This morning’s dumb lede comes to us from the New York Times. Reporting on Chrysler’s announcement of 13,000 job cuts, Micheline Maynard writes:
Every decade provides a new lesson for the American automobile industry.
In the 1980s, automakers underestimated their Japanese competitors, thinking they would never build anything but small cars. In the 1990s, the Americans focused too heavily on sport utility vehicles, only to see profits wiped out when buyers’ tastes shifted back to cars.
Now, this implies that SUV sales collapsed at the end of the 1990s, forcing domestic car companies to retrench going into the new decade. However, the SUV market collapsed around 2004-2005.
It’s a minor point, but when it’s the peg of the article you’re writing, maybe you should be a little more accurate.
(Note: now that Chrysler has helped drag down the Germany company that bought it, I have fewer issues about buying one.)
off my shelf. I’d picked it up around 4 years ago, but never started it up. It seemed like a charming premise: it’s an epistolary novel about a small, independent nation off the Carolina coast starts banning letters from the alphabet. As the weeks go by, more letters get banned and thus the characters have to become more inventive in their correspondence. You’ll note, for instance, that I managed to go through this entire post without using the third-to-last letter of the alphabet. I think.
. Or, of course, something by Dan Brown.
. I thought, “I have two Pamuk novels at home that I’ve never been able to get into, so it’s into the Eco Chamber with you, Orhan!”
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