes: hugging.

Connecticut School Bans Physical Contact

East Shore M.S. Outlaws "High-Fives," "Hugging" And Horseplay Of Any Kind; Violators May Face Expulsion
MILFORD, Conn. (CBS) ―

A Connecticut middle school principal has laid down the law: You put your hands on someone -- anyone -- in any way, you're going to pay.

G-20 Gossip: No Touching, Please

According to video of the Obamas visit to Buckingham Place today, the First Lady briefly touched Queen Elizabeth on the back during a reception there for G-20 leaders, and that is, apparently, a huge social no-no. We just turned on SkyNews, which was airing a panel on the apparent faux pas. “You don’t touch the queen!” one red-face analyst insisted. “You don’t touch her!”

"Hugging. How ethnic."

― caek, Thursday, May 28, 2009 6:40 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

"what is this, the italian parliament?"

god help us all that this merits trend pieces

and i thought UK newspapers had the market cornered on dumbass moral panics

http://gentlepony.com/pics/nuclear-arms3_green.gif

(anything you can't accomplish with nuclear arms is obv kinda suspect)

http://www.photobasement.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/huglife.jpg

^^^^^^^ "know" the person with that, BTW

do you hug her?

nnnooooooooooo

The hipster bandanna and the green waist/fanny-pack take it from mostly lol to kinda sad.

A friend in response to the hug story:

"So this is what happens as the New York Times dies? The travel budget doesn't allow them to go and cover real stories, so the farthest they can go is Montvale, NJ?"

by 'know' i mean that she is an 'active member of the chicago cycling community, so we've maybe met'

i like the existence of this article. i've been noticing something with regard to hugs -- i generally like them a lot but i'm also a fan of knowing when you just don't have to.

Ha, this article totally made my morning, actually. My favorite bit is the mother's complaint:

“I hug people I’m close to. But now you’re hugging people you don’t even know. Hugging used to mean something.”

HUGGING USED TO MEAN SOMETHING

Yah gbx, I was hoping you meant "biblically", but it seemed unlikely, so...

bowtie guy is prob coolest guy on the planet
http://www.xtcian.com/RonJodiIan2VAWed(bl).jpg

slightly old for facebook doesn't seem to really matter anymore

That's her husband, isn't it?

xp alex (a few posts back) pretty much, yeah ... the whole thing reads like a hastily compiled list of reasons a few of the writer's friends quit facebook without any real point about generational differences, technological change, or interesting information

bowtie guy looks kinda familiar

I think bowtie guy is the author of the blog post.

actually - he looks like this douchey guy at my college who wore a suit every day to be "rebellious."

haha yeah okay see maybe this is my deeper issue: some woman gets an email from Heffernan asking why she quit Facebook -- she says oh, I joined cause my hip friend said it was awesome, but then the main application I liked got axed, someone called me old, my stepson got all Facebooked out, and eventually I was like screw it, I'll just play backgammon. this seems relatively normal and non-annoying to me, I guess; it seems like such a touchy bar for calling people out as annoying. I'm being way more annoying right now than that, just not in the Times.

since I'm being annoying I will add value with this actual screencap of "Alex"'s Facebook page and the REAL reason she quit:

http://emailsfromcrazypeople.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Q6umM-500x392.jpg

I just assumed it was David Samuels. Photo captioning sucks on that thing.

xp nabisco: the way you phrased it is far less annoying than the phrasing in the article ...

nabisco, this also might not be as big a deal if it weren't for the fact that the nyt has been fairly routinely making up fads lately and this fits into that pattern

xp - Alex - I doubt that's the douchey suit guy, he just looks like him.

Scrabulous didn't even disappear, it just became Lexulous instead (with the same app and stats even kept, as far as I can make out).

Oh, multipost.

You are right. David Samuels appears to have an eating disorder like his wife.

there were significant changes made when scrabulous became lexulous, at least for users in the USA.

Also the thing I think silly about this article is more things like

"Another friend, who didn’t want his name used, found that Facebook undermined his whole notion of online friendship. “It’s easy to think of your circle of ‘Friends’ as a coherent circle, clear and moated, when in fact the splay of overlap/network makes drip/action painting a better (visual) analogy.”"

OMG! Online friendships might not be quite like real ones! OMG I spend too much time online and it's full of ads and vapid!

Hello, 2001 called?

is the Bogus Trend Story thing really more prevalent at the Times, or does the Times just catch more public shit for them? (that's a serious non-rhetorical question.) like today the WSJ is getting it over an article about people cutting their own hair.

(I guess the Times's do tend to be more embarrassing, in our world, since they often have to do with trends of hipness or style)

wall street journal trend pieces tend to be WAY worse in my experience--i remember one from last winter about people who wear sneakers at the office--but i think they, uh, suffer from the subtle bigotry of low expectations

Probably because the Times is the most prominent "serious" paper in the country they get more shit about bogus trend stories ... the SF Chronicle definitely has its fair share ...

I do think it's getting more prevalent - and ilx isn't the only one noticing (http://www.slate.com/id/2225301/)

Whether the WSJ / other crappy newspapers do it more often than the Times doesn't particularly matter, and that certainly doesn't excuse the Times for doing it.

you get them in the UK, but they don't have this deadly serious capital-J journalism tone.

i think times just gets the most shit on ilx becuase its the only paper most of us read

and yeah the chron does it like crazy, but it also doesn't have a great reputation anymore. the nyt is still taken seriously, but if they don't put a lid on this stuff, it's gonna hurt their rep in the long term. this is the 2nd most read article on nyt.com.

this is the 2nd most read article on nyt.com.

You realize this is why they keep publishing them, right?

right, well if the nyt wants to aim for page hits above uh, fact-based articles, they can do a lot better than this

they're usually spottable insofar as their tone's just weaselly and anecdotal and question-filled, like "could these uncertain indicators and observations maybe suggest that possibly X? Bob Abernathy thinks so, though he admits that statistics are vague; here is an interesting story about some guy that does X and says all his friends do too"

(the Heffernan absolutely does that, but I've always felt like a magazine column is the main spot that's acceptable)

in the print copy, it's pretty obv that there's a difference between the magazine and the newspaper, but the website doesn't particularly highlight that difference. I mean, it says 'magazine' on top, but I imagine 50% of the people who read this don't even know what the nyt magazine refers to.

but I imagine 50% of the people who read this don't even know what the nyt magazine refers to.

You don't?

http://www.xtcian.com/RonJodiIan2VAWed(bl).jpg

The walls between realities must be getting thin, bowtie guy is clearly alt-world Greg Kinnear.

Ladies and gentlemen

In her debut column, Virginia Heffernan writes about a series that explores both coal-mining narratives and reality TV.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/mining-reality/

Welcome Back Virginia! A wonderful writer that truly understands the digital culture as well as the pop one, i followed 'Screens' & 'The Medium' , and was pleased to see your pic and news of this 'debut' column. Your voice has been missed in it's own space.

Perhaps the paywall went up so these people, including commenters, could be more readily isolated and contained.

this seems vaguely relevant here

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/lifestyle/the-other-side/william-duncan-state-school-bans-children-from-rolling-up-sleeves-on-jumpers/story-e6frfhk6-1226107452535

amazing picture with that story