Who Killed Paulina Borsook's Career? | Hacker News Reader

Who Killed Paulina Borsook's Career?

wired.com

> Ok, but first I have to tell you about Dick Pick. Literally his name. Richard A. Pick. Went by Dick.

How Americans keep straight face in such situations?

Often they don't and it's kind of the point. You could go by Rich, Richie, Rick, Ricky, Dickie... if you choose to call yourself Dick, you know you're going to cause some amount of snickering and you're doing it on purpose.

Also I remember men called him Richard Feynman but a lot of women called him Dick. That's sending a different message.

I recall sitting in a seminar in Australia, conducted by an American man called Buck Rogers. I had a moment of disbelief when he introduced himself.

I later found out that he had legally changed his name to Buck Rogers to intentionally be noticed.

I doubt that Gen Z und the millenials would even know Buck Rogers

Not an American, but this reminded me of Randy Baumgardner and Foggy Bottom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Baumgardner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foggy_Bottom

From Randy Baumgardner’s Wikipedia page:

“…a legislative intern, accused Baumgardner of sexual harassment in which he slapped her butt…”

You can’t make this stuff up.

There used to be a Novell Netware engineer called Randy Bender, which caused a lot of mirth in the UK in the 90s.

Ha, yes - he was often featured in their adverts on the back cover of a bunch of computer magazines.

I once heard a secondhand anecdote about an ad sales person at Dennis Publishing who had encouraged Novell to believe the ads featuring him were particularly popular and should therefore be repeated. Assuming that Novell were completely unaware of the UK meaning, that seems a bit cruel in retrospect...

Similarly, German skier Fanny Chmelar.

(Known in the UK for a question on a quiz show that caused the host to lose his composure and be unable to stop laughing for a few minutes).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Chmelar

"Borsook" as it is spoken means "badger" to most Slavic language speakers. Whoever was the immigration officer back then was noting things down by ear.

There used to be a politician named Richard Swett[0]. He went by Dick.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_N._Swett

Apparently, there's also an illustrated childrens' book by another author Sandra Peterson based on cyberselfish by Paulina [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0HF8QPPLS

edit: update to mention the new book's author.

Strong smell of Ai generation on the cover there.

Her agent says they can use the Cyberselfish part of the title but not her name. She was made aware of it a few weeks ago.

Trademark, rather than a trade dress issue. https://www.greenbergglusker.com/publications/when-copycats-...

This is a pretty interesting article. Firefox shows the first paragraph for a second and then blanks it, but lynx -dump manages to get the text. There's an audio too but I ignored that.

Firefox reader mode displays the full article perfectly.

It shows one paragraph on my machine.

me too

God I hate this writing style. And the title. The reality is probably more bland.

In the 80s and 90s, tech was magic. Lots of computer magazines, cyberpunk novels. Tech fact and fiction sold in huge quantities. Mainstream tech publications depended on tech ad dollars, so editors preferred tech sycophants. There were doom-scarers but it was mostly a utopian thing. It's what got me into tech as a kid.

After the dot-com bubble burst, this imploded. Investment in tech dropped across the board, including advertising tech publications. I'd love to get a count of cyber/tech fiction novels published through the 80s,90s and early dot-com burst.

You sound like this touched a nerve. Also, your argument is self defeating. If tech publications were not so dependent on tech ad money after the bubble burst, then critical writing like Borsook’s should have become more palatable and editors would have had some interest in publishing critical stuff.

I don’t think there was a conspiracy, as much as a “we don’t wanna have to do with her because she’s problematic” consensus. The outcome for her was the same.

The kernel of truth here is that the behaviors we see displayed nowadays by tech bros were always there, it’s just that at the time there was less scrutiny, and telling the underdog-changing-the-world-for-the-good-of-all tech story sold their narrative much better.

They were always after the usual triad: power, money, sex.

>The reality is probably more bland.

Maybe read the article before criticizing. It says the same thing as you.

I did read it. I didn't enjoy reading it. Yes I said the same thing, in fewer words, and I didn't hint that maybe there really was a conspiracy. There doesn't need to be a conspiracy or a blacklist if you rub people up the wrong way, and then the bottom falls out of the market you're writing about.

The story itself, or the lady it was about, was interesting, but for fucks sake

> In a way, the happy turn of events in the past few months had left her even more discombobulated.

> The work was impenetrably abstruse.

> … but neither did they go in for gooey panegyrics to the likes of Newt Gingrich…

When did it become a thing amongst American journalists that knowing how to use thesaurus on your word processor makes you both a really amazing writer as well as super-duper cool smart person?! For fucks sake, Orwell and Hemingway wrote the way 11-year-old could understand every word, they were still masterful in the depth of their stories. I hate this jargony thesaurus-wanking in today’s journalism and I don’t think I am only one.

Please stop.

I guess it depends on your background. For me, those words are part of my vocabulary, and I would not think twice when seeing them in an article. The author might not have been thesaurus-hunting if they had already internalized those words, right?

However, I agree that some authors go too hard on the thesaurus for seemingly no good reason. The New Yorker and certain other "high brow" publications are well known for this. "Obstreperous", "prelapsarian", and "fuliginous" are not, I would argue, part of anyone's vocabulary.

I got yelled at to "stop being so bloody obstreperous" all the time as a child!

But, yeah. Add to that the tendency to use untranslated French phrases, which was pretty common in highbrow UK journalism even into the early 2000s. Pretty much everyone in Britain learnt French as their second language, but there are plenty of people who went to school in other countries who have no French at all so it was pretty exclusionary.

You regularly use "panegyrics"?

Not often, but just because it's rare doesn't mean it's not part of my vocabulary! I know a lot more words than I actually use in daily communication, and I suspect that's true of most people.

For example, I have never used (as far as I remember) "inchoate", "protean", or "exegesis", but I know perfectly well what they mean.

My point is not about whether this or that word is part of someone’s (active) vocabulary, ie. whether they can explain the meaning of the word if asked without checking external sources. The reason why I evoke modernist masters is that each of those words have a plain English equivalent that more or less matches the meaning of the more abstruse one. This is usually a dead giveaway that the author felt the level of their prose would be greatly heightened by searching for a synonym of the more hipsterist variety - I know, since I have done it myself often enough, before maturing somewhat. Even if the words actually were something they use every day, I’d still argue more plain prose would be better every and which way. Obscure language a good writer does not make. Hoe often you need dictionary when reading The Sun Also Rises? Or Homage to Catalonia? Or The Bell Jar?

In short, having have to read extremely jargony and difficult to understand academic or professional text more or less daily - text that by nature sorta have to be difficult and abstract, since the subject it - the benchmark for journalistic writing should be that it can be understood by a 11-year-old. Interestingly, Borsook herself seems to recognise this, the author of this article less so.

There was about a paragraph and then nothing but ads. Don't bother clicking.

Ignore this poster and their misconfigured browser. It works fine, no paywall, nothing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com