This year, I'm getting it out of my system immediately. Today the Sunday New York Times magazine again offers its annual version of "What's In" trend analysis with a faux-intellectual spin — "The Year in Ideas" theme issue — and again, it's singularly lacking in real ideas. The 78 mini-features overwhelmingly focus on:

• Computer gimmicks (mostly involving the Internet)
• Flashy consumer goods (or the marketing thereof)
• Pop psychology and sociology notions
• Technologies of crime and/or war
• Retreads from science-fiction stories of the past century

I am hard-pressed to locate any concepts that will be remembered a decade hence. Perennially, what bugs me most about "The Year in Ideas"? Overwhelmingly, the New York Times is a thoughtful, honest, useful newspaper. Here it devotes most of a major section to fluff and product promo-hype. What a pity.

Amusingly enough, a revealing typo (edit-o? HTML-o?) appears on the main Table of Contents page for the web version of the Sunday NYT magazine: amongst the index of articles is Fertile Red States — an "idea" from the 2004 issue. I've reported it; presumably it will be fixed shortly. Its presence suggests that "The Year in Ideas" is at least in format recycled annually. Oops!

(cf. YearInIdeas (16 Dec 2003), YearInIdeas2004 (30 Dec 2004), ...)

TopicThinking - TopicSociety - TopicScience - TopicHumor - 2005-12-12

(correlates: Eight Days a Week, YearInIdeas, YearInIdeas2004, ...)