Fake New York Times article is the most perfect fake New York Times article ever

The most-emailed New York Times article of all times. (The Awl)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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bjacques

Well played, especially in light of the book that NYT columnist David F. Brooks has just written about the “Composure Class.” If you thought the Bourgeois Bohemians were insufferable…
hassenpfeffer

The article also needs to mention that the subject is the goddaughter of Amy Chua.
- dampier
  
  Yes.
Anonymous

Ibex farming is so 2006.
irksome

I knew it was a fake when she didn’t take a stand in The Great Soap/No-Soap Debate.
zuludaddy

Was just about to submitteratorize this – I love it that you and BB beat me to it…
notavegan

And I suppose some people take this seriously.
chgoliz

I won’t believe it until the comment section is filled up with posters from “fly-over country” pronouncing angry judgments against the liberal elitism of NY Times articles.
- kc0bbq
  
  We used to just turn the NY-type attitude towards us here in flyover country into positives, or at least sometimes we did. The Saint Paul Winter Carnival is an example of that. The rest of the time we just added snarkiness to newspaper articles, such as an editor adding a by-line referring to Oscar Wilde as an “Ass-thete” in the Minneapolis Tribune in 1882.
- BDiamond
  
  Not all of us in fly-over country are Rush-worshipping inbred morons. (Only most of us.) So stop with that generalizing, you effete pate-licking Prius-driving chardonnay-swilling liberal hippie, you!
  - Anonymous
    
    I agree, we must support our non-knuckle dragging brothers and sisters in middle america.
  - chgoliz
    
    Nicely done!
Donald Petersen

Okay, so you hide the post’s real title in here, in Commentland!

Man, you had me wondering… I truly thought someone must have lost a serious bag of marbles. Glad I caught the “fake” headline before I went and embarrassed myself with several lines of WTFness!
andyhavens

Best line from the story:

“Like many of the ibex farms sprouting up across the northeastern United States, Yael offers an intensive Chinese-language immersion course.”
g0d5m15t4k3

I guess I don’t get the joke about how rich white people actually do shit like this and think better of themselves because of it. I guess “it’s funny because it’s true” applies here but all it did was make me depressed that I am lower middle class on the edge of poor.
- LYNDON
  
  I assumed it was mostly about how NYT feature writers, like many of their compatriots, have someone with a whip standing over them shouting “More colour!”
  
  (I used British spelling to emphasise I am not in fact a reader of the NYT.)
- Donald Petersen
  
  rich white people actually do shit like this
  
  Do they? Well, if anything, that makes me glad I’m not rich. I’ve seen an ibex or two in my time, and I’d just as soon keep my distance from those foul-tempered, flatulent lawnmowers.
Bamalama

For the slower people here in fly over country, like myself, read the title above the comments section, then it all makes sense.

It really is a great lampoonization of liberal elite. Andyhavens nailed the funniest line above.

Nicely done.
Anonymous

First I was all like, “whaa?”
But then I lol’d!
phisrow

One minor quibble on this otherwise brilliant parody: Shouldn’t our dear protagonist, special unique flower that she is, be trying to decide between the rigor and prestige of a top ranked Ivy and the opportunities for unconventional personal growth and close intellectual engagement with a group of lifelong learning peers offered by one of the New England Small Liberal Arts schools(one of the ones you wouldn’t be ashamed to have on your CV, of course)?

To be sure, everybody who is worth writing an article about considers Harvard and Yale; but some people just don’t find these institutions to be sufficiently nurturing of their individual uniqueness…
- Delaney
  
  My little sister is in her bocce club. She says that Anna is indeed not considering any other American university but Yale or Harvard. Anna is apparently quite insistent that if you’re going to go somewhere ordinary it might as well be the best. It seems very likely however that she won’t go to university at all but instead will be training under Yanashi Yo in the ancient art of making washi, traditional Japanese origami paper. Yo is famed for making the best washi in the world, so perfect that to actually fold it would be sacrilege. Instead all of her washi is burnt over the ocean in a ceremony known only to herself and her apprentices.