I see this that Yahoo Finance has added columnists to its site. While a welcome step forward from living off the Reuters-delivered finance & investing feed, the current crop of YF columnists is a motley crew that should deservedly go mostly unread.
Case in point, the ubiquitous Ben Stein, who, like monkeys and typewriters, can periodically write a decent column, but who more often writes over-obvious cliche-ridden stuff, while relying for frisson on Ben’s fading star power and mashed-up economist/actor/gameshow/writer bio.
Today’s Stein column is a good example. It loses me in the first para with a pet peeve of mine, the cliche “May you live in interesting times”. Leaving aside, for a moment, how dreadfully overused the empty phrase is (Google counts 133,000 uses on the web), Stein doesn’t even have the curiosity to realize (and maybe even play off) that the phrase’s origins itself are highly suspect. Most Chinese scholars don’t recognize it from Chinese literature, and about as close as you can get is a Chinese proverb that goes something like, “It’s better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period.”
I think you get my point. And overall, the same point holds for most of the new Yahoo Finance columnists, except, perhaps, for Jeremy Seigel, who is at least able to turn conventional wisdom on its head now and then. But other than that, this is a predictable and boring bunch, little different from what you would read in any random newsstand financial publication. Where are some fresh, fun, and lively voices, people who you read because of how they say what they say, not just because they put out machine prose about personal finance?
Yo, Scott Moore, you listening?
[Update] Unless I’m missing something, the columnists section of Yahoo Finance has no RSS/Atom feed. Hello, what in the world is up with that? It is 2005, people.
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Probably competing with TheStreet.com adding Lenny ‘Nails’ Dykstra, the former Mets center field.
Your snarky item on LA, posted above, should be considered when you complain about how Yahoo chooses it’s ‘talent’.
Remember, Yahoo is now a media company, don’t you know, run by entertainment geniuses from Santa Monica.
So leave Ben Stein alone… it’s not his fault.
Snarky? Moi? Actually, I’m strangely fond of LA — just wouldn’t want to live there. Am fascinated by Mike Davis’s Apocalypse Now stuff about the city, for example.