NYT = Sucks

A few weekends ago, we noticed that the NYT Sunday Mag was devoted (not in a really thematic way, but just, like, in a perfect storm confluence of forces (forces = editors' ages, ages rising, gray hair, etc) the mag was devoted to middle age/aging/old people. We hate old people. After last year's Shamu marriage article dominated the most emailed list, we figured something was up. But, like, lots of people are married: our friends (who are young) are married. But the two most emailed stories this morning on our personalized Google page were well you can see above.

That second-most emailed article, like, 1) totally ripped off Slate's "I'm fiftysomething, and I'm joining Facebook" article; 2) seems to make the ethical/pathetic (in the Greek root sort of way) appeal to the reader, but the reader can't help but notice that when the author's daughter says

“wayyy creepy,” it said. “why did you make one!”

she's, like, totally right; the author's daughter is; 3) besides creepy, pathetic.


We didn't even read the fucking menopause one. Jesus Christ. Periods, child birth, menopause. You'd think women want a fucking medal the way they always write/talk/advertise about these things. Men don't talk about nocturnal emissions, dodging baby mamas, and erectile dysfunction all the fucking time. (Well, the last one is out of mens' hands because of, like, spam; and men don't talk about problems getting it up, anyway.)

Even if the news coverage is good, from this point onward we refuse to read the NYT and their middle-aged, creepy, trend-piece-dominated, preoccupied-with-aging, perceived-as-liberal ass.

Well, we get our ideas from everywhere

[All the {well-educated, taste-making, media-controlling-parents-having, only-people-you-seem-to-hear-about} kids are doin' it.]






We were watching 30 Rock the other day, and there was this episode where Lemon (Tina Fey) totally owned Josh (generic Jewish funnyman) during the latter's contract negotiation. Besides making him do the worm, Lemon makes Josh list off ways that she's better than him. One of them, which made me laugh, was when he yelled out "You read the newspaper!" And she says, "Yeah, it's true." Who reads the newspaper anymore? Masochists we are, we picked up the Saturday NYT the other day to try to fill in correctly one or two pieces of the crossword. Of course, we had a hard time finding the crossword, for a paradoxical reason--the paper was so thin that we thought we lost a section. What did it have, about 15 pages total? That's a goddamn shame. Thinking about it, we decided we'd have been better served giving the dollar to the homeless, or, like, putting it toward a latte at Starbucks.




[Oops. Can't figure out how to insert more pictures]




Add that to the Times Select on-line wall, and you're left with a double-forked plan to kill readership (maybe?). You can't read everything online, but when you actually buy the paper you're inevitably disappointed because it's, like, a ten-minute read. If we wanted ten-minute reads, we'd totally read FP Passport and The Ag. Oh, what's that? Yeah, we do.



[See above.]



FP Passport collects various World News stories together in an intelligent fashion. For instance, we learned yesterday that we share a birthday with the Six-Days War. Interesting! Besides which, we were alerted that the G8 meetings are going to be a shitstorm, and that the next Cold War is on the horizon.





The Ag collects news and presents it in the cutesy Harper's Week in Review and Findings style. This style is awesome. NYT take note: what the people want isn't reliable reporting (over which point print can hardly claim superiority over Internets), they want conceptually interesting presentations or even re-presentations of the news. If the past is doomed to repeat itself, and every presentation is already a re-presentation anyway, etc., etc., then why not hire some of the Harper's editors and have them turn your publication into something interesting-on-the-page-to-look-at. Your both heart-run-dry-from-bleeding-so-profusely liberal rags anyway.

OK, Brilliant piece on Iraq Here

[And... boom goes the dynamite.]

This article sums up perfectly the situation in the Middle East, which situation qua Western media coverage constitutes in our minds daily.

Locals are calling for an investigation into excessive force or outright corruption by military or political officials on one of the 15 sides of the various conflicts, although the implicated party has categorically denied wrongdoing, just like they always do, without fail, every time this happens, which is daily, it seems.

And in Afghanistan, the Taliban.

Iranian government Condemns 300

Re: our previous post, we have to say that the Iranian government might just be right.