benjamin frankenstein
LightNews LightNews
banner
fiercefully.bsky.social
benjamin frankenstein
@fiercefully.bsky.social
75 followers 63 following 52 posts
chloe/cloudie • any pronouns • would prefer you don't follow if we don't know each other! • 4 stars have been deducted for dabbling in the Occult.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by benjamin frankenstein
bencollins.bsky.social
Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...
What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business? The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday. The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times. That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working. You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step. If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.
July 7, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Reposted by benjamin frankenstein
volts.wtf
The reasonable conclusion to draw from the poll (and all the other polls, and everything else we know) is that rural Americans are -- not all, but mostly -- ignorant & bigoted.

But America's own noble-savage mythology does not permit anyone, on either side, to say that out loud.
June 17, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by benjamin frankenstein
volts.wtf
Gonna move on with my day, but if you want to read what is, IMO, the single best thing written on the contemporary urban/rural clash, read "The Density Divide" by Will Wilkinson.
The Density Divide: Urbanization, Polarization, and Populist Backlash - Niskanen Center
In this new paper, I weave recent research in political science, economics, psychology and more into an account of political polarization and the rise of populist nationalism as a surprising and overl...
www.niskanencenter.org
June 17, 2025 at 6:24 PM