{"id":2211,"date":"2008-08-05T06:31:16","date_gmt":"2008-08-05T10:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=2211"},"modified":"2008-08-20T21:23:18","modified_gmt":"2008-08-21T01:23:18","slug":"f-you-you-whining-f-8508","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/f-you-you-whining-f-8508","title":{"rendered":"F*** You, You Whining F***: 8\/5\/08"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why are newspapers falling to pieces? There’s a perfect storm of reasons, including the destruction of the diurnal newscycle, the obliteration of their local classified ad market by Craiglist and its ilk, and increases in paper and distribution costs.<\/p>\n

Then there’s the fact that they publish crappy, irrelevant opinion articles. Case in point: today’s Whining F***, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. A few weeks ago, Cohen wrote an Andy Rooneyesque rant about kids today and their crazy tattoos<\/a>. Today? He complains that Amazon is destroying The Book by trying to “digitize everything in sight” and make us all buy Kindles<\/a>.<\/p>\n

See, Amazon is “inadvertently thinking of ways to make the world worse for children and for the grown-ups who love them to pieces” by, um, offering people options for how they buy and read books (and not trying to end world hunger and\/or take Rush Limbaugh off the air: seriously). I support independent bookstores over chain stores; I love the serendipity factor of walking among the shelves of a well-stocked used bookstore.<\/p>\n

That said, I really love Amazon’s ability to find virtually any book that I’m looking for, and I love the Kindle’s ability to get me a book within moments of my ordering it, like it did last evening after I read a sample of Jimmy Breslin’s new book, The Good Rat<\/a>\"\".<\/p>\n

Here’s my favorite — by which I mean, “most befuddling” — passage from Mr. Cohen’s cranky rant<\/span> regular column, which was published in one of the largest newspapers in the country:<\/p>\n

I used to frequent one in New York — Books and Co., now closed — that recommended certain kinds of books. It led me to Joseph Roth, the great central European writer of the interwar period, and Thomas Bernhard, the eccentric Austrian who so hated his country he wouldn’t permit his plays to be staged there. I read all of Bernhard and all of Roth. What joy — although Bernhard, to tell the truth, was sometimes a bit of a slog.<\/p>\n

Can Amazon do anything like that? Does Kessel — “We wake up every day thinking about digital,” he once told the New York Times — even know who Roth was? Roth killed himself in Paris. At least he never knew that one day he might be digitized.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, while we weren’t looking, Amazon must have updated its store and removed all “you might be interested in” suggestions as well as the reader reviews that offer up just these sorts of associations. Or Richard Cohen is a Whining F***.<\/p>\n

Any suggestions for his next column topic?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why are newspapers falling to pieces? There’s a perfect storm of reasons, including the destruction of the diurnal newscycle, the obliteration of their local classified ad market by Craiglist and its ilk, and increases in paper and distribution costs. Then there’s the fact that they publish crappy, irrelevant opinion articles. Case in point: today’s Whining … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “F*** You, You Whining F***: 8\/5\/08”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[267,4],"tags":[127,249],"class_list":["post-2211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-f-you-you-whining-f","category-literature","tag-kindle","tag-richard-cohen"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-zF","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2147,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/unrequired-reading-july-25-2008","url_meta":{"origin":2211,"position":0},"title":"Unrequired Reading: July 25, 2008","author":"Gil","date":"July 25, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"That's the sound of the men, working on the link gang. . . I wasn't sure if this qualifies for another installment of F*** You, You Whining F***, because I think she's actually right. Still, a 20-year-old complaining that \"I'm leaving the NYC literary scene for Paris\" borders on Whining\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2279,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/f-you-you-whining-f-82008","url_meta":{"origin":2211,"position":1},"title":"F*** You, You Whining F***: 8\/20\/08","author":"Gil","date":"August 20, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Ann Patchett complains about going on book tours and having to SELL her book and her writer-persona to the public? F*** You, You Whining F***. By the way, if the Iowa Writers Workshop is serious about training writers, then it's idiotic not to have a seminar on promoting one's work.","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4325,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/f-you-you-whining-f-hipster-edition","url_meta":{"origin":2211,"position":2},"title":"F*** You, You Whining F***: Hipster Edition","author":"Gil","date":"August 12, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Hipsters with Condo Shame: \"I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll just have to pull down the brim on my Pabst Blue Ribbon trucker cap hat as I go in and out every day.\"","rel":"","context":"In "F*** You, You Whining F***"","block_context":{"text":"F*** You, You Whining F***","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/f-you-you-whining-f"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4423,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/f-you-you-aimlessly-whining-f-facebook-disillusionment-edition","url_meta":{"origin":2211,"position":3},"title":"F*** You, You Aimlessly Whining F***: Facebook Disillusionment edition","author":"Gil","date":"August 29, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Seriously, I don't even know what this NYT article on people quitting Facebook is supposed to be about. People are leaving Facebook because they didn't read the terms of agreement? Because they were using it too much? Because it's not magically free of copyright restrictions? Save our newspapers (from idiotic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "F*** You, You Whining F***"","block_context":{"text":"F*** You, You Whining F***","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/f-you-you-whining-f"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3204,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/f-you-you-whining-f-1809","url_meta":{"origin":2211,"position":4},"title":"F*** You, You Whining F***: 1\/8\/09","author":"Gil","date":"January 8, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"A lot of these entries have focused on the publishing industry, because I read about it and its constituents tend to whine a lot. I haven't written so much about the financial crisis in that context, so I'll remedy that now. Here's an article about the SEC branch chief who\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "F*** You, You Whining F***"","block_context":{"text":"F*** You, You Whining F***","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/f-you-you-whining-f"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3186,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/f-you-you-whining-f-1509","url_meta":{"origin":2211,"position":5},"title":"F*** You, You Whining F***: 1\/5\/09","author":"Gil","date":"January 5, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Editors and publishers must now learn how to use telephones. (In a bonus piece of cluelessness, this article also focuses on publishers' debilitating problem of returns from bookstores . . . without ever mentioning e-publishing! God forbid you mention a distribution venue that eliminates the cost of physical production, shipping\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2211"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2277,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211\/revisions\/2277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}