this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2025
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Wow, apart from the description of an actual event, there's like one single sentence worth of coherent points buried in all the excessively verbose and obtuse rambling, and that boiled down to "the material engineering of this particular attempt was not good enough". Was it considered proper prose at the time to say a whole lot of nothing in the most indirect and overly wordy way possible, or would it have been as insufferably vapid then as it is now?
Also how the fuck does someone have like an inch-wide column to write in and write like that? There's not even the smallest measure of information embedded in most of the individual lines.
Yeah that's mandatory for all NYT articles
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IIRC back in the roman empire, Julius Caesar's literature (he wrote a few books) was generally considered exceptionally good because he managed to pack a lot of information in a text that was both simple to read (no complicated words) but also very efficient with space usage (i.e. he didn't waste pages writing about nothing, essentially). that's actually why caesar's writings were often read in latin school later on, because they were both easy to read but also provided actual informations.