quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

i was a fan of monsterpiece theater as a kid!

Nothing particularly bad about this, but "Relying on the centuries-old principle that white objects absorb less heat than dark ones" is the kind of sentence you get when you let an NYT culture critic write about science.

More of an adjunct to this thread but even so:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/opinion/30wasik.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

... (As Jody Rosen described it, from 'the department of half-baked conceits')

ah yes, i remember when white objects started absorbing less heat than dark ones back in the 1600s xp

Meanwhile, another destination beckons, a place that courses with all the raw ambition and creative energy that the hard times seem to have drained from New York. I am referring, of course, to the Internet

(jaw all over keyboard)

that's it, im moving to the internet

The rents are too high for me.

They changed that, but you do have to look at billboards all day.

gold in them thar internets

a coney island of the web

ugh i used to live in the internet but its been gentrified beyond recognition at this point

Blog posts in the age of mechanical reproduction

The author is a writer living in vles.com

facts are funny things

this fucking nick mcdonnell kid makes me reach for my revolver

and the fact that the time so blatantly sucks his dick just...sickens me.

what'd you expect from a publication responsible for stuff like this:

Alessandra Stanley...a prolific writer much admired by editors for the intellectual heft of her coverage of television..Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts.

Did anyone read the "Lives" thing in the back of the magazine this week, about the guy and his neighbors?

i did i did

lmao @ Alessandra Stanley
"The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work"

haha Mr. Que I am not even sure how to formulate my response to that piece

yeah me neither--usually i read like the first sentence of those things and then stop, but for some reason i pressed on

like did that guy expect the reader not to think he was sort of a dick before the part where he realized he was a dick and felt bad about it? or was he trying to encourage us to notice he was being a dick to prepare for his eventual shameful realization? are we supposed to feel good about him realizing he was sort of a dick, even though as far as I'm concerned he should have realized it way before and then not published an article about how he learned the important lesson not to be an asshole? and how do you write that without at all addressing any of the obvious things that problem contributed to your neighbor tension, like class stuff and city-versus-country stuff and sexual-orientation stuff? is it really possible to live next door to people and be the fussy meddling gay man from Manhattan and not be aware of the dynamics involved? (if so, is that a good thing?) so many questions.

the casualness of the whole "well, we couldnt live next door to them anymore, so we sold the house!!" was very

yeah but in some ways, i'm glad i read it. it seemed like a much better Lives column than normal, if only because it raised all those crazy questions that you mention? usually, if i read the whole thing i think "Why did I just waste three minutes of my life reading that."

on the other hand i was totally cheering on the German Shepard to attack the guy, and when he admitted he had never heard the swing set, i wanted to throttle him

ha, that's true, it definitely got more reaction out of me than anything back there in years. still, it seems wrong to give someone space in the back of the times magazine to talk about his important experience, as a presumably non-autistic grown man, of how not to get along with neighbors.

Thank u ILX for being (shockingly) an island of sanity. Someone I know is apparently friends with the steampunk/Victorian taxidermy people from last week, and was posting links on FB being all "CONGRATS TO CALUMERIA AND NICHOLAS CHATTAM-SMYTHE" or whatever.

the more I think about it, surely he was arranging the details in a self-deprecating way: he talks about moving their stuff off their own driveway, and finally flips out when they're making noise at one after a family wedding. I would like to think he's being self-aware there, but then I have trouble imagining a very self-aware person writing the thing in the first place.

almost like a throwback to 1970s style village voice confessional journalism (w/o the sexual TMI)

In her haste, she said, she looked up the dates for two big stories that Cronkite covered — the assassination of Martin Luther King and the moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon — and copied them incorrectly.

I hate to be that guy, but not knowing these two dates off the top of one's head kinda boggles my mind.

seriously

"intellectual heft" apparently does not include much heavy lifting

oh and if a freelancer handed in a piece w/errors like that?

The Cronkite episode suggests that a newsroom geared toward deadlines needs to find a much better way to deal with articles written with no certain publication date.

hmm you guys haven't figured out how to do this in your 150 years of publishing?

you guys weren't exactly trying to figure out how to twitter the Obituary

WALTERGATE

The Cronkite episode suggests that a newsroom geared toward deadlines needs to find a much better way to deal with articles written with no certain publication date.

I promise you that in ANY kind of publishing, if something doesn't have to get done RIGHT NOW, no one will look at it until it does. This is just business as usual.

NYT fail right guys

I hate to be that guy, but not knowing these two dates off the top of one's head kinda boggles my mind.

wait wait hold up now: not talking about Stanley here, but ... you two really have those exact dates as part of your store of instant top-of-head knowledge? really honestly? like to the point where you're surprised other people don't? I mean, not to hurt your mind or anything, but I totally don't. I'm pretty sure like 99.9% of people wouldn't have instant recall on those.

well maybe not 99.9%

can i admit something

the one way i remember the day MLK was shot?

Nope. Wouldn't know those dates if they came with an identifying tag on their collars.

(or the way i used to remember)

is via that song by that Irish band

they might if they recall the lyrics to "pride (in the name of love)" still, basic point taken.

xpost

the Neil Armstrong is just there--i'm not aware of a U2 song about him

Man why didn't U2 make a song about all the important events & their dates, 1967-199?

I mean, I can be pretty catty about having to make reprint cx to a book in which someone MISTAKENLY CORRECTED Michel Legrand's name to "Michael" and now I have to fix it, when I could have proof-read the goddamn thing for them in the first place. But dates...apart from 1492 and 9/11? No.

NEVER FORGET