Tag: The New York Times

I Have A Growing Number Of Books About The New York Times To Read

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I now have TWO tomes about The New York Times to read. I already have one, The Trust, while I’m waiting on the second, newer one, The Times to arrive in a few weeks from Amazon.

For all its problems, I really love The New York Times and I wish I could hang out with a few of them at some point in my life. All the times I’ve crossed paths with them they came across as really genuine, nice folks. Two of the times I had an opportunity to interact with Times folks, I was as giddy as a 50s bobby socker.

Anyway. Absolutely no one cares or listens to me. And if I ever manage to breakout with my DJ (novel) money and actually hang out with any New York Times people that way, it will all be very, very surreal.

I’m been a drunk crank loser for so long that any change in that particular situation that allow me to have drinks with New York Times people would be a rather dramatic change of fate.

Of Meeting The Publisher of The New York Times & Ageism In The Context of My Homage To Stieg Larsson

When It Comes to Fixing The Looming Problems of A.I., Ezra Klein is Full of Shit

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I finished reading Ezra Klein’s great book “Why We’re Polarized” with a lingering sense of being a little bit cheated. He was great at explaining WHY we’re polarized, but when it came to giving a rube like me any sort of solution as to what to do about that polarization there was nothing.

So I find myself listening to him on The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast and he did it AGAIN. He gave a really cogent description of the problems associated with the rise of AI, but when he was asked how AI companies might make money other than in advertising — he punted. He pivoted to the idea that somehow we should get the government to award huge prizes for technology development.

Does he really think that somehow, magically the government is going to subsidise the AI industry to the point that Federal prizes would be able to supplant the vast sums of money that would come from the path of least resistance that would be advertising?

I hate that. I hate the idea that a smug wealthy podcast liberal Klein can make all this money, get all this status by bitching and moaning about the problems associated with AI…and yet he refuses to come up with any actual solutions. The idea of government “prizes” instead of advertising is complete and total bullshit.

I turn to people like Klein for not just complaints, but solutions. Because I think ultimately Klein’s complaints-with-no-solutions will ultimately lead to the exact thing he doesn’t want to happen: a combination of competition and people using the experiences associated with social media will cause AI to be based on the concepts not of government prizes, but pure capitalism.

I Feel Your Pain, Catturd

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

While the earnest, well-meaning nature of MAGA “thought leader” Catturd enrages me, I saw a description of him that gave me pause for thought. I’m really self-conscious about my current loser lot in life and the way some smug Twitter liberals were describing Catturd could very well be pretty much applied to me.

And, I hate to admit it, in some ways at this specific moment Catturd is actually on a personal basis a lot better off than me. And, in fact, I suspect there’s at least one smug liberal out there who uses her encounter with me in Seoul many moons ago as something of a cocktail party joke.

I’m talking, of course, of Jennifer 8. Lee.

Many moons ago, back in Seoul, Lee came to Seoul to work on a book about fortune cookies. And while she was polite to my face, I think she and her friend Tomoko thought I was completely fucking bonkers — a total fucking loser. And, occasionally, I will see in my Webstats random poking around about my various write ups over the years of that event from my point of view.

I can just imagine how much glee she gets in talking about the crazy, loser expat she met in Seoul. Her friend Tomoko, who was working for the Asian Wall Street Journal at the time, I think, really, really did not think much of me. So much so, that to this day it kind of rattles my personal self-perception.

And, going forward, if I should manage to write the Great American Pop Thriller, I think I’m going to have to prepare myself things not to be as great and wonderful as I want them to be. Any inspection of my personal life over the last 20-odd years will leave Normal Smug Wealthy Liberal Elites aghast at what a fucking loser I’ve been.

But I can’t change how old I am and I can’t change the past. All I can do is just try to write a good a novel as I possibly can.

What’s The Matter With The New York Times

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve all but given up talking to my Traditionalist relatives about politics. They are really, really upset about the evils of the “media narrative” and anything that doesn’t fit THEIR media narrative is dismissed as “bogus.” One thing that they often raise is what they feel is the lack of objectivity on the part of the mainstream media.

This really upsets them a whole lot.

And I honestly don’t understand why they’re so upset or what, specifically, they want to change. If you give a lie (MAGA) equal value to reality (everything else) then you’re pretty much lying to the audience. Of course, they like the lie and they get really angry when anyone calls a spade a spade and a lie a lie.

Which brings us to The New York Times. I love The New York Times and all my occasional interactions with them have been pretty cool — other than Maggie Haberman who was really mean to me on Twitter. Anyway, the Times on an institutional level, despite being liberal leaning, always tries to square the circle by going out of its way to give some validity to the MAGA lie.

Given that our democracy is in something of a long term, structural crisis, such behavior does not help anyone — especially not the Old Gray Lady. Conservatives already want to burn the paper to the ground and they totally ignore the fact the paper struggles with being objective, to the point of doing a disservice to its readers.

This is yet another example of how totally fucked the United States is on a macro basis. We’re careening towards a very, very dark future of either autocracy or civil war.

A Fun-Interesting Event: Why Did The New York Times Retweet My Retweet?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I don’t think many people appricate how rarely anything of note happens in my life. I spend most of my time struggling with developing and writing four novels and, for the most part, I live in oblivion.

So, it doesn’t take much to rattle my cage or to make my day, for that matter. Something as small as someone from Brooklyn doing some sort of due diligence on me by spending an hour on this site is enough to make me sit up and take notice. I mean, what the what?

Anyway, today, there was, minding my own business when this happened:

The New York Times retweeted my retweet of their tweet.

My first reaction is, lulz, it was all very random. They just picked me out of what they saw on their TweetDeck and that’s it. And, in fact, that’s the most logical explanation. Not a big deal. Nothing to think about beyond that.

Then, because I have a VERY active imagination, I start to game out other scenarios.

Hopeful
Someone who works at the paper has followed me using a burner account and they were giving me a hat tip.

Paranoid
They’re going to use my rantings on this site for some sort of take down of me and I’m going to get “canceled.”

But I think I’m way overthinking this. I think it’s all a lulz. While I like to think I’m exceptionally interesting and colorful, the truth in this situation is probably pretty prosaic: they just wanted to re-up the tweet and used my retweet to do it.

Nothing more interesting than that.

We Need To Talk About Maggie Haberman


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The more I think about it, the less I care about Maggie Haberman and her closeness to Trump. Some of this comes from how pointless it all is — she’s member of the media elite. As such, any time some hayseed rube like me points out much of her reputation comes from TrumpWorld scoops netted through…uhh…access journalism, it’s just scoffed at by her fellow nattering nabobs of negativism as not understanding what journalism is.

One of the key issues in this meaningless media kerfuffle is how nebulous and vague it all is. Yes, Ms. Haberman is a good journalist who is well respected — and defended — by her peers. And, yet, it’s also self-evident that she’s close enough to TrumpWorld that the average person is within their rights to be a bit squeamish about it all. It’s like how if your best friend breaks up with their significant other, there may not be any hard and fast taboo about dating their ex, but you try to at least wait a little bit before jumping in the sack with them.

As such, Twitter people get angry about Ms. Haberman bringing down the latest morsel of TrumpWorld news and her Twitter liberal peers get VERY UPSET that anyone might not see such morsel as just another example of how great a reporter she is. So, it’s something of a stalemate.

So, I think I’m going to go back to cursing the bread and pondering if it’s going to be civil war or autocracy that we face between now and January 2025.

What MSM Can Learn From Nascent ‘Tik-Tok Journalism’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Absolutely no one listens to me. But I will suggest, in passing, that MSM should study the growing number of people doing journalism on Tik-Tok. Such journalism is a lot like TV journalism, but it’s a lot tighter because they have only a minute — though that may be expanded to three minutes soon.

I read exceptionally well-written articles from the New York Times and they’re just too long. Give me 300 words and a Tik-Tok-style video instead. Unless something radical is done to traditional journalism, it may fade away entirely. Such a “radical” thing might be to re-imagine what a news story is. You can convey a lot of information via a Tik-Tok video and if you have the imprimatur of the New York Times on such a video, it would be quite good.

But, again, lulz. No one listens to me.

Even if I’m right, I won’t get any credit for it.

Sorry Maggie Haberman, It’s Starting To Look Like Trump MIGHT Not Be The Political Genus You Cooed About


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Let me begin by saying I never fucking let anything go. Maggie Haberman was weirdly mean to me on Twitter out of the blue and it still smarts. So, she’s become something of a running gag in my content. Anyway, for those of you playing the home game, for about four years, people like The New York Times‘ Maggie Haberman have told us in hushed tones what a fucking political mastermind Trump is.

How things have changed.

Welp, as of right this second, I ain’t seeing it, Ms. Haberman.

I mean, if Internet crank me can think of six different ways RIGHT NOW whereby Trump could stay in office as long as he likes and that ding-dong can’t even figure out one, well, it looks like he was just a very lazy right guy at the right historical place.

Trump is a lot like Hitler in the sense that he simply didn’t really do anything other than use the existing rot in his country’s political system to get what he wanted. Hitler was notoriously lazy. And, if you just look around, you can tell that Trump is pretty lazy, too.

So, about selling your soul to House Trump for access — you got what you wanted, Ms. Haberman, but you will forever be the journalistic equivalent of Leni Riefenstahl…in a sense. What I mean by this is when History judges Trump, she is likely to judge YOU too.

And I’ll freely admit that Ms. Haberman is a far, far better journalist than me. But you’re supposed to have a least a thin veneer of conflict between yourself and the people you report on.

Regardless, I’m just an anonymous Internet crank. No one listens to me, and they probably shouldn’t.

People Keep Doing Due Diligence On Me


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Another person used the Internet Archive to poke around this Website. I don’t know if I should be flattered or alarmed. They seemed interested in my dystopian “Trump wins” scenarios and the novel I’m working on.

The only reason why it’s even matters is I’m an anonymous rando. There’s honestly no reason for anyone to care about me. So for someone to take the trouble to use the Internet Archive to look at this site anonymously is really crazy.

The last person to look around this site so aggressively I think was The New York Times‘ Jodi Kantor. I contacted her for the novel and I think she was curious who I was. It’s pretty apparent she swiped left on me, if you know what I mean.

Anyway. I really need to get back to my novel. I just hope a civil war or revolution doesn’t break out in the next few days. Keep it peaceful, folks.