Interesting! I'd love to know why you were interviewed. The New Yorker used to be famous for its fact-checking, but no more. Last year, Jill Lapore wrote in the NY that two-thirds of ER visits among young people resulted from police violence. Really? I've been to emergency rooms. People crash motorcycles and skateboards and drop cinderblocks on their toes, but very few are beaten by police. That this made it past the editors shows how lost they are at the New Yorker. (The actual number is closer to .2%.)

One of my aha moments came a few years ago when Jia Tolentino wrote, in an article about incels (remember them? they were before murder hornets) that "a rich straight white man" will always "find ways to get laid." Huh? Her article was about a rich, straight white man who was so angry at being rejected by women that he killed someone.

Last year, in a typical throwaway, Bill McKibbon wrote in the New Yorker about his home state of Vermont: "As has been the case across the nation, the state’s population of color has been disproportionately hit." Follow his link and we see that non-whites died at LOWER rates than the overall population. They just make stuff up. (I wrote about this article in "Attitude or Climate in Vermont? The New Yorker Credits Folksiness over Science." A link is near my name above.)

Almost all of the press is bad, and in all the same ways, but I feel especially betrayed by the New Yorker, as it used to be a place of great writers—E.B. White, J.D. Salinger, John Hersey, Nabokov, John McPhee, thousands of them. Now it's Keeanga-Yahmahtta Taylor writing the word "racism" 21 times in an article about a virus.

Anthony Mir writes about what happened to media in a book called Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. The media after Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization. I did not post here initially for eyeballs, but I've had something to say about most of the publications people have expressed frustrations with here, so, if you're curious, you can scroll through the titles from the link above for your favorite target.

I'll post just one piece, about my wayward New Yorker. I touch on the low-pay-in-journalism problem in it: https://scareballoon.substack.com/p/plague-journal-july-2021-conformity-e98