The Art Of Saying Nothing (And Getting Paid To Do It)

There's something in the water at New York newsrooms that turns good writers with sharp minds into addle-brained, insta-historians enamored with striking cultural commentary gold.

At the Times, it's quick-witted scribes like Maureen Dowd and Alessandra Stanley who weave observations about Desperate Housewives into some elaborate discussion of a zeitgeist that is apparent only to them. While you are reading their columns, you get caught up in their arguments ("Yeah, Tom Cruise's latest appearance on Oprah totally did have something to do with Jeremiah Wright!"), but when you're done reading, whatever point they've made dissolves in the brain like cotton candy on the tongue.

The cover story in this week's New York typifies this overthought, overwrought style. It's a 5,000-word article about the comment section of a Brooklyn real-estate blog.

That's right. Someone got paid a lot of money to sift through the comments left on a blog.

The extra coats of varnish on the cheap plywood of the story just keep coming, too. In order to beef up his bonbon of an article, the author dabbles in a little literary criticism of the blog's most notorious poster:

"In spreading his dire message, he favors colorful curses like “asshat” and “fucktard” as well as the enthusiastic application of exclamation!!!! marks!!!!!!!!! and the twitchy overuse of childish acronyms like ROTFLMMFAO (i.e., rolling on the floor laughing my motherfucking ass off)."

Illuminating.

The article is meant to set up this poster as the id of Brooklyn's real estate market, which is teeteering on the precipice of total chaos, but when all is said and done, the article misses its mark. Instead of being an eye-opening think piece with a clever hook, like so much of NY journalism, it's a lot of pricey ink with nothing to say.