Jamie Malanowski eviscerates a bogus trend story about recession strippers in yesterday's New York Post. Of the supposed "scores" of New York women who once held six-figure jobs and who have now turned to pole dancing, the paper identifies three. The cover model, it turns out, was not recently fired from Morgan Stanley, as the piece claims. She left on her own some years ago to do PR then acting and finally stripping. And she's writing a book about it. The second one was supposedly a real estate broker but has no Google trail. The third was a pastry chef. "One of those nubile, twenty-something, six figure-earning pastry chefs that were all over town before the crash, no doubt. I'd very much like to see the Post produce the other 38."

12:36 PM :: Comments (3)

Here's a new one for the self-censorship files. Yesterday's New York Times featured an entertaining, not-too-overreaching trend story about cauliflower ear as a badge of cool among ultimate fighters. This is the part that set my Spidey-sense tingling.

"It’s definitely part of the culture," said Dr. John H. Park, a physical therapist in Rockville, Md., who specializes in treating M.M.A. participants. "They say, 'Chicks dig that stuff because they know you’re a fighter.'"

A familiar chasm separates what women dig from what dudes imagine women dig. But for mixed martial arts, a combination of boxing, wrestling and jiu-jitsu that has found favor among young men, cauliflower ear has assumed a place alongside such evocative conditions as torn elbow ligaments in pitchers, knee tendinitis in marathon runners and torn anterior cruciate ligaments in female basketball players.

Clearly, the sentence following the quote is supposed to read, "A familiar chasm separates what chicks dig from what dudes imagine chicks dig." Changing it to "women" renders the sentence awkward if not pointless, especially when "dudes" is left in place. And indeed, reporter Michael Brick confirmed for me that he had initially written it that way. "But hey," he adds, "didn't somebody once say you should never call broads 'chicks'?"

So "chick" is one of those epithets that the Times will quote other people using, but will not use itself. That rule has applied at least since 1945, when the author of a profile of Shirley Temple wrote, "At 16, Miss Temple is a chic chick. (That's her language, not mine.)" (Incidentally, the next sentence is, "She is five feet two and she won't tell her weight, which is well distributed." Way to keep it classy.)

This makes "chick" less offensive than "nigga" or (as far as I can tell) "bitch," which can't be printed at all. But it's still touchy and not, in the Times' view, simply a female equivalent of "dude." Curiously, the paper has used the phrases "chick lit" and "chick flick" countless times, despite occasional grumblings.

On his blog this week, NYT Ombudsman Clark Hoyt publishes several letters chastising him for his mealy-mouthed defense of censorship in the "nuts" affair. You've heard most of the arguments from me before. Kim de Riel offers the most pithy rule of thumb: "If you can’t say what they said, don’t even say they said it. If it’s too important to ignore, it’s too important to censor." But Charles J. Smith makes a further point regarding the use of asterisks or dashes:

A basic principle of linguistics: if you have a word in mind and display some symbols to your audience so that the audience realizes what you meant to write, then you have communicated the word to them. Not actually printing the missing letters is a trick to give the illusion of civility, while allowing the “unprintable” language to be communicated just as clearly as if it were spelled out.

This fussy preservation of the appearance of civility amounts to hypocrisy.

Finally, here's a 1904 NYT headline, from the "more innocent times" department.

9:32 AM :: Comments (7)

Normally I wouldn't bother posting about yet another example of media self-censorship, even one as lame as the New York Times refusing to say the name of the blog Go Fug Yourself ("We only take fug from Norman Mailer," Abe Rosenthal might have said). But this article happens to be a kind of radosh.net perfect storm, seeing as how it's also a Sunday Styles trend story about books by bloggers. Here's the key graf:

One of the first literary agents to troll the Web for talent was Kate Lee, who in 2003 was an assistant at International Creative Management, the sprawling talent agency, looking for a way to make her name.

When she started contacting bloggers and talking to them about book deals, many were stunned that a real literary agent was interested in their midnight typings. Her roster was so rich with bloggers, including Matt Welch from Hit & Run and Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit, that the New Yorker profiled her in 2004. Two years from now, the magazine noted, “Books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon.”

Some of you (hi, mom) will recognize that New Yorker story as one of mine. And some of you (hi, um, me) will even recall that the tongue-in-cheek "cultural phenomenon" line was a set-up for this punchline: "You will probably read about it in the Sunday Times."

So, I was off by two years. And, yeah, the Times already ran this exact story three and a half years ago — but that was on a Wednesday.

[h/t: Susannah]

10:08 AM :: Comments (2)

From the AP obituary for Norman Mailer: "The book — noteworthy for Mailer's invention of the word "fug" as a substitute for the then-unacceptable four-letter original — was a best seller..."

Doesn't "then-unacceptable" imply "now-acceptable"? Because if so, why the fug won't the AP say what the word is?

It's frak, right?

Update. In the comments, abe asks, "Has there been a steady increase in what is acceptable to say in print? Or was there a time, perhaps hundreds of years ago, when words like 'fug' or its longer equivalent appeared in newspapers, etc.?"

I managed to dig up this amazing 1879 New York Times trend story [PDF] on the proliferation of "expletives in high and low life" (or, more precisely, on how a debate about said proliferation has taken over the letters pages of the London Telegraph -- in case you thought the "we're not writing about this distasteful story, we're just writing about how other people are writing about it" gimmick is a recent one). In it, the Times writer observes that,

In my boyish days filthy epithets were much more common than they are now, and a century ago the newspapers printed words which are considered indecent now even in a whisper. I have in my posession a Berrow's Worcestor Journal of a century and a half back, in which a bestial crime was described, in large letters, in a word now ony used by the filthiest and most profane swearer.

Sadly, the goatfucker leaves us to guess what that word might be. This article is a treat from top to bottom, so I won't spoil any more here, except to note that it includes a delightful example of how to describe an offensive word without actually using it: "I cannot mention the revolting originals for whose hideous adjectival force a compromise is offered in 'sanguinary,' 'bleeding,' or 'blooming.'"

[Previously]

12:23 PM :: Comments (5)

For some reason, I'm quoted in today's New York Observer article on trend stories (scroll down to second item). Toward the end of the piece, the meta-trend story I wrote for GQ eight years ago is cited. I think I may have mentioned it before.

2:32 PM :: Comments (1)

It's another dubious trend story, complete with forced coinages and vague data, and a reporter using his friends as sources. So why aren't I griping? Because it was written by a friend, and my family and I are the starring sources. Plus, this one is 100% true!

The story on The New Faitheists can be found on page 3 of this week's Brooklyn Paper [pdf], but for convenience, I've posted it after the jump too.

Continue reading "Defenders of the Faitheism" »

1:31 PM :: Comments (13)

Well, gosh. From a Gelf Magazine interview with New York Times Styles reporter Warren St. John:

GM: Lately, the Times has taken a lot of flak about bogus trend reporting. What’s your reaction to that? Do you think any of your articles would fall into that category?
WSJ: I definitely hope not. I keep by my side at all times the GQ article that Daniel Radosh wrote back in 1998 called the Trendspotting Generation. It’s a great dissection of trend stories. I personally pride myself on never—if I can help it—never writing a story I can’t back up. I’m very skeptical of trend stories when I read them. I’m even more skeptical of wading into a trend story and coming up with the data I need to satisfy myself that something is happening. Sometimes I think the flaw of a lot of trend stories is simply overstating what they found. Sometimes people can find things that are interesting that aren’t really trends. And that’s OK. It doesn’t have to be a trend to be interesting to write about. It might be less significant and warrant A1 play less. But sometimes it just a question of dialing back the significance of what you’re saying your findings mean.

4:21 PM :: Comments (3)

Slate readers curious about my history with trend stories can read this.

My own readers are pretty sick seeing that GQ story dredged up at every opportunity. But if you've memorized it, you no doubt got a kick out of seeing The New York Times this week hype "the rise of 'screenagers'", a trend story I traced back to 1965 — and it doesn't even get a new coinage this time.

As it happens, though, I once wrote a different article — a 1994 book review — that touches even more closely on the themes Shafer discusses today. I'd forgotten about it until now, but reading about the work habits of Generation Y reminded me that I'd once read about some very similar trend stories on the work habits of Generation X.

7:31 PM :: Comments (0)

In my 1998 essay on trendspotting (yes, I'm linking to it again; what of it?), I wrote: "How does a trend story come to be? At Time, insiders say, the custom is for writers and editors in New York to sketch trends at editorial meetings in their offices, then call on reporters in the field to document them. Sometimes the initial idea can be traced to a story in New York or The New York Times. Otherwise, editors extrapolate national trends from their own small world of other writers and editors. 'I'm surprised they haven't done a trend story on working late and sending out for Chinese food,' quips the former stringer, 'because everybody they know does this.'"

Now there's new evidence for this phenomenon in a remarkable investigation by Fishbowl LA, which uses Friendster to trace the names in a recent NYT Styles story. Bonus points to FishLA for dubbing Friendster "the craigslist of our generation." [via Fishbowl NY]

10:03 AM :: Comments (1)

While I was busy with other things a couple of weeks ago, the debut issue of the newly revamped mMode Magazine hit the stands, or would have, if it were sold on stands as opposed to being distributed free in cell phone stores and through the mail.

mMode Magazine, as some of you know, is the lifestyle publication of AT&T Wireless, and it's worth reading because, well, I'm the deputy editor. That's right, finally someone took up my longstanding offer to sell out -- and I couldn't be more pleased with how much I went for. The magazine isn't bad either, especially since it was essentially cobbled together from scratch by Chris Tennant and myself, though it is odd to think that with its 3.3 million circulation, it will probably be the most widely-read work I've ever done.

It's more impressive in print, but plenty of good stuff got repurposed for the poorly-designed Web site, including an exclusive Jinx Society adventure, my guide to the world's coolest vehicles, my introduction to moblogs, Marjorie Ingall's Confessions of a Mom on the Run, an original comic by Josh Neufeld, and Kevin Guilfoile's trend story on personalization.

I'll also say that other than the need to put in repeated references to AT&T products and services, Chris and I had pretty much free reign in creating our "faux edgy" editorial content -- the theme of the magazine is "mobility" in case you're wondering -- and I'm authentically proud of how most of it turned out. An exception is Tim Carvell's timeline of mMode through history, which was really funny when he wrote it and ended up, for various reasons, being kind of "eh."

And like it or not, issue two is in the works.

7:10 PM

Jack Shafer's flattering plug for my 1998 meta-satirical-investigation of trendspotting inspired me to dig out some material that got cut from the final version of that piece, but that deserves to be seen. I spent many hours in the fantastic Time Inc. library looking through back issues of Time, and I rewarded that institution's generosity with its resources by holding it up to ridicule. But not quite as much ridicule as I'd originally intended. Specifically, I ended up discarding a lengthy tangent about how poorly trend story predictions hold up over the long run, and, obversely, how contemporary trend writers must ignore the work of the predecessors in order to make their own points. Here are those missing passages:

Technology in particular feeds a fear of the future that trend journalism is always enthusiastic to address, despite its dismal track record. "Even the most moderate estimates of automation's progress show that millions of people will have to adjust to leisurely, 'nonfunctional' lives," predicted Time in 1965.

Even when accurate, forecasters frequently miss the point. Another 1965 Time article, "The Communications Explosion," raised the "frightening thought...that every man on earth will eventually have his own telephone number and will carry personal apparatus that will permit him to be called, even by people who have no idea where he may be." The truly frightening development that Time fumbled, of course, is that every man on earth will become rudely oblivious to his surroundings while yapping away on his apparatus in the middle of a busy sidewalk.

Delehanty believes that "technoromantic" and "technoapocalyptic" trend stories "rarely take into consideration the unpredictable human factor." Nor, for that matter, do many human-interest trend stories. A 1965 Time essay on "Today's Teen-Agers" avowed that "marijuana [is] out," "free sex [is] nowhere near at hand," and "the classic conflict between parents and children is letting up." Which times are a-changin'?

[snip]

Conceivably, a knowledge of past trends hobbles our ability to draw meaning from current ones—or to pat our backs about how far we've come. In a 1984 Time article on "The New Concern with Civility," Judith "Miss Manners" Martin laughed at how in 1978 her boss told her that "etiquette was dead." He must not have seen the 1978 Time cover on "America's New Manners." Come to think of it, would we today be quite so pleased about Ellen DeGeneres and Rupert Evrett if we recalled that Time first proclaimed, "homosexuality is the vogue" back in 1969?

Trend stories prophesy the past the same way they do the future: based entirely on what we believe about the present. When the author of Time's "Everybody's Hip" essay excoriates Woodstock '94 as "a triumph of salesmanship over spirit," he harkens back to the original Woodstock and its flock's "heartfelt rejection of the mainstream." Few would argue with him, but then few remember his magazine's early 1971 lament that youth culture had become "diluted by Woolworth hippies [and] limped through the past two years a paranoid, fragmented version of its former self" [emphasis mine]. The hipster who moaned, "The music was adulterated and repackaged and sold to us like hamburgers" was not talking about Woodstock '94, he was, in '71, referring to the now-sanctified Monterey Pop Festival.

Or read Esquire on do-me feminism a few years back. Susie Bright wonders, "What happened to the joyful '70s exploration of Our Bodies Ourselves? When did that take-off-your-top-and-smash-the-state feeling die?" Perhaps it was when college students told Time they felt "uneasy about their almost unlimited new sexual license" and some detected "a new puritanism." In other words, 1972. Boomer trend writers of the '90s commonly find themselves yearning for the solid values of their parents' day, but in 1964 Time saw that parents had "only the tattered remnants of a code." And between 1990 and 1997, Generation X changed from "a back to basics bunch that wishes life could be simpler" to one that said, "material things...are really important to me"; from a generation that grew up with "Reagan's message: problems can be shelved until later," to one for whom "the message of the [Reagan] Administration [was] do-it-yourself, no-one-is-going-to-look-out-for-me-but-me."

3:28 PM