Annoying New York Times articles

[Sporting]

We're getting more and more bike lanes here every day.

[diggedy derek]

Well timed news today that the centre of Birmingham (a goddamn big area maybe 3-4 km across) is set to become car free in the coming years

[delicatemoth]

Who is the Bad Art Friend?

Spat between writer acquaintances escalates to court and an article in the New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/m...-v-larson.html

[ad hoc]

That is a really fascinating piece. Feel like it should be in Books really.

[caja-dglh]

Well timed news today that the centre of Birmingham (a goddamn big area maybe 3-4 km across) is set to become car free in the coming years

Birmingham's transformation long term ideology on the interaction of foot traffic and car traffic is quite fascinating, remembering how it used to be designed so you could walk the City without crossing a road (less certain about not getting mugged in an underpass).

[ursus arctos]

That is a really fascinating piece. Feel like it should be in Books really.

It is fascinating, yet I find Larson's defence completely unconvincing.

Short story writing seems to be relatively rife with such incidents (as the article's reference to the Cat Person kerfuffle evidences).

[Heliotrope]

After a while I just stopped reading it because I hated everyone involved.

[ursus arctos]

A very reasonable position

Though one might miss some of the most telling evidence against Larson

[ad hoc]

After a while I just stopped reading it because I hated everyone involved.

I think that is fair. The premise of the short story itself sounded really good I have to say, even though its writer sounds like a vile person

[San Bernardhinault]

So, I don't want to subscribe to the NYT just to Hate Read it, otherwise that would mean that they've won: creating irritating but shareable content as a way of generating money. Are there workarounds like the FT C&P The Headline one?

[ursus arctos]

I just emailed it to you.

[Heliotrope]

Oh, I admit I skimmed through the rest and saw the part about the gossipy Grubstreeters. On the other hand, I first heard about this story on Twitter, and there's a lot of tweets about the relentless promotion of the donation.

[Incandenza]

Apparently most people think that Dorland comes off the worst? I thought Larson was the more unlikable person, but Dorland kicked off everything. Emailing someone because they didn't like your Facebook post? That's a big yikes.

I had to laugh at this tweet:

https://twitter.com/Lallypb/status/1445771808033030158

[ad hoc]

Dorland comes across as insecure and needy, which are not particularly attractive qualities, but not nasty. Larson comes across as pretty unpleasant.

[ursus arctos]

Same

[Incandenza]

This seems representative of the takes that I saw that put Dorland as the worst party.

https://mobile.twitter.com/rgay/status/1445438763329540103

While I can see that POV, and she is apparently the one that went to the NYT and pitched her story (or so says Celeste Ng, one of Larson's friends), she was ultimately right about Larson. Larson plagiarized the letter, knew she did, and tried to make changes to the story so it wasn't obvious, and then lied about that later.

[WOM]

Dorland comes across as insecure and needy, which are not particularly attractive qualities, but not nasty. Larson comes across as pretty unpleasant.

Same, too. And the googling of 'kidney' and 'author's name' months later...she was just looking to be aggrieved at that point.

[ad hoc]

This is a great piece that Inca linked on FB

https://idiotscontinue.substack.com/...l-intelligence

[Incandenza]

This essay by Heather Havrilesky (who writes ask Polly) which is meant to be a wry and truthful look at marriage, but instead seems just like a "why my husband is the most annoying person in the world" story:

When encountering my husband, Bill, in our shared habitat, I sometimes experience him as a tangled hill of dirty laundry. “Who left this here?” I ask myself, and then the laundry gets up to fetch itself a cup of coffee.

This is not an illusion; it’s clarity. Until Bill has enough coffee, he lies in a jumble on the couch, listening to the coffee maker, waiting for it to usher him from the land of the undead. He is exactly the same as a heap of laundry: smelly, inert, almost sentient but not quite.

Other times I experience Bill as a very handsome professor, a leader among men, a visionary who has big ideas about the future of science education in America. This is clarity.

And then our dashing hero begins to hold forth on “the learning sciences” — how I hate that term! — and he quickly wilts before my eyes into a cursed academic, a cross between a lonely nerd speaking some archaic language only five other people on earth understand and a haunted ice cream man, circling his truck through the neighborhood in the dead of winter, searching for children. I see Bill with a scorching clarity that pains me.

This is why surviving a marriage requires turning down the volume on your spouse so you can barely hear what they’re saying. You must do this not only so you don’t overdose on the same stultifying words and phrases within the first year, but also so your spouse’s various grunts and sneezes and snorts and throat clearings don’t serve as a magic flute that causes you to wander out the front door and into the wilderness, never to return.

Albert Burneko at Defector:

It’s about here, less than a quarter of the way through this terrible, ridiculous piece of writing, that I started thinking about exactly how profoundly my wife would have to have wronged me, how galactically and intractably miserable in my marriage I would have to be, before I could even consider doing this to her—taking to the pages of The New York Times to savage everything about her and tell the world that our marriage exists by the grace of my mercifully deigning to forget all of what I’ve just detailed at length to the largest print readership in the anglophone world, to indict her as a parent and spouse before all the world; to belittle her passions and air out her unconscious habits; to write and publish that she is “not a good learner.” And I started thinking about how, if I even had it in me to do this to the poor sucker who stood in front of their family and promised to love me and care for me for the rest of their life, it would not be my forgiveness and tolerance of them that deserved honorable mention in The New York Times.

The original essay got A REACTION on Twitter, mostly from people going "yikes," which lead to reactions like "if you think Havrilesky was mean to her husband, then your wife is probably thinking the same things about you, and the cycle continues.

It's an except from an upcoming book of hers, so no doubt there's more of a full picture in that and not just a rant about her spouse.

[Ginger Yellow]

https://twitter.com/hollykmichels/status/1493398987474276352

[Lang Spoon]

Kill them all.

[Incandenza]

https://twitter.com/hollykmichels/status/1493398987474276352

I'm perhaps not the best person for this outrage--a 2500 square foot house for $1.45 million would be a steal where I live.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Is a 2500 square house something a single person buys?

[Hot Pepsi]

I’m alone with a dog in about 1950 sqft. It’s too big but anything smaller wouldn’t be much cheaper around here.

But I didn’t pay anywhere near a million for it. I don’t live in major city.

[ad hoc]

Is a 2500 square house something a single person buys?

Christ that place is roughly 240 m²

I've just moved into a flat that is 40 m²