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Comment by naillo | Hacker News Reader

You can just smell that this is a book ad from the title

I take it you didn't sniff any deeper. From the text:

Gunnar Broberg’s biography dutifully accompanies Linnaeus every step of the way, trekking through his life for four-hundred-plus pages. These are not, unfortunately, a pleasure to read... The main problem with “The Man Who Loved Nature,” though, is not all the things in it we don’t need to know but all the things we need to know that aren’t in it.

It's a book review.

A new biography, “The Man Who Organized Nature” (Princeton), written by Gunnar Broberg and translated from the Swedish by Anna Paterson, attempts to provide the fullest possible account of his life yet fails to grapple with the fundamental question it raises: if categorization is crucial to making sense of the world, how should we classify Carl Linnaeus?

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

For as many times as I have read and re-read that essay, I find that I still need to be reminded just how pervasive this sort of thing is.

It is possible to be overly cynical, this is not a huge industry pushing the same product again and again, it's a dude who wrote a book about Linnaeus

Exactly. The New Yorker's audience is people who like to read. It isn't that publishers are paying them to run these articles -- they are there because knowing about interesting new books is on topic for the magazine.

It's possible that there is an exchange of money I guess, and a promotional nature to the article. Not surprised that a free media distributed over the internet is funded by sponsors. It's also super transparent, high quality, and harmless, definitely not the most egregious example the article was referring to.

The New Yorker runs a lot of these, it's not a secret.

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