The Times’ list is completely fictional. Made up. Divorced from reality. The stated goal of the list is to find (and promote) books that Times editors want people to read, not books that are actually selling a lot. So, they make up ‘rules’ to appear consistent. When Harry Potter was selling like crazy, they invented a new list so that they could take JK Rowling’s books off the real list. When diet and other books started selling a lot, they made up a new ghetto (miscellaneous) for those books. When books started selling in places like Walmart (thus driving the snootiness factor down) the Times penalized sales in chain outlets. And books like the Bible are banished because they’re not current enough.

Carefully curated so as not to have dreck like harry potter or diet books on it.
2013-02-14: Aww, how inconvenient. NYT makes up story, gets owned by pervasive data logging in the car.

After a negative experience several years ago with Top Gear, a popular automotive show, where they pretended that our car ran out of energy and had to be pushed back to the garage, we always carefully data log media drives. While the vast majority of journalists are honest, some believe the facts shouldn’t get in the way of a salacious story. In the case of Top Gear, they had literally written the script before they even received the car (we happened to find a copy of the script on a table while the car was being “tested”). Our car never even had a chance. The logs show again that our Model S never had a chance with John Broder. In the case with Top Gear, their legal defense was that they never actually said it broke down, they just implied that it could and then filmed themselves pushing what viewers did not realize was a perfectly functional car. In Mr. Broder’s case, he simply did not accurately capture what happened and worked very hard to force our car to stop running.

2013-09-12: NYT got trolled by Putin. Syria op-ed by Putin, publication date 9/11. Masterful pr.

RECENT events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.

2014-03-19: NYT fails at economics. The rag of record apparently slept through economics class.

most states have limits on direct sales by auto manufacturers. These rules are meant to ensure competition, so that buyers can shop around for discounts from independent dealers, and to protect car dealers from being undercut by automakers.

2016-03-21: NYT middlebrows Terrrrists

To summarize, if you see something on someone’s computer screen that fits the description below, the person with the computer could be an ISIS terrorist!
It looks like “a line of gibberish across the screen.”
It’s “a bunch of lines, like lines of code.”
There’s “no image.”
There’s “no Internet.”

2020-06-26: nyt delenda est

This morning, like many others, I woke up to the terrible news that Scott Alexander—the man I call “the greatest Scott A. of the Internet”—has deleted SlateStarCodex in its entirety. The reason, Scott explains, is that the New York Times was planning to run an article about SSC. Even though the article was going to be positive, NYT decided that by policy, it would need to include Scott’s real surname (Alexander is his middle name). Scott felt that revealing his name to the world would endanger himself and his psychiatry patients. Taking down his entire blog was the only recourse that he saw

2021-02-21: NYT is middlebrow. The reason the NYT is so smug, and yet also consistently wrong about everything, is because it is middlebrow.

The NYT has 7.5M subscribers, mostly progressives in the 90-99% range. These people feel very smart, and they are in fact smarter than 90% of the population. So there’s no point bemoaning the fact that the NYT is not about to tell it’s readers that, “Actually, we provide middlebrow news analysis, and if you want brilliant inspired analysis you need to read blogs like SlateStarCodex.”

Yes, the NYT story is awful in all the ways that are currently being discussed by its critics, but the fundamental problem is inescapable. Any time a powerful middlebrow entity (which wrongly thinks it’s highbrow) evaluates an actual highbrow entity, you will end up with a mixture of resentment and incomprehension. This case is no different. It’s just how things work.

2022-10-24: NYT pretends to do corrections, but only on things that do not matter.

if you’re willing to correct the spelling of 1 vowel in somebody’s middle name or the location of a statue of a rambunctious horse, you should be willing to correct the erroneous statement, “Researchers find that female-named hurricanes kill 2x as many people as similar male-named hurricanes because some people underestimate them,” or various erroneous economic and education statistics.

For Brooks or Kristof to admit to a non-trivial error, as you suggest they do, would be for their admissions to immediately become high-profile fodder for their critics. And not just then, but forever more — a link to the admission, a quote of it, will be repeated at any occasion when a club to use against their credibility is wanted. But more to the point, such a club will work. It will work because people strongly recall that someone was proven wrong about something and especially they recall when someone admitted to it and, finally, they weight that information very heavily when evaluating credibility.

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