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Notes -
As ancient as "please read literally any other book" seems now, some senior NYT people simply never got off the 2015 "Gryffindors for Hillary!" train. They overslept and missed the stop all the cool junior staffers got off at.
Lagging cultural updates seems a more likely explanation than this being some watershed cultural moment caused by a retvrn to fundamental principles of journalism.
(I'm sure someone's already written about this, but there's an essay in how much of fandom is now about tearing down the last popular thing and denouncing it as problematic to show how cutting edge you are. Weaponizing "eww, that was so six months ago" fashion-bullying was huge for the cultural revolution.)
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