I have some opinions about the articles this week. In particular I have a lot of opinions about the Time Magazine 100 influential people of 2017 article.
I’ll start off with the Rolling Stone article about 25 important people that are shaping our near future. I don’t really have much to say about it. It was certainly interesting, and I learned a lot from it about some amazing people that are doing some incredible things. With all of the negative stories that get released most of the time from basically every news outlet, it was refreshing to read an article about people that are trying to stop the end of the world. Or at least make it a better place. One that stood out as particularly interesting to me was Manu Prakash: High-Tech for Low-Cost Medicine. His idea that “if you make science accessible and scalable, it will have impacts on global health and education beyond our imagination,” is particularly attractive. It’s impressive when seen put into practice with his “Foldscope”: “an origami-inspired paper microscope capable of high-powered imaging, the component materials of which cost just $1.” The Rolling Stone article was, in fact, particularly interesting throughout.
The Time Magazine article was not so interesting. Or maybe it was interesting, just in a way that was also useless and frustrating to talk about. Sure, there are 100 people on this list, but I have so many problems with most of them. The writing is terrible here, this person has done nothing important there, this one’s bio is written by a total idiot that also happens to be incredibly biased.
One of my huge issues here is that some of these people are not even close to being influential. Ivanka Trump? Jared Kushner? Those forgettable puppets are seriously supposed to be among the 100 most influential people of last year? Preposterous. Ed Sheeran? James Corden? A bland pop artist and an insufferable entertainer? I just feel like these people aren’t nearly as influential as this article would paint them to be.
And that’s not even to say who these are written by. Close friends, other celebrities, political allies. All completely biased in a way that can ultimately be very misleading. The Donald Trump piece written by Paul Ryan should be considered a crime for being so very inaccurate. Yes, Donald Trump is (unfortunately) influential. No no no, he is not keeping promises or doing anything good for this country. How could Time Magazine post such blatant misinformation?
Of these articles, one was very unique and useful, and the other was simply a piece of mindless internet content, to be consumed by Time Magazine’s audience, and forgotten about five minutes later. There is nothing to be learned from the Time Magazine article. As far as I’m concerned, when you are creating a piece of writing, pointlessness is the biggest crime that you can commit.