推荐一位文字作者

虽然在每天挑选文章的时候，刻意的会去找一些不同的话题，但文字读多了，总归会有些个人的倾向，所以有的时候就变成了不是在挑文章，而是在挑作者。这种方式当然是安全的，毕竟建立起来的对某个作者的文字信任，大概率不会让我们失望。这个就像看顺着自己喜欢的导演，去看ta的系列作品，大抵都会是符合期待的。

今天要推荐的文字作者，其实不是常规挑文章的时候会留意的。最初因为话题挑的文章，后来读完了以后，感觉想再多去看一下这位作者的文字（读的时候还刻意的圈了下作者）

找到作者的时候，发现之前的有一篇觉得有很多可以学习点的文章也是来自于她的。

作者（Tressie McMillan Cottom）介绍

A trenchant cultural critic, celebrated sociologist, and award-winning writer, Tressie McMillan Cottom is known for rearranging your brain in the span of a carefully-turned phrase. Her breadth is phenomenal – it moves from the racial hierarchy of beauty standards and the class codes of dressing for work to the predation of for-profit colleges and the stain of racial capitalism on our plural democracy – all while reimagining the essay form for the 21st century as she goes.

两篇我们读过的文字：

❶ We’re All ‘Experts’ Now. That’s Not a Good Thing.

❷ The Strange Allure of the Blockchain

觉得好的原因

# 观点

看观点性的文字，目的不是拿别人的观点变成自己的。基本功能上至少有两个，如果是自己认同的，那么可以看下自己所认同的观点，可以怎么表达；如果是和自己想的不一样的，可以看下对方的理由有哪一些

作者有一些比较有意思的观点，这是她的文字吸引的第一的原因

❶Any good carnival psychic can tell you that anything is true at the right level of abstraction.  主要足够的抽象，听上去就很有道理。

They also reflect technological change. For instance, you had mail fraud in the 19th century, and telegraph scams were all the rage in the first decades of the 20th. 行骗的方式随着科技的进步而变化着

Pop music, R&B and hip-hop are all about the producer. Country music, Americana and folk music are about the songwriter.  流行音乐的核心是制作人，民俗、乡村音乐的核心是曲作者。

❷While he is figuring out his second act, he views crypto as the way to build “generational wealth” and “freedom.” I put those words in quotes because you hear them a lot in conversations around financial-sector schemes, and I am not sure they mean anything in those contexts.  如果人云亦云的讲大道理，说明还不够了解。

The average cryptocurrency trader is under 40 (mean age is 38) and does not have a college degree (55 percent). Two-fifths of crypto traders are not white (44 percent), and 41 percent are women. 玩加密货币的人群可能和我们直觉的不同。

I don’t think of blockchain as a technological innovation so much as it is a cultural iteration. 区块链不是技术革新，而是文化（价值观）的宣传。

... healthy skepticism is a good place to start when deciding whether something is a scam or merely risky. 健康的批评总是好的。

It reminds me of another legitimate scheme in higher education, which I researched and wrote about for years: Telling people that their very expensive, low-quality degrees from these schools may not be a good solution for them rarely worked. That is the power of culture. 当一个观念成了文化，就很难异议了。

# 语言

文字整体是比较直白易懂的，所以对于写作的模仿也是很好的

## 引入的方式

The best piece I have read so far on how variants change our experience of Covid is by Sarah Zhang in The Atlantic. The gist is that ...  (先介绍出处是什么，然后引入主旨gist)

Speaking of high-quality information, it is time to continue our conversation about scams and scam culture... (用speaking of 过渡，引入要讲的内容)

Off the top of my head = without careful thought or investigation.

e.g. Off the top of my head, I can list a half dozen other institutional failures and the scams that capitalized on them: cryptocurrency, counterfeit goods, degree mills, spam, identity theft, phishing.

# 结构

## 开头

两篇文章的开头都比较一致，都是由自己的生活琐事作为引入，然后开始讨论这个琐事背后引出来的社会现象（作者的sociologist 的身份会让讨论肯定往这个方向去）

❶ Happy New Year!

My family’s holiday season was far more muted than planned. Giddy from vaccines, we planned to gather in the Blue Ridge Mountains and then head to a celebration in a venue overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. Alas, the Omicron variant made both trips too risky. After I initiated “The Talk” about risk factors, we ended up canceling all of our holiday plans.

...

第一篇由假期讲到Omicron, 后面会讲到对于疫情的解读，然后开始说信息质量和 scam culture的文章重点

❷My family managed to get together for a small Thanksgiving dinner last year. It was our first gathering since April 2020. After a big meal, my cousin only wanted to talk about one thing: cryptocurrency. He is a middle-aged Black man from New York, just a few years older than I am, but those years make a huge difference in his job security. ...

第二篇由节日聚餐，过去到家人聊crypocurrency, 后面开始说blockchain 的文章主题

## 从让步，到自己观点

.... Some people talk about crypto as being revolutionary because it promises to democratize access to financial markets and give individual investors control of their destiny. .....

For my part, the discussion over Thanksgiving leftovers brought home a data point about women’s and people of color’s interest in cryptocurrency. ...

## 并列结构

When Covid hit, we were knee-deep in spoofed phone numbers slamming our cellphones about fake car warranties. We were wading through emails trying to steal our identities. We were triangulating Yelp reviews and Consumer Reports summaries with testimonials and marketing research just to buy a new mattress or an air fryer. We were checking out our own purchases at the grocery store and waiting on hold to replace the credit card that got hacked for the umpteenth time. We were staring, bleary-eyed, into apps that promised less “friction” in our everyday lives if we would just consent to tracking — not that we had a clue as to what exactly we were consenting to. ... (大的句间并列)

It is no wonder that so many of us think that we can parse vaccine trial data, compare personal protective equipment, write school policy and call career scientists idiots on Facebook. （几个连续动作的并列）

# 其他

两篇文章都有铺垫介绍后续相关内容的部分。这个当然是行文上的特点，不见得是我们一定要模仿的，只是在其他的类似大报的专栏里面比较少看到类似的安排。觉得还是挺有意思的

❶ ...In a lot of ways, scam culture is the foundation of the misinformation and disinformation that plagues our public discourse on the pandemic. Over the coming weeks, I’ll continue to unpack what this means.

❷ ....The conversation was so rich that I will write about it in a two-part discussion starting next week. (下周的专栏话题提前预告了下)

作者不仅仅有推荐自己专栏的后续文章，也会推荐类似话题其他的资料

If you want a delicious profile of one of the characters who prompted our scam culture discussion, you will want to read Olivia Nuzzi’s take on Dr. Mehmet Oz’s run for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania in New York magazine. I also enjoyed — if that is the right word for the feeling associated with a good essay about a constitutional crisis — a guest essay in The Times on the Jan. 6 riots by Jedediah Britton-Purdy....