I’m not a fan of the New York Times wedding announcements.
Based upon some number crunching by The Atlantic, it’s clear that these announcements amount to lists of white people who graduated from Ivy League schools, work as Congressional staffers, and/or work as elite attorneys.
Not exactly scintillating reading.
Not exactly folks in need of any more attention than they’re already received in life.
There’s actually a website designed to a searchable database of nearly 60,000 NYT wedding announcements from 1981 through 2016 that allowed you to plot n-gram frequency and visualize trends across 30+ years of nuptials.
The website creator’s goal: The New York Times’s wedding section is a perfect natural experiment designed to answer the question: What do the world’s most self-important people think is important?
All you have to do is watch how phrases like “Prospect Park,” “magna cum laude”, “hedge fund,” and “met at Harvard, Yale or Princeton” have soared in popularity in the last 10-20 years to know who you are dealing with in these announcements.
While this correction from an October wedding announcement is certainly not indicative of every New York Times wedding announcement, I suspect that it could only happen in a New York Times engagement announcement.
