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Oyler’s book is not very good, I’m afraid, but it’s written in the idiom of the contemporary internet and is about “the Millennial experience” so it’s receiving the kind of desultory positive reviews we give to young women writers who look like the future, which in the long run turn out to be a burdensome type of white elephant.
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While I was reading Fake Accounts I often couldn’t help but think of Oyler’s bizarre, frequently asyntactic review of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror. Appearing in the august London Review of Books, that review read like someone had Benjamin Buttoned their way through an education in writing and arrived at a place where they could construct some elaborately engineered sentences of real craftsmanship but was unclear on the whole concept of subject and object. That mangled grammar is, I suspect, a tactical choice: if you write in an artificially high register, as Oyler does in her essayistic writing, and you throw enough arch and elliptical sentences out there, chances are a lot of people who secretly don’t trust their own reading comprehension will get to something they don’t understand, chuckle, and say “ah yes, quite.”
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Campaign polls are… insincerely woke? What? I don’t know what kind of Facebook friends Oyler has (just kidding, I guarantee you she’s too cool to have Facebook) but when mine talk about skincare or astrology or homeopathy, I assure you, they are achingly sincere. This is just awful, awful writing, and the cause is someone who’s too busy trying to impress to write sensibly. The fact that this review seems to have been well received, I say again, is either a function of people not getting it and being afraid of seeming not to get it or, even bleaker, of not wanting to publicly insult a rising Cool Girl.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/re ... e-accounts?
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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?The Missing Link wrote:
For instance they were never taught that Columbus was a slave owner.