The Next Time You Go To Share That Bad Parenting Story Please Think About The Children

“’Are people writing these stories knowing that they’re going to be mocked horrendously on the Internet?’ asks Benjamin Kabak, proprietor of the trend-mocking Twitter account The Times Is On It. At least some of them appear to be in on the joke. The Times headline for the artsitter piece is the inoffensive ‘Where Babysitting is Truly an Art,’ but when Giridharadas tweeted out the story from his own account, he adopted a cheekier tone: ‘Let grown-ups have personal chefs & personal pilots. Kids have the personal artist, rentable as babysitter.’ (Giridharadas and a couple other trend story authors either declined to be interviewed for this story or didn’t immediately respond to a request.) Either way, ‘they keep running these stories, and recycling them every few months,’ Kabak says — and he keeps hate-tweeting them, sending traffic the Times’ way. Everybody gets a piece of the action, except the kids.”