Specious trend of the day: icing

Actual trend of the day: 17 year-old girls drinking sugar liquor

Because I am very old, I read the New York Times in order to keep up with various social trends. It’s a little like reading Madeleine L’Engle to keep up with developments in contemporary physics: one encounters compelling stories, if not reports of, you know, this world. Tuesday, the Times turned the tables on its old adversary reality with this article about icing, which suggests that the trend—of which actual evidence exists, for once—may itself be artificial. It’s a Times trend piece in reverse: the people doing it believe in it, and the newspaper thinks it’s made up. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The reader not wearing flip flops and a khaki visor may ask, what is icing? To which I reply: take a knee, bro.

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