Jesus CHRIST — this article should be taught in writing classes everywhere, specifically, on why editing is absolutely important. I'd about how this article could be vastly improved if you cut out x% of its 6,500 words, but I can't even make that estimate b/c by the time I reached the end, I was no longer sure what the point of the article was.
> A style magazine published an account of a large cash withdrawal that didn't match my understanding of banking reality. I burned several thousand dollars and a year investigating. I now doubt that account less, because I understand the context better.
I'm truly at a loss at understanding how the author spent so much time and money to arrive at basically the same conclusion made by anyone who had closely read The Cut's essay [0] and the next-day NYT followup [1]. The Cut writer's family wealth [2] was already tweeted about during the viral discussion. The police report that apparently satisfies the author's skepticism was something that could have been pursued as soon as he finished reading the article, which clearly asserts that she made a police report.
Kudos I guess for detailing this laborious process. But if it took author this long to find a police report, then maybe he could trim the roughly 2,000 words devoted to exploring how dumb the media can be.
edit: one example of how tendentious this article is:
> The writer’s positive home equity, trivially available to the bank which wrote their mortgage, is well in excess of ten years of the median household income for New York City. The writer is the president of the family charitable foundation, which per its annual filings with the IRS has in the recent past held approximately $2 million in marketable securities. And the family estate in Connecticut (which the writer’s parents live at) was featured in the local paper, highlighting two hundred years of history.
> Discovering these facts radically changed my impression of why, per the writer’s written communication with me, she was not asked for the purpose of a $50,000 withdrawal by any bank staff. It no longer looks like a surprising lapse in procedure, when someone attempted to empty their entire savings account and wasn’t even half-heartedly counseled about caution.
So the author links to U.S. Census [3], which says the median household income is $79k. But it also says the median value of an owner-occupied home is $751k. I suppose having $800k in positive home equity is different than owning a $750k home...but she's a New York City-based writer at a prestigious magazine. Even if you didn't look up her address, it should have been obvious that she was obviously a different kind of bank customer than the ones that fit Bank of America's profile for scam victim.
> A style magazine published an account of a large cash withdrawal that didn't match my understanding of banking reality. I burned several thousand dollars and a year investigating. I now doubt that account less, because I understand the context better.
I'm truly at a loss at understanding how the author spent so much time and money to arrive at basically the same conclusion made by anyone who had closely read The Cut's essay [0] and the next-day NYT followup [1]. The Cut writer's family wealth [2] was already tweeted about during the viral discussion. The police report that apparently satisfies the author's skepticism was something that could have been pursued as soon as he finished reading the article, which clearly asserts that she made a police report.
Kudos I guess for detailing this laborious process. But if it took author this long to find a police report, then maybe he could trim the roughly 2,000 words devoted to exploring how dumb the media can be.
edit: one example of how tendentious this article is:
> The writer’s positive home equity, trivially available to the bank which wrote their mortgage, is well in excess of ten years of the median household income for New York City. The writer is the president of the family charitable foundation, which per its annual filings with the IRS has in the recent past held approximately $2 million in marketable securities. And the family estate in Connecticut (which the writer’s parents live at) was featured in the local paper, highlighting two hundred years of history.
> Discovering these facts radically changed my impression of why, per the writer’s written communication with me, she was not asked for the purpose of a $50,000 withdrawal by any bank staff. It no longer looks like a surprising lapse in procedure, when someone attempted to empty their entire savings account and wasn’t even half-heartedly counseled about caution.
So the author links to U.S. Census [3], which says the median household income is $79k. But it also says the median value of an owner-occupied home is $751k. I suppose having $800k in positive home equity is different than owning a $750k home...but she's a New York City-based writer at a prestigious magazine. Even if you didn't look up her address, it should have been obvious that she was obviously a different kind of bank customer than the ones that fit Bank of America's profile for scam victim.
[0] https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-w...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/your-money/scam-new-york-...
[2] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/850...
[3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...