salon vs. slate vs. atlantic

Yeah, I'm a Hipster. You Should Thank Me For It.

thanks chump

Breaking Bad: You're Watching It Wrong.

Calcium: Why You Don't Need It

Forget Mars: Why We Need a Base on the Sun

Killed By Chemical Weapons: Not as Bad as It Sounds

Does Thanksgiving Dinner Really Need Turkey?

Why Jimmy Falon is a Genius

The Eagles: America's Greatest Band

Slate has resisted any kind of sane layout for more than ten years now, why change.

But I don't think this Tetris.0 design is any worse than the others. Kinda wish all of these sites had a little Wayback Design button that would just turn everything into a reverse-chron text list of articles. Although now I guess you'd have to wade through way more bs to find what you're looking for.

Oh well, I don't really go to Slate anymore, so the fuck do I care. As long as Hang Up And Listen comes out on Monday afternoons and Political Gabfest on friday morning, Slate can continue not figuring out how to design theirs own website.

It's not Tetris, they've tumblr-ized their homepage.

the worst thing about the redesign is how prominently it sticks those "from around the web" links that fool you into clicking them... such a sleazy practice and every news site does it these days it seems

Dunno, just went over there on my laptop, got the urge to let the two middle boxes at the top fall down the whitespace underneath and watch the Hipster article, Yglesias piece, and sponsored content go *poof* at the bottom.

New Slate page should pivot and add Korobeiniki.mid as background browsing music.

content aside I would say the manner in which Salon runs their Twitter feed is by far the most irritating out of these three

Classic Salon-in-2013 pitch

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/27/the_dangerous_transphobia_of_roald_dahls_matilda/

actually laughed out loud at the last line of that.

well with this

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/the-mcrib-enjoy-your-symptom/281413/

starting here

“Pork” is a generous term, since the McRib has traditionally been fashioned from otherwise unmarketable pig parts like tripe, heart, and stomach, material that is not only cheap but also easier to mold and bind into a coherent, predetermined shape. McDonald’s accurately lists the patty’s primary ingredient as “boneless pork,” although even that’s a fairly strong euphemism. Presumably few of the restaurant’s patrons would line up for a Pressed McTripe.

Despite its abhorrence, the McRib bears remarkable similarity to another, more widely accepted McDonald’s product, the Chicken McNugget.

but end up here

Sometimes the things we believe aren’t out there in plain view, but hidden away inside. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan gives the name objet a to the thing that elicits desire. In French the phrase means “object other” (the a stands for autre). For Lacan, our behaviors themselves may be knowable, but the causes of those behaviors aren’t always so. Objet a is not the object of desire (the thing we desire), but the thing that causes the desire to come into being (the cause of a desire for that thing). The philosopher Slavoj Žižek sometimes calls objet a the stain or defect in the world that motivates a belief or action.

… i didn't expect it to…

oh, that's why, it's ian bogost

lol i enjoyed it. good read.

what do you think of ib j.?

i think he hasn't had any very good molecular gastronomy or he wouldn't confuse it for a cheeto.

on the other hand the article has a great punchline.

i don't know, he seems like yet another huckster/hustler, but i do recall glancing through one of his things and not being turned off

i like him. he seems like he's into cool things.

That was good, the kind of thing I miss since I started wasting too much time on forums and not enough reading essays.

Paged through most of his author archive too. This hit home -- http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/hyperemployment-or-the-exhausting-work-of-the-technology-user/281149/

Ian Bogost is not a huckster.

well, i was just thinking of the typical mode for anyone working in media now - just find it gross and tiring and insubstantial.

on the other hand, apparently he is big on object-oriented ontology, which is worthy of suspicion for charlatanism

http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia17/parrhesia17_brown.pdf

thanks for posting that!

“OOO” seems to be relatively popular at the moment. But obscurantism usually gleans the sort of popularity that
does not last. Despite the present popularity of “OOO” the conceptual weakness, the scholarly irresponsibility,
and the rhetorical desperation of Realist Magic offer ample evidence that it is not aging well. Academic theory ATHAN BROWN
will shortly try out a new flavor of the month—and the sooner the better, I suppose. It could not be more
tasteless.

burn.

oops bad copy/paste but you get the idea.

"OOO"ps

that article is actually a really great attack on obscurantism that doesn't seem at the same time to be dismissive of complexity or difficulty. a nice balancing act.

I did a quick google search. Nathan Brown, the author of the OOO takedown, was in the Bryant- and Harman-edited Speculative Turn. Ian Bogost thanks Brown in his acknowledgements to Alien Phenomenology. Brown has given at least two symposium talks (with Morton and Bryant and Bogost variously present), one on Meillassoux, a self-described speculative materialist (under the spec. realism/OOO umbrella), and the other on a subject I forgot after I clicked away (feel free to google it yourself). Morton also references certain of Brown's anti-correlationist (OOO/spec. realism) arguments, and Brown was at UC Davis at the same time as Morton, and in the same department.

So it's cool if you want to be skeptical of OOO or disagree with it on particular terms, but it's weird to cite a guy so closely associated with OOO as a way of attempting to dismiss it as unmitigated bullshit. It sounds like Nathan Brown was very much caught up in what he calls the new flavor of the month, and in spite of his involvement, for some reason he's misrepresenting Tim Morton's writings in a bungling way, writing about OOO as if it's exclusively dealing with material objects, or that the objects in OOO are exclusively material. Not that Morton doesn't like to talk about material objects! But it's an unfair way to pigeonhole a guy who's incredibly prolific and detail and learned (whether you agree with him or not).

Brown's thing seems more that he quibbles with certain ideas about finitude, which Morton's OOO and Meillassoux's spec. materialism both definitely deal with.

Aside from OOO, Bogost has other sincere, non-huckstery interests. He usually seems like the opposite of a huckster - he's not the guy selling something, but the guy saying, "Don't buy that." "Don't buy into MOOCs. Here's why." "Gamification is bad. Here's why." You can disagree with him generally or specifically, but I don't think it's fair to characterize him as a huckster. Ian Bogost likes video games and video games are cool. He's sincere. He's not, like, winning scads of friends and influence because he's a marginal OOO guy.

I'm also tired of college-educated people shitting on college and grad school, which is some of what I think Nathan Brown is doing by calling OOO the flavor of the month; OOO seems to be something that's popular with a handful of grad students, and fewer undergrads, and that makes it a thing to scorn, because it's trendy among the students you want to have relations with, but can't, because you're an ugly, chubby beardo. Although people might be disdainful of the things they thought when they were 23, it takes a hell of a lot of obliviousness to your privilege to be disdainful and dismissive of the things you learned in college or grad school. Where does that leave the rest of us? Do you think we're better off for not having gone to college? For not having gone to grad school? Are the things we learn in college just skin we shed? I've had a few conversations about college and grad school with credential students recently, and the way they feel about college... the way they feel about what they've learned... I don't know. I don't think they'll ever repudiate that. They'll never say lolcollege. Some of them would literally cry a little to hear someone be so dismissive of their education.

That's only on topic by a hair, but it's been on my mind, and it's something Brown's attitude reminded me of.

if something -is- intellectually fashionable, and its fashionableness seems to be unduly responsible for serious intellectual defects it has, then how is it anti-education, or anti-academia, to call it what (you think) it is? just the opposite, it would seem, if you care about the intellectual virtues higher education is supposed to be about.

But I sympathize with "gross and tiring and insubstantial," but re the New Yellow Press, ilx is in the belly of the beast, isn't it? Like, it must be hard for someone with high journalistic standards to hang around here. I've come to think that consistently good journalism, from any one publication, is too much to ask for. There isn't a newspaper, magazine, or journal that won't give me at least 50% of "gross and tiring and insubstantial." They also give me "pre-written article frame," "research courtesy of the interns," "wholesale recapitulation of other sources," "shitty understanding of statistics," "couldn't quote accurately to save their lives," "lifestyle porn dressed up as highbrow journalism," "letting other people's quotes justify my questionable or outright offensive opinion," "massive point-missing," "audience pandering," and a lot more.

xp

I don't think the point that intellectual fashionableness has been unduly responsible for OOO's defects has been well-made, and I'm not sure if the article, coming from a seemingly current or former spec. realist person who has associated somewhat closely with the people he's criticizing, can really be talking about serious intellectual defects rather than about particulars. I wonder about the motivations for Brown writing that article in the tone he did, given his background and associations.

And I was talking about a general attitude that I've seen expressed many times on ilx and which I think was the motivation behind some of that article. He doesn't need to say anything about its fashionableness to criticize any aspect of OOO. I don't care if anyone wants to criticize OOO. I care that college and grad students are looked down upon by college-educated people, and wonder how that must look to someone whose life is being changed by college. Intellectual standards are a different matter. Higher education itself, as it's practiced in the U.S., is a different matter.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/holidays/2013/11/thanksgivukkah_is_bad_for_jews_and_bad_for_america.html

which is worse for jews - thanksgivukkah or intermarriage?

lol

that's the stupidest article ever, as it even admits, this is the first time it's happened in 125 years (and i'm guessing it won't happen again for at least a few decades), how is that going to inextricably interweave religion and thanksgiving

it won't happen again for like 70,000 years

i actually enjoyed reading that article, ban me

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/28/what_happened_to_thanksgiving_tv_partner/

I like that piece. The new classics will be yours and mine, but not ours.

all of these publications have been extremely disappointing in the long run

i like to read the atlantic

i'm sure there is good stuff in there somewhere, but i can't get over their shitty click bait trolling enough to want to dig for the good stuff, if they still do it

salon is actually pretty good these days, would rank it way way way ahead of the other two.

Do they do investigative stuff or is it opinion or ?

yeah they're absolutely killing it

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/06/brian_is_returning_to_family_guy/
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/04/the_top_10_oral_sex_scenes/
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/09/the_10_rules_of_homeland_story_telling/

salon the worst of the 3 - pretty much only good for hate-reading in 2013

yeah they publish a lot of dreck too but in terms of political columnists/reporters i think they're way ahead of slate -- alex pareene, natasha lennard, etc are all great.

pareene is far from the worst thing at salon but even he isn't doing any original reporting, just snark + salon in-house political style + sprinkle the word privilege liberally throughout

some of the best hate-reads i've ever had have been on salon

i will always come back to this one http://www.salon.com/2011/02/02/my_fake_facebook_profile/

sites like these 3 are basically why I use RSS feeds. There's the occasional thing which will interest me, but if I had to actually go to the sites to check out the content I would never read anything by them.

yeah they really don't do a lot of investigative stuff (none at all that i can remember for years tbh) but i do prefer them to slate's toxic mix of reader-baiting "this is why i'm glad the beatles broke up" articles and hilariously inane 'in-depth' pieces (from today: "did i ruin my third-grade classmate's life when i told her the truth about santa? a slate investigation...")

ok then i'm ok not reading it -- that is all basically bs as far as i'm concerned. people who need to produce words (in order to eat?) but aren't interested in doing the work to have something worth saying. it's like being stuck in a conversation with a verbose person who won't stop talking about themselves and also gets paid by the minute.
generally i pretty much only want to read investigative journalism. no personal shit, no opinion, absolutely no trolling.

i realize that there is always opinion in one form or another, but i mean Opinion as Opinion