The NYT respects acronyms, but only up to four characters:
Why Nascar, Not NASCAR?
Auto racing fans chafe at our rules on acronyms. Here they are, from our stylebook:
acronyms. An acronym is a word formed from the first letter (or letters) of each word in a series: NATO from North Atlantic Treaty Organization; radar from radio detection and ranging. (Unless pronounced as a word, an abbreviation is not an acronym.) When an acronym serves as a proper name and exceeds four letters, capitalize only the first letter: Unesco; Unicef.
We limit the uppercasing to four letters because longer strings of capitals are distracting and tend to jump off the page.
Or at least, that used to be the rule. I can't find anything newer about their style on their site, but here's a recent article (not published under the Athletic either) that uses "NASCAR":
All of these support a single computer only, so if your home lab has multiple PCs you need a remote control KVM switch too. And separately a remote control power strip/outlet if you need that also.
KVM switches are relatively cheap[^1] so I'm surprised there isn't an integrated solution.
There are a few, like this add-on for PiKVM[1], a fully integrated version from Geekworm[2], and an as-yet unreleased 4-port IP KVM switcher from GL-iNet[3].
(Submitted title was "Astronauts on ISS told to shelter as repairs under way to fix air leaks", no doubt because that's what the article said at the time.)
It has "Live Updates" in big bold text as one of the first and most prominent lines on the page so... yes? Is that a problem?
Publications have had live-updating articles for things ongoing for years. This seems both entirely reasonable and normal, and I'm not sure what the concern or issue is.
Given that the title was highly accurate at time of submission perhaps a moderator will update the title further but the submission seems to be inline with all the guidelines. This is actually also a case where I think it wouldn't be unappreciated to deviate a bit from the article title to something like Live Updates: Astronauts on ISS told...
100% and it has regularly happened in the past as live updates change the current state. Things like service status/degradation is a big one that comes to mind which is almost the same.
The subscription fee does not and has not covered the full cost of any magazine/newspaper I'm aware as long as magazines/newspapers have existed. They've always had ads. It was just easier to look past them in print.
1. The ocean observation system began operating in 2016 and was expected to continue for 25 years.
2. It cost $48 million annually to operate the network. The Trump administration repeatedly tried to shutter it, proposing to cut its funding by 80 percent in both 2025 and again in 2026. Congress pushed back, restoring the money.
3. “One of the real tragedies here is that collecting data effectively at this site was a huge engineering challenge, and it’s not the kind of thing where you can just leave your notes for the next person who comes in,” Dr. Palevsky said. “There’s a lot of expertise that has the potential to be lost.”
The administration is, as I understand it, in violation of the constitution by shutting this down. It was funded by Congress, twice. The executive branch cannot just legally not spend that money.
> The executive branch cannot just legally not spend that money.
Time and time again this proves to be rather irrelevant to this administration. There's literally no consequences for illegal actions and even if they're called out on it all that is reactionary. The system will be well broken before a ruling.
I don't discount that it's possible that NYT headline policy could have changed in the last decade, but sensationalism when it comes to newspaper headlines is the historical norm. "Clickbait" is an ancient phenomenon:
"In A History of News, Mitchell Stephens notes sensationalism can be found in the Ancient Roman gazette Acta Diurna, where official notices and announcements were presented daily on public message boards, the perceived content of which spread with enthusiasm in illiterate societies."
Sure, if it bleeds it leads. But I've been a news consumer since the 1980s and a reader of the NYT almost as long as it's had a web site. It is my strong impression that its headlines have gotten noticeably worse. The main one that annoys me, and I don't actually see an example of it on the main page right now, is the teaser headline that forces you to click through to know what the article is even about[^1].
Edit: here's an example. Headline on the front page is "A Chaotic, Confusing Campaign: Here’s Who Should Be the Next Governor of California". Makes it sound like you're clicking through to an endorsement, right? Nope, the article is actually a voter guide. It's a completely misleading headline.
[^1]: You can often inspect the URL to see the original descriptive headline before the clickbaiters got to it which makes it even more annoying.
Blame the economics of the Internet. Companies use clickbait because it works, there have been many examples of this, and if a company wants to stay revenue generating in this day and age it must use clickbait.
Quite funny to think that we might have AI models meticulously nudging newspaper editors in order to carefully control the public's Overton Window about AI, playing some 5d chess.
My father, who died in 1981, was an inexhaustible font of wisdom and wit. I don’t know when he told me this particular three-part rule, but I’ve never forgotten it. I tweeted it three years ago, but people keep asking for it in one place, so here it is.
There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
The rest is commentary.
---
That last line is undoubtedly a reference to:
> When someone challenged Hillel the Elder (b. 110 BCE) to teach the entire Torah while his listener stood on one foot, he famously replied, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
Aside, I've always seen it spelled "fount of wisdom", but either spelling is acceptable and this seems to mostly be an American/British spelling difference:
I like the Hebrew syntax of the golden rule! I've never seen it before.
I've always like the idea of taking it a step further and trying to do unto others as they would like done unto them. However, the current state of the world has made me realize that lying to people that want to be lied to creates a flywheel of negative outcomes.
I guess the better way to improve the golden rule is to use empathy to internalize and understand the things other people are looking for, that way you can keep the golden rule simple, while not assuming that others want the same as you.
...we find that we may misjudge a man's attitude, his background knowledge, his aims, his standards ; and we may learn from our mistakes and take care even beyond the golden rule. (Karl Popper)
It's been a while since I dumped OSX and went back to Linux, but IIRC, this setting gets reset every time the system updates.
At some point Apple realized the "power user" market was too small, and they were better off treating all of their users like idiots. And that's when I left.
The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots".
Desktop power users were on the Acorn, Amiga, Atari and PC.
As NeXT "acquired" Apple, Linux users thought OS X was the UNIX experience they were looking for, and since they were never part of Apple culture, keep getting their expectations wrong.
Apple also kind of accidentally won the power user/developer market. When macbooks became synonymous with SV devs, Windows sucked for everything that wasn't Win32 development, and Linux on the desktop wasn't quite there yet (workable, but no where near the state its in today). Your only other choice was mac. It was UNIX, could dual boot windows if you needed it, so it checked the boxes is nice looking hardware (this was around 2008-2012 era, PC hardware at the time was complete crap).
They never set out to build the ultimate power user machine, their target was still general consumers. They just happened to have the right product at the right time when everything else just failed to compete.
Had desktop linux been in a better state, or had MS built WSL earlier, things might look a lot different today.
Apple did openly court Unix users during the early days of Mac OS X. As a teenager during this era, Macs of this era were my dream machines due to Mac OS X, and I was so happy to buy an 2006 MacBook the summer after my freshman year of college with money earned from a summer research internship.
"With the Power Mac G5, a researcher can now run both productivity applications and high-performance UNIX applications on a single system. Mac OS X Panther includes 64-bit optimized system math, vector and image libraries that take maximum advantage of the 64-bit G5 processor."
There was also a cluster in Virginia made of Power Mac G5s, which Apple also touted.
Yes, as they were fighting for getting out of bankruptcy and were reverse acquired by NeXT.
I also attended a marketing session at CERN, when they came to visit our IT department in 2003, when there were still people using Sun pizza boxes as their desktops (aka SPARCstation).
Anyone that has been around Apple long enough can recognise the old Apple (pre-OS X), on current Apple, now that they can be their old self.
Any good biography on Steve Jobs, like The Next Big Thing, Folkore or Cult of Mac, will show that underlying culture.
Mac when I got started on it in the 00s was really dependent on everything to do with creative - Photoshop, publishing, etc. It kept that for a decade or more, and added a ton of the software developers market in the 2007-2017 era. During that era, they at least made a show of seeing us as an important demographic. Since about that time though they've had so much success in the "mainstream" that it seems like if there is any decision where software developers would want X and it would be better for mainstream nontechnical users if Y, they go with Y every time, and often no longer even bother accommodating the "X" use case at all.
Silly point: Years ago, the iChat client that is the forefather of "Messages" on Mac let you choose a sound for an alert, and it would include whatever sounds you had put in ~/Library/Sounds. Today, it only offers the fixed list of canned alert sounds that shipped with the computer. Because why would a mere user even know what a wav or aiff file is? Why should the user get to choose?
I don't think Apple was ever really strong with the "idiots" market until the iPhone halo effect came into being, as much as they may have tried in their marketing.
That market always bought the cheapest machine (or "best value", by specs/$) they could find (or, if they were really an "idiot", the machine that Best Buy had the highest commission on), which would be a PC.
In the beige days, Apple's bread was buttered in the publishing market, once they moved to OS X, they got the "professional nerds who wanted UNIX but not doing sysadmin at home".
Why Nascar, Not NASCAR?
Auto racing fans chafe at our rules on acronyms. Here they are, from our stylebook:
acronyms. An acronym is a word formed from the first letter (or letters) of each word in a series: NATO from North Atlantic Treaty Organization; radar from radio detection and ranging. (Unless pronounced as a word, an abbreviation is not an acronym.) When an acronym serves as a proper name and exceeds four letters, capitalize only the first letter: Unesco; Unicef.
We limit the uppercasing to four letters because longer strings of capitals are distracting and tend to jump off the page.
https://archive.nytimes.com/afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/...
Or at least, that used to be the rule. I can't find anything newer about their style on their site, but here's a recent article (not published under the Athletic either) that uses "NASCAR":
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/sports/autoracing/kyle-bu...
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