Citizen! Stop living your life! Do not attempt to be an individual! Or you risk discovering that your life is wrong according to the most venerable of journalistic bludgeons, the unsourced trend piece. The New York Times is here to tell you the way ?many? people are living their lives ? which of course just happens to be the most conservative wet dream possible.

The most recent example, of course is the Times? which allegedly proves that ?many women? at elite colleges are planning to abandon their careers for husbands and kids, pretty much as soon as they graduate. As various bloggers, including Kevin Drum, have pointed out, the story is based on nothing. Basically Louise Story had a good hit of a crack pipe and then decided that she glimpsed a trend in the fumes. There are not only no statistics, the piece is based on a handful of interviews and a smattering of emails that Story sent out to a skewed sample of women.

The Times also recently had a trend piece about South Asians in the U.S. deciding to have arranged marriages, only with veto power. This piece was similarly conservative, and similarly based on absolutely no data, except for a few interviews. And the liberal use of the word ?many,? as in ?many people think the New York Times is full of crap.

I still haven?t forgiven the Times for letting Judith Miller hype non-existent ?intelligence? about WMDs in Iraq.

But really, the Times is just one example of the decrepitude of print journalism. The goal is to present a stultifying world view that encourages people never to try and challenge any of the idiotic aspects of the status quo. Remain in your brain-dampening chambers, citizens! ? Do not attempt to exercise brain activity! ? The brain-orderlies will come and administer an extra dose of Soma shortly!

I?ve thought a lot lately that we don?t talk about the central facts of our age nearly as much as you?d expect ? global warming, extreme income inequality, our massive debt, and other signs that we?re living in a way that is drastically unsustainable in the short term. (Plus the housing bubble, and the widespread predictions that the world?s supply of oil will peak soon.) People have said that sort of thing for decades but it seems truer than ever now. And we do talk about all those things ? but at the same time, we sort of talk around them more than we talk about them. They?re sort of on the horizon but not squatting on our heads like ugly birds. They should be all we talk about, not just things we talk about occasionally.

And I think the media actively work to keep us from discussing the only things that matter in our world. In favor of bullshit celebrity news, or manufactured controversies. But also by focusing us on ?trends? that let us know that everything is fine, ?many? people are behaving in an orderly, obedient manner.