You might be interested in this story about leaks in the white house.

When asked Tuesday night for an update on the unfolding situation, one top White House aide simply texted a reporter two fireworks emoji.

It strikes me how good-looking everyone is in those pictures. There must have been a beauty requirement to join in those days.

Thank you for all the work you (and everyone else) do in keeping this place going, mk.

Haha. That article exemplifies exactly what he's complaining about. It's poorly written, doesn't clearly explain his point and is basically an ad for his book. He doesn't define what he means by "bullshit" until 3/4 into the article.

Bullshit is communication that wastes the reader’s time by failing to communicate clearly and accurately. With no editors, clarity and accuracy are hit or miss, and bullshit is inevitable.

Did he have an editor? His article lacked clarity. As for the accuracy, it was opinion piece. That's not a factual thing, as is most communication on the internet.

If you’re lucky, soon after you graduate, you get a job. The first thing they do is show you the employee manual, which is full of legalese and jargon. Your colleagues are writing long, cover-your-ass bullshit in the reports and emails you read. So you take those skills you learned in school and become part of the corporate bullshit machine.

CYA memos clearly and accurately convey what they're trying to convey. They're trying to CYA. They don't fall under the definition of "bullshit" as he's defined it.

It's true that print media was a lot more edited before the internet. There are a lot of ramifications of that. His analysis is simplistic and unhelpful.

Until every writing teacher, administrator and legislator in America reads and changes the way we teach writing, this won’t be any different. But that’s ok. I’ll settle for changing you. Just recognize that what you learned in high school and college is not what you need now to write without bullshit.

This is just an ad for his book and a good example of what he considers "bullshit". If he could clearly and accurately convey what needs to be changed to create writing that is not "bullshit", the might be a step in the right direction. He has not done that here. Given there's so much access to the internet, there's no way to get everyone to the same level of education and ability to clearly and accurately convey their point.

That's not THE definition of happiness. That's HIS definition of happiness.

I've read easily over half a dozen books on happiness -- from a Buddhist point of view, from a Christian point of view, from an atheist point of view, from a neuroscientist point of view, from a historical point of view and from a experimental point of view. None of those books defined happiness as constant joy. That would be highly unlikely to maintain. It would be too exhausting.

His source of inspiration is also a little dubious. He cites Augusten Burroughs as his source. Augusten Burroughs wrote a memoir about being abandoned by his psychotic mother and fostered by a crazy psychiatrist, looking at the Amazon review. I wouldn't take my definition of happiness based on that one person.

That article is horrible. It's like back office gossip with all the names replaced with "sources". That it was written on anything more than toilet paper or someone's personal journal is amazing to me. As lurid gossip, it kept my attention. But it wasn't very illuminating.

There's no substantiation for pretty much anything. The whole article is incredibly vague. It's difficult to tell which employees were laid off and which left voluntarily. The employees leaving voluntarily could have left for any number of reasons. But she lumped them all together when she claimed that there's an atmosphere of being with an abusive boyfriend, which was claimed by one anonymous source.

If the atmosphere was really that bad, it should have been possible to find ex-employees who were claiming the same thing but were now in better jobs. If she had been able to show that, it would have been a more credible article.

The number of visitors by month at the end of the article didn't really say much. It was all just written in a way that implied negativity, even when the numbers were trending positive.