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Shame on the New York Times. Say it with me: “Shame!”
Behold, an actual headline in the year of the Christian god 2025, from today’s paper of record:
Did Women Ruin the Workplace?
First things first, let me just get a few caveats out of the way: yes, this is from the Op-Ed section, an increasingly (and well-known) safe haven for right-wing strawmen, at least in the last twenty years that I’ve been reading this newspaper. Yes, it is Ross Douthat, the Times’ resident Catholic apologist. Yes, it is bait.
But it’s safe to say that it’s also one of the most unhinged, unmoored, backwards-looking, and irresponsible pieces of hot filth that I’ve ever seen this paper publish in black and white. And let me be clear: the substance of this article is irrelevant, for reasons which I’ll explain. I’ll even go so far as to let Douthat off the hook (this time), considering that headlines are the purview of a newspaper’s editors, not its writers.
A well-known meme featuring Tom Hardy in George Miller’s fantastic Mad Max: Fury Road
In today’s age, we are all familiar with the idea of “click bait”—spurious links that are designed to pique our human sense of curiosity, humor, rage, or all of the above. Click bait has long been associated with, well, nothing of substance. It’s called “bait” precisely because it’s a ruse. There is nothing of value behind the link, the true function of which is to generate ad fees, calculated on a per-view basis. Websites that thrived on click bait in the early ‘00s—Buzzfeed comes to mind—seem to have largely run their course, as social media infinity scrollers like Reddit and Instagram become the most frequented corners of the internet. Nevertheless, as a mechanism of persuasion, click bait is battle-tested.
But I’m not here to talk about click bait today. I’m here to talk about the utter irresponsibility with which formerly great news organizations have adopted the rhetorical style of click bait, which often takes the form of a disingenuous question like “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” Why “irresponsible?” Keep reading. I’ll get there; I have more steam to let off first.
Let’s see what else we can find just on the front page of today’s NYT (November 6, 2025), outside of Op-Ed:
This one seems rather harmless: “This Is What a Vindicated Iguana Looks Like” I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that iguanas have no scientifically measurable sense of the concept of vindication. Maybe we’ll get there one day, but this ain’t it.
“Is Melatonin Bad for Your Heart?” Uh-oh. Now we’re starting to walk the line of irresponsible publishing.
“Would Elon Musk Work Harder for $1 Trillion Than $1 Billion?” OK, I’m going to have to stop here because I feel an aneurysm coming on.
Thank goodness for line breaks like the one above. Let’s start again.
“Brigading,” which now takes a few different forms on the internet, is classically a tactic used by extremists to dismantle an online community and/or radicalize users toward a particular ideology. Back in the day when forums, image boards and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were the de facto social media platforms, it worked like this:
Imagine an online community based on a forum system. The forum is there to host and facilitate users who want to gather around a specific topic of interest, say knitting. For purely organizational purposes, the forum might be divided into sections: perhaps there is a section where people are only allowed to post questions about types of yarn, while to encourage sociability there is another section for general “off-topic” discussion.
A bad actor enters the space and tests the waters by posting something edgy but irrelevant to knitting and ultimately unacceptable, say an anti-Semitic joke. At this point, the bad actor still has plausible deniability (“I’m just joking, lighten up”). But it’s enough to drive some users away. After all, if I’m just looking for knitting tips, I don’t necessarily want to have to wade through anti-Semitic content to get there.
Other users either don’t mind, or agree that jokes (even the edgy ones) are acceptable. Like any close-knit community, forums develop styles of personality, inside jokes, “lore,” etc. If the bad actors are numerous and the forums are not well-moderated, there might spring up a subculture of anti-Semitic joking on the knitting forum. Some users might still insist that it’s all just a joke, but an increasing amount of people who just want knitting advice may decide to abandon the space. At the same time, the bad actors who are actually anti-Semites might reach out privately to users who have engaged with their jokes, offering to share more anti-Semitic material or inviting them to join their other forum where the main topic is something like white nationalism or neo-Nazism.
Ultimately, the community falls apart. Some users desert it, others are radicalized into a new ideology, and if the forum remains at all, the wolves step out of their sheep costumes unashamed, and the site develops a reputation, not for its knitting content but for its ideological content. It has become “brigaded.”
At its core, brigading is a propaganda tactic. It’s relevant to this discussion because it involves introducing extremist ideas to an unsuspecting audience, most of whom are unprepared to engage with them.
But if propaganda can be defined as material or behavior that is designed to unconsciously influence opinion, that is, if we can say that “true” or “good” propaganda is material in which the element of ideological persuasion goes unnoticed, well, it’s time to return to the Times.
Let’s ignore the classist Musk headline and the cute iguana and return to the more fundamental, more disgusting question that kicked this whole thing off:
Did women ruin the workplace? I mean, I’m not saying that they did; I’m a feminist; I think men and women should earn the same wages for the same work; I donate to women’s shelters; some of my best friends are women. But what do you think? Did women ruin the workplace?
I hope it’s apparent from the above paragraph that the substance of the article is of no importance here. In fact, journalist Ian Betteridge coined a law way back in 2009 that says “any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no.’” But by legitimizing the question in the act of posing it per se, much less in the form of a fucking headline, the damage has already been done. It doesn’t matter how nuanced or illuminating the following discussion may be: we have introduced the idea that women have possibly ruined the workplace; we have, in all of our rhetorical generosity, “held space” for otherwise rational and intelligent people to bat around the pernicious and ridiculous notion that, in one way or another, women should be excluded from the workplace. We have suggested, against all tides of social progress, and completely irresponsibly, that women have indeed ruined the workplace. The line between engaging with misogyny and engaging in misogyny, in fact, never existed. We are, much like the forums brigadiers, simply misogynists.
Now, of course I’m not suggesting that the Times has been brigaded by sexist trolls (Douthat excluded), but I hope it’s obvious to you that with even an iota of media literacy, this is an unacceptable way of trading ideas.
Last month they did the same thing with the headline “Would You Try 996?” If you don’t already know, “996” is a grossly anti-human work schedule currently gaining traction in China that has you on the clock from 9a-9p, six days a week. That’s a 72-hour workweek that completely flies in the face of over 100 years of global labor rights progress. It has no basis in the reality of human life, which necessarily includes things like sleeping, feeding oneself, and raising children, all of which I’m sure you can accomplish on your one day off, that is if you don’t sleep through it. That the Times should just casually suggest—not that they approve of it, heavens no; we’re a union shop!—that you even consider trying it is completely irresponsible publishing and blatantly propagandistic. Whose propaganda? Well, if you’ve read me recently and saw the Marx piece, I think you can imagine who I have in mind.
You and I deserve better than to have to even ponder a question like either of these two. The Times, in a recent earnings report, just proudly announced nearly half a million new subscribers. If you subscribe, I encourage you to cancel your subscription and let them know why. Hell, link them to this piece. As the crisis of affordability grows, as the inequality gap becomes virtually chasmic, as American families literally starve this week for no defensible reason, and as the fascists increasingly cast doubt on our elections (or rig them completely), we must, at any moment or opportunity of exchange within a capitalist system, vote with our wallets. And don’t forget: a little bit of shame goes a long way.
Post-Script — You may be familiar with the practice of “A/B-ing” headlines. In short, some users are served headline A, others are served headline B, and as the clicks bear out the data, one headline becomes the favored (and permanent) one. In the process of writing the below “What Am I Watching” section, this headline was changed to, “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” If you didn’t believe there was an insidious ideological bent before, I think you gotta give it up at this point.
What Am I Watching?
Today’s newsletter kind of came out of nowhere—I decided this morning for the sake of my partner and our three cats to stop shouting and start typing. Nevertheless, we’re always watching, and this week it’s a slice of historical fiction called Dark of the Sun (1968).
If you know anything about Belgians in the Congo, you are already familiar with the utter brutality of these particular colonists. Like most colonial enterprises, when it came time to pack it up and head home, Belgium was unable to quit the intoxicating haze of power and violence (and money). Even after handing independence to the Congo in 1960, Belgium returned along with UN forces to try and tamp down tribal secessionist movements. Some of the resulting barbarism (by the Belgians, I should clarify) is only preserved in Africa Addio (1966), an exploitation “documentary” by the Italian creators of the notorious Mondo Cane (1962).
In an unstable environment such as this, capitalists and mercenaries thrive alike. Dark of the Sun is not a profoundly political picture, though it does feature an important Black character whose loyalty to his White commander seems to come from a place of genuine, post-racial friendship. No, this is a flat-out adventure film that leverages the backdrop of guerilla war to tell the story of a mercenary hired by the Congolese president to rescue a group of European settlers deep in the jungle before a Simba rebellion army gets there. His real mission, however, is to recover $50m worth of diamonds for a fat Belgian mine owner. To do this, our mercenary hero puts together an army that includes his Black second-in-command, a drunk doctor, and even an ex-Nazi. They must take a train to the colony in the jungle, and most of the film’s action revolves around the train as a set piece, which is awesome and fun. The film’s ostensible morality, bouncing between profiteering and hostage rescue, ultimately falls to pieces as they do and don’t make it to the colony in time. You’ll have to watch it to see what I mean.
Shot in luscious green jungles of Jamaica, I was initially attracted to this film because of its director Jack Cardiff, who is a vaunted cinematographer of some of the greatest old films, having worked for Powell & Pressburger on the sumptuously lensed Black Narcissus, John Huston, and even Hitch. It turns out he’s a great director as well, and this is a highly entertaining film.