Excrubulent , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

So… I only clicked on this because the title was so convoluted I wanted to see what kind of situation made sense of it.

This single headline has five layers of linguistic recursion. You have to hold all five in your head in order to make any sense of it, and they’ve hidden even more actors within the folds of each clause.

Just on the first attempt to read it, there is:

1. A woman
2. Who is married to a critic
3. Who
4. Who was the president of Harvard
5. Business Insider
6. reported on the critic (1)
7. A review was conducted on Business Insider (5)'s report (6)
8. The review (7) did not cause Business Insider (5) to retract the report (6)

Is that right? The first paragraph says it’s actually a woman who is married to a critic of the ex-president of Harvard, but it’s still a confusing mess. Why are all these details headline worthy?

I’ve tried reading the article but it just keeps on piling on the actors, and every sentence has a similarly obfuscatory construction, and if you get deep enough in you find the review (7) was conducted by yet another party that Business Insider (5) won’t disclose.

What was the content of that report? Where can I find it? Why should anyone care about this? The author doesn’t seem interested in these basic questions of the story. It reads like middle school gossip, and is about as gripping.

This is someone who wants to hide that they don’t have much to actually say, if I had to guess. If the facts of the case were something they wanted to explain clearly, then they could do that. If this is an actual attempt to convey information then this person should not be a journalist.

I smelled bullshit and as I dug into the article, that smell only got worse. If anyone actually knows what’s going on here I am still vaguely curious, but not enough to wade through all this.