The Shortest Article in the NYT?

September 2, 2016 5:00 PM

Yes.

(More)

posted by Songdog (48 comments total)

Delete your newspaper.

[Am I doing it right, kids?]
posted by indubitable at 5:03 PM on September 2, 2016 [9 favorites]

!
posted by languagehat at 5:04 PM on September 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Jesus wept.
posted by BlueHorse at 5:05 PM on September 2, 2016 [9 favorites]

Is this something I'd have to read newspapers to, oh never mind.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 5:05 PM on September 2, 2016

On Twitter, @gdead observes this article requires 6 Megabytes and 150+ requests to load.
posted by GameDesignerBen at 5:07 PM on September 2, 2016 [54 favorites]

Heh:

@gdead This one word NY article takes nearly 6MB and over 150 requests to load

(Not that a link to a single tweet is going to look that great in comparison.)
posted by Artw at 5:09 PM on September 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Dammit. :-)
posted by Artw at 5:09 PM on September 2, 2016

I'll take my Coke with ice, thanks.
posted by GameDesignerBen at 5:11 PM on September 2, 2016

On Twitter, @gdead observes this article requires 6 Megabytes and 150+ requests to load.

It takes > 47 requests and > 3.5 MB to load that tweet.
posted by indubitable at 5:11 PM on September 2, 2016 [14 favorites]

finally. an effective way to read beyond the headlines!
posted by bigendian at 5:27 PM on September 2, 2016

This would have been really hilarious what, 15 years ago?
posted by stevil at 5:30 PM on September 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

That's space that could've been used talking about shadows or clouds.
posted by condour75 at 5:38 PM on September 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

Well, you know, they like to take their time to be sure to get the story right.

Isn't that right, Judith?
posted by one weird trick at 5:39 PM on September 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Shouldn't the byline have read "Ian Betteridge"?
posted by TedW at 5:43 PM on September 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

Man, I love those email threads. I have a whole folder in my work Outlook right now labeled "clusterfuck" that's got about 300 messages DoD-wide, folks of all ranks, all emailing about how they don't belong on the distro (which went out to "army-all" or whatever originally, so yes, they really do belong on the distro...) and then the futile "stop replying all, just ignore it" messages. One time in Afghanistan I opened up my email on a network that I usually got like 1-2 messages a week on, and there in my inbox were like 500 messages. WTF? Were we under nuclear attack? No! It was a waterfall of "please remove me from this distro" messages. Some deputy chief theater commander's lackey was all like, "This is not the correct office; please remove Lt General X from this distro". I about wet my pants in glee as I clicked through. There were like three guys somewhere in theater who were encouraging others to keep replying all, and then some anti-trolls trying to tell people to ignore it.

It was one of the best days out there.
posted by Hal Mumkin at 5:44 PM on September 2, 2016 [40 favorites]

Nice use of the "bananas" tag, by the way!
posted by TedW at 5:45 PM on September 2, 2016 [21 favorites]

I don't even blame reply-all-ers any more. If you don't want everybody on the thread to reply all, don't friggin' public cc them; blind cc them. The drawback of bcc is that nobody can see who the message went to, and the conversation technically *can't* continue as a cohesive thread - but if that's the goal, why not make that the necessary outcome? People really need to use bcc more often.
posted by koeselitz at 5:55 PM on September 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

I have a whole folder in my work Outlook right now labeled "clusterfuck" that's got about 300 messages DoD-wide, folks of all ranks, all emailing about how they don't belong on the distro (which went out to "army-all" or whatever originally, so yes, they really do belong on the distro...) and then the futile "stop replying all, just ignore it" messages.

Back in the late '90s, one of those cascades shut down the networks at Fort Gordon, Fort Hood, and Fort Bragg (for those of you who don't know, that's the two largest bases in the Army and the home of the Army Signal Corps, a.k.a. the people who run networks). I don't mean that someone shut down the networks to stop it, either -- I mean that everything just fucking crashed and was down for two or three days. Sadly, that was before the days of "Well, the network's down... might as well go home," so we still had to do work.
posted by Etrigan at 6:01 PM on September 2, 2016 [16 favorites]

I'm amused that googling Amazon Wallet Incident returns the Wikipedia page for Email storm, without actually referencing "Amazon" or "WALLET".
posted by CrystalDave at 6:04 PM on September 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

This would be funnier if the Times hadn't just announced that it doesn't have the resources to waste on (a) local shoe-leather news coverage or (b) arts, culture, and food coverage in the tristate area outside of NYC.
posted by praemunire at 6:09 PM on September 2, 2016 [8 favorites]

Back in the late '90s, one of those cascades shut down the networks at Fort Gordon, Fort Hood, and Fort Bragg

Just as an aside, all three are named for traitors who took up arms against the United States.
posted by TedW at 6:11 PM on September 2, 2016 [17 favorites]

These days it's rare, but back when this happened a lot, I'd often reply all to get the party started. Usually it was when I had repeatedly asked for some jackass not to include me on the email chain. So when they continued, out came the reply all. Yeah. I'm an asshole.

Agree the article is many years too late, but love the style.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 7:07 PM on September 2, 2016

reply all previously
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:08 PM on September 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

ARMM ARMM ARMM ARMM
posted by lkc at 7:08 PM on September 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

wait, that's why you liked the "bananas" tag, isn't it
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:09 PM on September 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Indeed it is. That story is a classic and it called out for a tag.
posted by Songdog at 7:12 PM on September 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

That's space that could've been used talking about shadows or clouds.

Or Clinton's email.
posted by dersins at 8:23 PM on September 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Then there was the time I was migrating all my mail to a new email program which for some reason didn't have a "sent" folder. Confused I assumed that "outgoing" was what they'd decided to call it instead. So I took my old "sent " folder and dumped it into "outgoing".
My computer then spent hours re-sending 3 years worth of emails to their original recipients. Many confused replies resulted as close friends and colleagues got an inbox overloaded with a walk down memory lane of every correspondence we'd had.
Sigh.
posted by asavage at 8:27 PM on September 2, 2016 [35 favorites]

Obviously does not get paid by the word.
posted by AugustWest at 9:26 PM on September 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

On UNIX, I can just type fortune and get nuggets of wisdom like this, usually less than a kilobyte each.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:55 PM on September 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Okay, but. The most recent and most fucked up example of a reply-all mishap at my job: The campus facilities management department sent out an email to all university staff (almost 30,000 people) announcing a new online form whose purpose is too boring to even mention here.

Fifteen minutes later, all 30,000 staff members receive a reply-to-all email that says:

Hello [facilities management person],

My name is J_____ and I’m one of the supervisors here at [campus IT support]. This morning, IT has received a notable uptick in trouble tickets related to your new online form, but we don't know what do do with them or how to respond. Please advise.

A supervisor from freaking campus IT replied to all, first. And, more importantly, a supervisor from campus IT replied to all admitting that campus IT has no earthly clue how to do its job. So clueless that they asked facilities how to respond to trouble tickets.

~ fin ~
posted by mudpuppie at 9:57 PM on September 2, 2016 [11 favorites]

Just press 'M' for mute (or whatever works in your email) and don't reply at all.
posted by king walnut at 11:02 PM on September 2, 2016

I work for an international company that experienced this exact phenomena last year. You could actually trace the workday's path across the earth based on who in what countries was currently asking to be removed from the email thread or begging people to stop replying all. Truly nothing else happens so often while still amazing you that it ever actually happens at all.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:21 AM on September 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

I used to have a .signature that just said:

A: No.
Q: Should I put my reply above completely untrimmed quoted text?

These days I just top-post in non-technical groups because I'm trying to be understood by the readers.

A friend of mine once archived one of these explosions of impotent fury and named it "The Angry Moron Newsletter". If you look, you'll see it had some delightful extra feedback loops in it.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:10 AM on September 3, 2016 [2 favorites]

The weirdest one of these I had it turned out that there were actually multiple mailing lists based of of what server people were randomly assigned to. While my e-mail was getting slammed with over a hundred of these e-mails, I walked over to the office of my coworker I usually commiserate about reply-all storms with (for a while he was even keeping a leaderboard of the biggest reply-all storms he'd gotten), and when I started talking to him about it he got all confused. Turns out the version of the mailing list he ended up on had nobody doing reply-alls on it.
posted by ckape at 1:14 AM on September 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

Just as an aside, all three are named for traitors who took up arms against the United States.

As an aside to your aside, in the case of Bragg and Hood, the army picked traitors who emphasize certain unpleasant traits of the military or any large bureaucratic organization.

In the case of Hood, he was epitomized an organization's ability to promote people until they reach their level of maximum incompetence. He was a good general when he was under the command of Lee. When he was given independent command, he became known for inflicting heavy casualties on his own force by the use of some very clueless frontal attacks. His campaign in Tennessee was especially terrible. He attempted to break Sherman's supply lines, and ended up completely destroying his own army by following up every defeat with yet another offensive.

Bragg was also not the greatest tactician, but was possibly better than Hood. However, he was known as being especially petty and cantankerous. In the tiny prewar army, he was best known for getting into an argument with himself. He was given a company command, and was simultaneously given company quartermaster duties. Bragg would send letters to himself, as the commander, requesting supplies. He would reply, in his role as quartermaster, denying the requests as being unfounded. Which led to replies, from commander Bragg, telling quartermaster Bragg that he was an idiot and everything would fall apart if the necessary items weren't procured. Quartermaster Bragg had to reply and accuse commander Bragg of making frivolous demands.

So both men would have hit reply-all to an email chain from Richmond. "Sir, I demand you remove my name from this infernal correspondence at once as your words provide nothing but hindrance towards my successful prosecution of our grand enterprise."
posted by honestcoyote at 2:59 AM on September 3, 2016 [12 favorites]

This would have been really hilarious what, 15 years ago?

For me what made it was "The New York Times's internal email system contributed to this report."
posted by iffthen at 4:00 AM on September 3, 2016 [4 favorites]

What is it about government email that makes it so susceptible to "reply all" storms? Oh, wait, it's Outlook. I literally keep a file handy titled "how to use BCC" with step by step directions showing how to enable the (hidden by default!!) BCC field in Outlook. I send this to the unwitting originator of Reply All storms. Most seem to be sheepishly grateful.

My very favorite part of the mess is when IT starts chiming in telling people not to reply all. It never helps! And there's always at least one troll who purposely re-ignites the fire just as it begins to die out.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:10 AM on September 3, 2016

Outlook also has reply all as the default send setting, at least for me. I have to manually select plain "reply" every time I send mail. I could probably fix it, mail is soooo last century.
posted by RustyBrooks at 6:12 AM on September 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

I often think the best improvement that could be made to email at this point would be completely prevent any message from being sent to more than one recipient.

Want to contact two people - you have to send two separate emails, or use some other tool thats better suited to team collaboration.

email needs to be more like a telephone and less like a conference call.
posted by Lanark at 6:32 AM on September 3, 2016

In the tiny prewar army, he was best known for getting into an argument with himself. He was given a company command, and was simultaneously given company quartermaster duties. Bragg would send letters to himself, as the commander, requesting supplies. He would reply, in his role as quartermaster, denying the requests as being unfounded. Which led to replies, from commander Bragg, telling quartermaster Bragg that he was an idiot and everything would fall apart if the necessary items weren't procured. Quartermaster Bragg had to reply and accuse commander Bragg of making frivolous demands.

Holy shit. This man works at my university. Who knew that this behavior was a long and storied tradition!
posted by chainsofreedom at 7:23 AM on September 3, 2016 [2 favorites]

> It takes > 47 requests and > 3.5 MB to load that tweet.

As of right now in incognito Chrome, it takes 19 requests and 199kb to load this thread.
posted by postcommunism at 7:45 AM on September 3, 2016

For me what made it was "The New York Times's internal email system contributed to this report."

This, exactly. You read the headline, see the reply and the whitespace and think "Wow, it's like the NY Times just discovered single purpose websites. Welcome to 2002, Grey Lady."

But then down at the bottom is that credit line, which reveals why the story was written now, and that prompted a genuine smile. Not because I wish email hell on the NY Times, but because it's nice to see they have a sense of humour about it.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:02 AM on September 3, 2016 [5 favorites]

I often think the best improvement that could be made to email at this point would be completely prevent any message from being sent to more than one recipient.

I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:52 AM on September 3, 2016 [4 favorites]

For me what made it was "The New York Times's internal email system contributed to this report."

Probably just as well that so few of us would ever be in the position to use the Newspaper of Record to air our petty office grievances.
posted by BrashTech at 10:12 AM on September 3, 2016

The drawback of bcc is that nobody can see who the message went to, and the conversation technically *can't* continue as a cohesive thread - but if that's the goal, why not make that the necessary outcome?

Include a list of the cc's in the text of thread! Just like Ye Olde Typewriter Days of Yore.

It also cuts down on the recipients forwarding to each other saying, 'Did you see this?'
posted by A Terrible Llama at 4:25 PM on September 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

Include a list of the cc's in the text of thread! Just like Ye Olde Typewriter Days of Yore.

I actually do that sometimes, because the LISTSERV server strips off header information. So when I send out an email that's going to multiple lists I include a "To: [list1] [list2] [list3]" at the beginning of the body of the message to fend off later "did you send this to [group]?" questions.
posted by Lexica at 5:04 PM on September 3, 2016

The author explains the backstory.
posted by pmurray63 at 4:51 PM on September 4, 2016