Buy Or Don’t Buy

Normally, the Sunday Style section is where you’ll find the occasional New York Times trend piece that suggests the paper’s staff was raised entirely in a bubble of North Face and granola, but yesterday (a Wednesday!) one such piece appeared. That story was “Yoga With Your Dog“:

In Chicago, Kristyn Caliendo does forward-bends with a Jack Russell terrier draped around her neck. In Manhattan, Grace Yang strikes a warrior pose while balancing a Shih Tzu on her thigh. And in Seattle, Chantale Stiller-Anderson practices an asana that requires side-stretching across a 52-pound vizsla.

Call it a yogic twist: Downward-facing dog is no longer just for humans.

I enjoy stories like these because they depict a wondrous fantasy world where everyone has a liberal-arts degree, every neighborhood is full of cheery white people* and every thing is quirky and cute. It’s the same reason I watch indie films and read contemporary fiction.

*The only non-white people in The Times live in the World section and lead lives of misery and despair.

The Times has long cornered the market among newspapers in fun upscale trend stories, and there’s often a bizarre logic behind them. Normal news pieces need above all to be newsworthy; they need numbers and facts and context to convince you that the story is important.

The Times’ trend pieces do the exact opposite. Their purpose is twofold. For the 98% of readers whom the story doesn’t describe, they’re lighthearted slices of life, promising that if we work hard enough, we too can have lives full of terribly interesting hobbies. For the 2% of readers to whom the story applies though, the story serves as an ego boost, a justification of a lifestyle, a promise that they are important.

Sometimes there’s blatant hipster ego-stroking, like in the caption on a trend piece on vinyl:

James Acklin, of Pittsburgh, says it takes a special person to appreciate the imperfections in music recorded on vinyl.

Other times the story serves to normalize something ridiculous, as in this article on people breaking up over dietary preferences:

Ben Abdalla, 42, a real estate agent in Boca Raton, Fla., said he preferred to date fellow vegetarians because meat eaters smell bad and have low energy.

Lisa Romano, 31, a vegan and school psychologist in Belleville, N.Y., said she recently ended a relationship with a man who enjoyed backyard grilling. He had no problem searing her vegan burgers alongside his beef patties, but she found the practice unenlightened and disturbing.

But all trend stories have one thing in common: No matter the subject, they’re a place to preen, like in this story about lazy locavores:

Mrs. Howard said she ate local vegetables growing up in northern Michigan and Chicago. But her husband, a private equity fund manager, ate a lot of expensive imported food with little thought about where it came from. But all that has changed.

“It’s like the first time you start drinking good red wine and you realize what you were drinking was so bad you can’t go back to it,” Mrs. Howard said. “It’s that same way with vegetables.”

[Props to Slate's Jack Schafer, who is the Othniel Charles Marsh of bogus trend stories. Read his discovery of the Times' most ridiculous trend piece right here.]