I'm not sure I can trust a magazine that has a grammatical error in title of an article on the front page.* Now this doesn't say anything about the quality of the article itself (who doesn't make silly mistakes) but it does speak to a lack of editorial oversight. These sorts of basic mistakes do not inspire confidence.
*bottom article on the front page: "Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Children Learning?" should be "are our children learning".
ps what is the article that convinced you to go vegatarian, sounds interesting
Snow_Falls is so contemptuous of Asterisk that he sees a blatant 'error' which 'somehow' evaded the writers and editors all this time, and assumes that this means they are that incompetent; he doesn't consider the modus tollens, that the error is deliberate and he is the one failing to understand what is a well-known GWB allusion. If he had a higher opinion of Asterisk, he might have instead checked (if he took even a second to google the title "Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Children Learning?", the first 5 hits all explain the allusion), or at least withheld judgment - but he didn't, so he just snarks here and gets to be embarrassed when someone politely explains the joke to him.
This happens all the time in places with 'context collapse', especially on Twitter - I don't know how many times I've seen someone retweet something 'stupid' or 'obviously wrong', where actually the original tweet was a pretty amusing reference that the retweeter didn't get. (For example, if someone tweets something along the lines of 'They spent $X, for that much money, they could have given every American $Y million dollars!', others might get angry about the arithmetic being wildly wrong by multiple orders of magnitude, thereby demonstrating utter innumeracy... Because the original tweeter is making fun of a famous instance of innumeracy.) It is a particularly infuriating kind of criticism because it often is done in bad faith, due to contempt and laziness and assuming the worst possible interpretation of something one has written with great effort, and it is especially irritating to be condescended to by someone who is so ignorant compared to you that they don't even realize their ignorance.
It's a pity because it makes it hard to write publicly in any way but the most boring way for the lowest common denominator, given that inevitably someone is going to come along and take your Socratic ignorance for genuine ignorance, or your playful misspelling as proof you can't even run a spellchecker, etc, and you can hardly explain every joke without vitiating them.
I'm hardly contemptuous.
If I had a higher opinion of asterisk, I would still assume it's an error as that's exactly what it looks like.
Also, do you google the title of every article you read? Why would you say this as if that's something you expect me to do.
I'm not american, Hacker News is full of us, why would you assume that a specific sentence with a grammatical error is "well known".
You don't outright call me acting in bad faith, but you sure imply it. I am not embarrased at all, though I am grateful for the other commenter explaining the very nation-specific joke.
edit: I checked the video, it's thirteen years old! I wouldn't even expect an american to remember that.
I'm not american and I wasn't familiar with that bush quote; but my first assumption upon reading that typo would probably have been "Oh, they're joking about making grammatical mistakes because the subject is schoolchildren". But then again, I had a higher opinion of the magazine to start with.
I don't think you were being contemptuous, exactly, but I do think the train of thought you were describing is one often found on Hacker News, that boils down to "stop at the first problem I see and declare the rest is probably not worth considering". Maybe that process works well for filtering out things you don't want to spend attention on, but it's going to have false positives, and maybe it's a little grating when you confidently present one of these false positives as a rebuttal to other people praising the overall quality of the writing.
(See also: that guy in this thread who got flagged for replying "Do they claim to?" implying they only engaged far enough to read the headline and come up with a sarcastic reply.)
*bottom article on the front page: "Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Children Learning?" should be "are our children learning".
ps what is the article that convinced you to go vegatarian, sounds interesting