Mickey Kaus writes:

New York Times Cocoon, Verified! 9:41 PM 10/16/2014 677 Caterpillars: A man named Tyler Pearson had posted a list of the 1000 Twittter accounts most commonly followed by the 677 New York Times staffers on the paper’s public list. It is, as you would expect, embarrassingly cocooned: Times staffers follow people who share the liberalish/leftish viewpoint of the Times itself, meaning these staffers are less likely to even find out discordant information. Which may be why they are so often surprised, or late to a story. …

I’ll admit to not getting Twitter. I feel like I’m being pelted by intellectual ping-pong balls. But, even so, this has to be the most boring list of Twitter accounts in captivity. Glancing through it I see one journalist who might be considered “edgy,” Matt Taibbi, and one controversial comic, Patton Oswalt. Otherwise, these 1000 Twitter accounts are immensely Respectable.

A quantitative researcher could do a lot with this list to determine the characteristics of Establishment Thought as of c. 2014. For example, back in 2009, I took the “Atlantic 50” list of supposedly the top 50 pundits and looked up their demographics. That was pretty interesting. This represents an even bigger database to analyze.

Okay, why is this huge list so boring?

– Professional backscratching. Everybody signs up to follow people who might retweet their tweets or give them a job someday.

– It’s a public list, so you’d better be respectable.

– Everybody assumes these days that nothing is private, so you’d better be respectable.

Anyway, it’s awfully dismal.