The new literary form, sailering

What is it with the New York Times's hatred of nail salons? Five years ago they had a two-part take-down of nail salons starting with The Price of Nice Nails by Sarah Maslin Nir.

It was a curious hit-piece given that the apparent reading demographic of the NYT is, judging by their article choices, trust fund/rich husband, pampered leftist women. A reading demographic more likely to be avid consumers of nail services than harsh critics. But the NYT went after immigrant owned nail salons hard.

Not without pushback from those more concerned with facts than with moral posturing. See Politico, Reason, and The New York Review of Books. The latter piece was especially interesting given that the author was 1) a former New York Times reporter who 2) owned a couple of nail salons, and 3) whose wife was an immigrant from China.

As a former New York Times journalist who also has been, for the last twelve years, a part owner of two day-spas in Manhattan, I read the exposé with particular interest. (A second part of the same investigation, which appeared in the Times a day later, concerned chemicals used in the salon industry that might be harmful to workers.) Our two modestly-sized establishments are operated by my wife, Zhongmei Li, and my sister-in-law, Zhongqin Li, both originally from China, and “mani-pedi” is a big part of the business. We were startled by the Times article’s Dickensian portrait of an industry in which workers “spend their days holding hands with women of unimaginable affluence,” and retire at night to “flophouses packed with bunk beds, or in fetid apartments shared by as many as a dozen strangers.” Its conclusion was not just that some salons or even many salons steal wages from their workers but that virtually all of them do. “Step into the prim confines of almost any salon and workers paid astonishingly low wages can be readily found,” the story asserts. This depiction of the business didn’t correspond with what we have experienced over the past twelve years. But far more troubling, as we discovered when we began to look into the story’s claims and check its sources, was the flimsy and sometimes wholly inaccurate information on which those sweeping conclusions were based.

Providing, incidentally, further proof of Robert Conquest's First Law of Politics:

Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

So the NYT ran a hit piece on immigrant entrepreneurs, larded with bad sourcing, bad information, and faulty conclusions. Everyone makes mistakes (though some more frequently and persistently than others.)

Here we are five years later and the NYT appears ready with their next nail salon hit-piece. I’m Chinese. That Doesn’t Mean I Have Coronavirus. by Celine Tien. Switching it up a bit, this one is apparently by a privileged, self-absorbed young woman, distressed by the rank xenophobia of the Vietnamese running her local nail-salon. A journalist willing to go great lengths to find things to be offended by for our edification.

With this kind of article, it appears that the New York Times has apparently landed on a new corporate survival strategy in the face of their displacement as the nation's paper of record by the fast-growing Babylon Bee. Rather than the pedantic and staid strategy of offering more factual news in a better written fashion, apparently the NYT has opted for the cutting edge strategy of becoming so self-parodying that they will drive Babylon Bee from the hive.

It is almost cruel how the Times lets these people, in their desperate desire to hide their privilege, self-destruct any personal brand as they make themselves to be fragile, weak, frightened victims.

I shifted uncomfortably in the seat, suddenly very aware she was holding my hands.

[snip]

Finally, my voice cracking, I said . . .

[snip]

This past month, I’ve made less eye contact with people when I’ve walked outside. When I felt like coughing, I smothered the urge by biting my tongue. When I went to shake someone’s hand at a party, I instinctively scanned their arm for the tiniest jerk back, a moment of hesitation. When I went to a restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif., the awareness of my being the only Chinese person sat heavier in my gut than anything I ate at lunch.

[snip]

My voice a little unsteady, I shared with the women that the incident in the salon left me shaky for the rest of the day. That by nighttime, my anger had melted away to tears, leaving me collapsed on the couch.

Conservative writers occasionally mock overwrought liberals by referring to pearl-clutching and fainting couches. And here we have a NYT writer, without any self-awareness, claiming that a conversation with a frightened, low-income Vietnamese immigrant was so debilitating that Tien "collapsed on the couch."

Shame on the NYT for their persecution of nail salons and for giving column inches to writers who are self-destructive.

On the other hand, it is not all bad. All these implausible pieces have led to the emergence of a new writing art form. Earlier, with the advent of blogging, there emerged a new form of writing - Fisking.

A rebuttal to an article or blog made by quoting its content in sections and refuting each section individually.

Old establishment media has evolved into a platform for articles of self-abasement and bigotry by the cluelessly privileged seeking victimhood through micro-slights. With this abundance of material warranting deep mockery, as the day follows night, there is now a new literary art form, Sailering (for Steve Sailer, an early master in the new form)

Devastation of an article or blog made by quoting its content in sections and mocking each section individually.

Sailer's sailering of of Tien is here. Heh