Trend pieces are the go-to format for all the NYT’s attempts to chronicle the ever-shifting worlds of fashion and genteel society. They are the bread and butter of the Styles section, and the essence of why people hate the New York Times. When we look at trend pieces, we penetrate into the vacuous, long-winded, pseudo-intellectual Heart of Darkness. Except instead of finding Mr. Kurtz impaling Africans’ heads on stakes, we will find a pudgy middle-aged man who listens to Paul McCartney, shops at Abercombie & Fitch, and is pathologically jealous of anyone he considers a “hipster.” That is who writes NYT trend pieces. I don’t know them, but I can tell from their writing. I know how they think. If you wish to see the world through their eyes, just follow these simple steps.
Social Q’s columnist Philip Galanes doesn’t suffer from an inability to dispense competent advice. Every week it’s pretty much the same: Someone writes in asking whether they are morally obligated to fly to Australia for their best friend’s nephew’s wedding, or whether it is acceptable to poison their neighbor’s dog, and Galanes offers a response most of us would consider pretty reasonable. The problem lies in the fact that Galanes wishes to do more with his column inches than issue basic life strategies to lunatics who lack the faintest vestiges of common sense. No, Galenes wants to stand out. He wants entertain us with his sparkling wit. Philip Galanes wants to be clever.
But, being clever is hard! What are you supposed to do — go through life making note of the many absurdities and subtle ironies of social interaction, then articulate them in unexpectedly revealing turns of phrase? Who can do that?? The man isn’t Jane Austen! And fortunately, there is a simpler route to cleverness, one that any scribe can easily follow by watching celebrity news shows and listening to the routines of mid-level standup comics: references. Yes, by using cultural references, any writer can cultivate a unique literary persona, while showing he has his finger on the pulse of the Youth Generation. This is the path Philip Galanes has chosen. So, like the lobotomized love-child of Jackie Harvey and Neil Hamburger, he reels from paragraph to paragraph, indiscriminately strewing allusions to celebrities, politicians and hit television shows in his path.
I had oft noticed that Galanes’ references — like Bill Clinton’s sweaty jogging shorts, like Elaine Benes’ discarded Today Sponges, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ blood-spattered heroin needles (or something) — were not very fresh. But, just how behind the times is he? And is he getting better as he goes along — catching up a little? To find out, I undertook an analysis of the data. I singled out the references from Galanes’ ten most recent Social Q’s columns, and then from ten randomly selected 2008 columns. Next, I determined the “age” of the reference (calculated as the number of years since the phenomenon under discussion could have been considered fresh and timely). I used this data to find the average age of a Galanes reference, in the past few months and in 2008.
The resulting analysis will be something of a slog for all of us. But it will be a valuable reference for future scrutiny of Galanes. And if you read the whole thing, you may experience the not-entirely-unpleasant sensation that your mind has been cast adrift on a gently undulating sea of non-sequitors. Warning: Don’t try to read all the linked Social Q’s columns in one sitting!
And so it is with the most recent column. In this personal essay, Nicole Hardy tells us what it’s like to be a 35-year-old Mormon virgin. Fascinating… lurid… like a Judd Apatow movie, combined with that one reality TV show about how crazy Mormons are! I can’t wait to learn more about the Mormon faith, so that hopefully I can let go of my simplistic stereotypes about it. What have you got for me?
“Of all the places I felt sure I’d never go, Planned Parenthood topped the list. Because, you know, they perform abortions and give condoms to kids, or so I’d been warned.” Okay, never mind.
As the story opens, Hardy magnanimously deigns to make use of PP’s low-cost, community-subsidized health services. She finds herself “in its waiting room next to a teenage girl, who was clearly perplexed by the intake form and likely bound for an uncomfortable, humiliating four minutes in the back of a borrowed Chevy Chevelle.” Teenagers are so stupid, what with being confused by bureaucratic paperwork! Not like the writer, who, as we will learn, spent 15 years figuring out that putting off sex for marriage often results in neither. Also, for all she knows, this teenage girl is about to have hours of mutually pleasurable sex with her adoring boyfriend on a bearskin rug. It’s like, I know you’re jealous, but wishing painful intercourse on a sexually empowered youth is Not A Good Look.
“But what did I know?” What, indeed. “I was a 35-year-old virgin.” You don’t say! How come? “I was not frigid, fearful or socially inept.” Well, you sound a little fearful, what with that crack about “uncomfortable and humiliating.” “I was not overweight or unattractive.” Pics, plz. “Didn’t suffer from halitosis or social anxiety disorder.” I was not celibate like a nun/I was not celibate just for fun/ I was not crippled in my bed/I was not crazy in the head/I was not smelly like a goat/ I was not fat with junk-food bloat/I would have, could have gotten laid!/ I would have, but the church forbade. That’s a poem I wrote.
"Virgin" (original art by Eli Steele!)
The true reason, as the intelligent reader may have surmised (because it was in the headline) is that “I was a practicing Mormon, and Mormons ‘wait’ until marriage.” The result was an epic wait. “It felt as if celibacy was stunting my growth; it wasn’t just sex I lacked but relationships with men entirely…. I felt trapped in adolescence.” That sounds awful. I think I know what she should do, though. She should get a makeover and go on a wacky, booze-fueled quest to get her cherry popped.*
*Ew, but that’s what the movie people would call it… Pop My Cherry, starring (probably) Katherine Heigl.
Instead, “my first act of open rebellion was to go see ‘Brokeback Mountain’… with a pair of lesbian friends. I was not ready to have an alcoholic beverage or a cup of coffee, to lie with a man or smoke a cigarette. But I could watch a movie, even if that movie was an obvious attack on the sanctity of hetero marriage.” Damn you, Hollywood! Stop attacking the sanctity of hetero marriage by occasionally acknowledging that gay people exist! You’re perverting people’s morals and tempting them to drink coffee!
“While I am also straight and believe in God, one thing became clear that day: I could empathize with those gay cowboys.” I got news for ya, honey: Every straight woman can emphathize with those gay cowboys. The blond guy, the brunet guy, both at once, other gay cowboys who wander by and decide to join in, whatever. So strongly can I emphathize with them, I would like to be pressed in between them, to feel what it’s truly like to be a gay cowboy. Just a big testosterone-fueled sandwich of clandestine lust, musky sweat, and mutual identification. I would do that for you, gay community. Because I care about CIVIL RIGHTS.
Hardy goes on to appropriate the characters’ experience. “I knew what it was to be sodomized in a tent fundamentally bound to an ill-fitting life, to be the object of pity and judgment, to feel I had no choice but to be the thing that made me ‘other.'” Also like the characters, she risks being beaten up by rednecks and dragged behind a pickup truck if caught in bed with a man. Curse our intolerant, heterophobic society!
Wacky rom-com antics seem likely to ensue in next paragraph, in which she pursues “stage 2 of my rebellion” by going to a sex shop with her lesbian friends. The scene isn’t narrated in enough detail to make anyone laugh, though. If she wanted me to LOL, she should have made up a part where like, she runs into her boss while waving around a gigantic black dildo. Or maybe her chihuahau bites open a tube of strawberry-scented lube, and it squirts all over her silk scarf, and the clerk is like “since you damaged that, you have to buy it,” and then the next day she’s at Mormon church, and the lube falls out of her purse & into the collection plate… then an old lady sitting next to her says something incongruously risqué… this movie just writes itself!
She tries dating Mormon men and regular men, but gets nowhere. Finally, she has a has a conversation with some douchebag that reveals what she’s doing wrong. After getting her to admit that she has her own career and money & stuff, this dude concludes she’s “too independent” and that “If you have all the things we’re supposed to provide, we have nothing to give you.”
She regards this as a moment of epiphany, but it is hard to see why. If all the men in one’s social circle were seeking out young, passive, helpless, mindlessly compliant women as life partners, one would think it would be the sort of thing one would notice. Nonetheless, “I tried for 15 years not to lose hope.” It’s not clear whether the 15 years happened before or after the conversation with the douchey guy. There’s some stuff about “the Gospel” that I sorta skimmed over. Then eventually, she did lose hope.
“Perhaps the failure was mine — I’m sure many church members see it that way. I was too weak to endure.” Or, perhaps the failure was that of the Mormon church, for demonizing homosexuality and female sexual desire, judging women’s worth based solely on their reproductive output, and telling people they will burn in hell for all eternity if they don’t follow a set of arbitrary rules of conduct? Nah, that’s too nitpicky. It’s probably all the author’s fault. What a slut!
“Oddly, my trip to Planned Parenthood provided much that the church had not in recent years. I was mystified by [the doctor’s] compassion.” Yes… that is odd. After all, it says right in their mission statement that “for more than 90 years, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has promoted a commonsense approach to women’s health and well-being, based on respect for each individual’s right to make informed, independent decisions about health, sex, and family planning,” so it’s hard to see how they could have dropped the ball in this one instance WAIT I THINK I’VE MIXED THINGS UP SOMEHOW.
The nice lady doctor touched her all compassionately, and she cried. The end, almost. There’s one more paragraph. So, is this going to be it, the thrilling conclusion, the sex scene? Will she finally live out her dream of ass-balling on a mountaintop with a Heath Ledger lookalike?
No. “I would have an IUD instead of children.” Congratulations on your spiky little bundle of joy! This isn’t a very good movie, after all.
I have been meaning to start this blog for some time. Seeing this piece of journalism gave me the impetus I needed to get started. This article encapsulates everything I ever found hate-able about the NYT in the first place. This article made me fall in hate all over again.
“Titans in Party Dresses” is a profile of a Johns Hopkins sophomore named Hadley Nagel, who comes from a rich and socially prominent family. She is a debutante. The worshipful prose devoted to her here makes me long for one of those stupid articles the Times does about freegan squatters living the fixed-gear lifestyle and making artisanal farm tools; at least those people have their own shit going on. The most noteworthy fact to emerge about Nagel is that she has a fascination with James Madison, and has registered as a Capitol Hill lobbyist to win him a national monument. George Gurley’s profile does not explore the reasons for this intellectual enthusiasm, but it does engage in one of the worst habits of bad NYT writing: assuming that banal actions become fascinating when performed by wealthy socialites. See if you can spot any others, though!
"Debutante"
Gurley informs us that Nagel is “the most swell” young lady in the land, because she is “a German countess, according to her mother, Susan Nagel, and also a direct descendant, through her father, Jon… of two signers of the Declaration of Independence.” Okay people, let me tell you something about being descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence. I am also a “direct descendant” of a Declaration of Independence signer (for reasons of personal anonymity, it won’t say which one it is, but that person’s initials are J.B.). No one cares, nor have they ever. I’ve never bothered mentioning it to anyone except my boyfriend, and he forgot about it until I reminded him of it on Gchat just now. It’s unfair, I now realize. Here I am, a potential swell, driving around in a 1996 Honda Civic and buying “manager’s special” items at the grocery store. I have some salsa I bought yesterday that is fermenting and attempting to turn itself into a sort of hard tomato cider. My “debutante ball” was an 8-ball! (of Olde English malt liquor) (not really, but you get the idea.)
“But Miss Nagel, 19, plays down her pedigree. ‘I mean, you still have to pay for your coffee at Starbucks,’ she said recently.” That is what I was just saying about the hard life of a Declaration-of-Independence-signer-descendant. People can’t recognize our blue blood just by gazing on our physiognomy. This quote makes Nagel sound insufferable at best, and possibly like a dangerous lunatic at worst, but I don’t think it’s her fault. Can you imagine the question the reporter must have asked her to elicit such a response?
Nagel’s accomplishments are “dizzying.” Some of them involve published writing, but also, “an expert shooter in trap, skeet and clay, she was a blue-ribbon winner of a small-bore rifle competition.” I wish the winners of small-bore rifle competitions received more press coverage; I bet there are some colorful characters there, possibly even more colorful than Nagel herself. “Miss Nagel had founded Model United Nations and history clubs, a travel Web site for teenagers, playintraffic.com, and another site, americansformadison.org.” “Founding” a website is kinda up there with founding a bank account or erecting a piece of Ikea furniture, but she does have some unique accomplishments.
“According to Susan Nagel [that’s H-Nag’s mom]… many, many, many people have thought Serena van der Woodsen, a character on the CW network show ‘Gossip Girl,’ is based on Miss Nagel, minus the promiscuity and drugs.” Man, that sounds like a losing formula for a show. You’re not supposed to take out the promiscuity and drugs from someone’s life! If anything, you should add in more! Gossip Girl must be a show for Mormons or something. I’m glad I never watched it. This makes me wonder, though, why George Gurley has been wasting all this space talking about high school chess clubs and… wait, what really went on at that “small-bore rifle competition”?
Speaking of which, “Miss Nagel has… dated a cross section of interesting young men in New York and Europe, including a duke with a castle.” That reminds me of a book I once read; I think it was called Portrait of a Honky. Seriously though, do the young people of today still think it’s cool to hang out with titled nobility? I wouldn’t. I see the words “duke with a castle,” I hear “boring dork who’s never heard of the Butthole Surfers.”
“Currently a member of Phi Mu… she asked her distant cousin Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia to design a Phi Mu ring, the proceeds of which will benefit the Children’s Miracle Network.” How hideous do you think that ring is? I have this feeling that anything designed by a “Prince Dimitri” would be way over the top and gaudy. Maybe that’s just a harmful stereotype about Yugoslavian royalty.
The next paragraph shows of Gurley’s eye for detail and provides us with a window into her world. “To unwind, Miss Nagel says she watches ‘crappy’ reality shows on her flat screen in the suite she shares with three roommates. She enjoys listening to the Jay-Z song ‘Empire State of Mind’ when she’s homesick.”
It turns out she likes the song because it evokes the hustle-bustle of NYC life. “Indeed. Miss Nagel doesn’t go to frat parties. Good-looking nerds are her type, she said. Her biggest vice seems to be iced cappuccinos with cinnamon sprinkled on top and two packets of Splenda. ‘She is not blowing up, like a lot of kids in college, because of beer,’ her mother said.” This paragraph has sort of a “word soup” aspect that I enjoy. It’s relaxing. Cappucinos… cinnamon… vices… beer… the horrors of weight gain… something about blowing good-looking nerds… “Shorty let me tell you bout my only vice/ It has to do with blowing lots of hot nerds, and it ain’t nothin’ nice.” That’s a rap I wrote. It is called “Johns Hopkins State of Mind.”
There’s a part about how she believes Napoleon is to blame for the war of 1812, and then: “Wearing a Ralph Lauren blazer, cashmere sweater, jeans and Ferragamo loafers, she was having a lunch of crab chowder and chicken pot pie at a restaurant in Saks Fifth Avenue, with her mother (also in Ralph Lauren blazer). Both women’s nails were painted pink.” I have a feeling George Gurley thinks I’m more ravenous for scraps of information about the Glamorous High Life than I actually am. To be fair though, if I were a shoeless preteen growing up in a Appalachian mining shack in the 1930’s, I would find a paragraph like the above utterly riveting.
The article concludes with Gurley asking his subject the question that has been on the tip of his tongue the whole time: “‘Can you dance?’ ‘I have rhythm, thank you.'” It’s a strange moment, combining fawning obsequious, condescension, and wacky randomness in a manner rarely seen. I kind of feel sorry for Hadley Nagel now.
I Hate the New York Times 