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I read some AI slop earlier today and then read this. The AI slop was better than whatever this is.

You might not be the target audience for this, and that's ok.

Now that people know what ai slop is, they start having higher expectations from prose because vacuous articles like these might be misconstrued as slop

It's a shame you feel that way as articles like this were extremely common 30 years ago in the Saturday and Sunday papers. And I do miss them.

I wonder if it's a generational thing, where now every essay must focus on one idea instead of taking a meandering path of curiosity to the author's final point.

I agree with you that this is a Parade-level essay, and I think those were always basically fluff: enough to give a sense that something had been learned about two or three seeming-disparate topics from a great distance, but not enough to actually satisfy curiosity about any of them. In the 80s as a pre-teen, those were the first part of the Sunday paper I claimed, but they never did more than whet.

I don't think it's even about staying on one topic. It's just that the topics were too broad for such a short essay, even had it been relatively dense, and then to that problem the author added long phrases where a short phrase would do, as if trying to pad the length to some predetermined mark.

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