STOP TELLING ME WHAT EVERYBODY'S EATING: A RANT ABOUT ALMOST NOTHING.

There is a limit to what we can, within reason, be expected to endure, and sometimes even the smallest thing can tick me off. At the risk of demonstrating myself to be a short-tempered coot, I demand that the New York Times writers stop talking about what they and their sources are eating.

What do I mean? Good question. My response: Frequently, in 'features' sections of the NYT, like the New York Times Magazine, the stories involve longer interviews with sources who play major roles in stories. As if to demonstrate that these are real people, doing real things, with whom the journalist ACTUALLY interacted, and also so as to fill space (part of what Kevin Barnhurst has called "The New Long Journalism"), we find journalists sharing all kinds of information concerning what their sources are eating, and where

Take the recent article about internet trolls, from The New York Times Magazine, August 3, where we are told:
"We ate muffins at Terra Bite, a coffee shop founded by a Google employee where customers pay whatever price they feel like."
"We walked on, to Starbucks. At the next table, middle-schoolers with punk-rock haircuts feasted noisily on energy drinks and whipped cream. Fortuny sipped a white-chocolate mocha."
"Fortuny calls himself “a normal person who does insane things on the Internet,” and the scene at dinner later on the first day we spent together was exceedingly normal, with Fortuny, his roommate Charles and his longtime friend Zach trading stories at a sushi restaurant nearby over sake and happy-hour gyoza."

This is an informative story about internet trolls, and I write not to discredit the journalist (Matthias Schwartz), but to say two things:

a) The fear was, for a long time, that stories in news outlets would get shorter and shorter, as a result of competition with television. The web (though not all other parts of the internet) has given journalism a much more expansive shell for journalism, and stories are, in some cases, free to 'breathe', even to lounge around, have brunch, take a stroll through a leafy neighborhood, get lost in the basement of a bookstore, and eventually find their way home. In elite US journalism, we're seeing (and this is indirectly related to web journalism) long stories.

b) I think the bit where journalists tell us what they're eating, or what their sources are eating is irritating, and will be mocked in future times as a telltale sign of elite journalism of our current period. It's an obvious way to identify one's journalism as made by, and intended for, the upper middle-class (perhaps as 'objectivity' was a hundred years ago). And it's too clever by half.

Before I become Andy Rooney, I'm going to take my leave...