Axios II: Attack of the Clones

This story, along with the above picture, is pretty funny. I guess the previous man in the sequence is sitting in a rocking chair somewhere and the next one is at Little League practice. What really makes the photo work, beyond these guys all looking pretty similar, is (a) they’re dressed the same way, kinda like adorable twins whose parents buy them identical outfits, and (b) the monotonic pattern of hair loss, which reinforces the sequential look.

Really, though, those Axios dudes should stick to sports (background here).

A couple weeks ago we discussed this thing that used to happen, but we don’t see so much of anymore, which is writers being treated as all-purpose pundits, even though they had zero qualifications other than writing skills. An example would be Norman Mailer. This Axios thing is kind of the reverse: some bad writers offering writing tips. I’d say “selling” writing tips, but it really doesn’t count as selling if you’re actually paying people to buy your book.

Not that I’m one to talk, giving out all my prose for free here . . .

6 thoughts on “Axios II: Attack of the Clones

  1. I checked out Axios.com here:

    https://www.similarweb.com/website/axios.com/#overview

    A few salient factoids:

    They are currently the 931st most visited site, way behind their newsy competitors and falling. The average site visit is 1.58 page views and 1:31 minutes. The readership skews young and male.

    So on the one hand, they seem to be seeking an audience with the shortest attention span, and that part of their strategy is working. On the other hand, those short attention spans result in a quick pass-thru of the site.

    I’m thinking the book is a Hail Mary and if it doesn’t work Axios won’t be around long. That casts the financial commitment in a different light.

    Having never looked at Axios before, I tried reading the first article of today’s news, on Hurricane Ian. I suppose I could get used to the format, but it sure didn’t work for me the first time and I didn’t make it through. Perhaps the Axios hashtag should be #<2minread!.

  2. “which is writers being treated as all-purpose pundits, even though they had zero qualifications other than writing skills”

    Stephen Dubner seems to fit this category as well. The guy only popularized Leavitt’s work, and has been cashing in on it with blogs, podcasts, and paid appearances ever since!

    Since they signed a book deal and exhausted most of Leavitt’s work in Freakonomics I/II, they went so far as to create a book from a set of curated Freakonomics blog posts! (When to Rob a Bank)

    Incidentally, I think this blog would be a great candidate for such an exercise!

      • You are free to call Dubner what you wish. I would argue he’s a former professional nonfiction writer who is now a pundit with over 100 podcast episodes in his “No Stupid Questions” series, in which he answers questions with his research psychologist cohost, spanning the range of “Are You Having a Midlife Crisis?”, “What’s the Secret to Making a Great Prediction?”, “Can You Learn to Love Hard Work?”, “Do People Pay Attention to [Highway] Signs?”, “What is the Optimal Way to Be Angry?”, and “Is Poor Nutrition a Supply Problem or a Demand Problem?”

        https://freakonomics.com/series-full/nsq/

        • Unanon:

          I followed the link and took a look at this one, “Why Are Stories Stickier Than Statistics?”, which displayed, in context, a stunning lack of self-awareness when at one point Dubner says:

          Yeah. So, I’m so glad you bring that up because we’ve written about a lot of things that I could see easily trying to dismiss as just a story, right? If you say that the legalization of abortion led to less crime because it meant that there were fewer unwanted children being born, and social science shows that unwantedness is a really bad thing to have as a child. So, look, we tell the kind of stories that one is right to be skeptical of and right to challenge. Which is why, whether it’s in books, or now in the podcast, there is, what I guess I would consider, a sort of responsible version of storytelling.

          And this gets us back to what you had asked at the beginning, which is, are stories stickier than data? And my answer would be yes, they probably are. But for sticky stories to also be believable, you should include as much data as you possibly can. That, to me, is why a sort of hybrid version of storytelling is very compelling, which is, yes, it’s causal. This happened, which led to this happening, which led to this happening. But those three sentences alone are not enough.

          Kinda wack for him to slap himself on the back for his careful reporting regarding scientific studies!

          And then he says:

          And you need to back them up with evidence. But I argue that stories, because we gravitate toward them and because they are sticky, it’s important to tell them, but to challenge them during the telling as much as you possibly can. So, to include as much data as you can, to include the magnitude of the effect, to include the time series, because if there’s a huge effect, but it’s gone within a year, well, the story becomes a lot less dramatic. But it’s important to tell that, because maybe it was novelty more than anything.

          Practice what you preach, bro!

          I still wouldn’t call Dubner a “pundit” in the sense of someone who offers his own take on issues of the day. His shtick is that he’s an everyman who’s reporting on scientific studies that he’s read, not so much different than when he interviewed Levitt and then wrote an article and book about Levitt’s work. Sure, sometimes Dubner offers his own opinion, but then he’s framing it as that he’s a guy with interesting questions who’s then gonna find the experts and see what answers they have.

        • Fair enough. Thought about it a little more last night and I’m coming around to the opinion of Dubner being less of a pundit and more of a prolific podcast host who occasionally offers his take on various issues.

          [I didn’t even need to listen to Episode 83: “Can you Change Your Mind Without Losing Face?]

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