[danso]

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.

[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...

[pchristensen]

Patrick's audience (for BAM especially) is 1) people who enjoy or are professionally interested in nitty gritty details of financial regulation, and 2) people who enjoy Patrick's personality and writing style. It's ok to not belong to either group.

And the point of the article is basically: Patrick can get obsessive about details, and here is an example of how that plays out in real life.

[danso]

It's not word-count or details that I'm averse to, but purposeless word count. Patrick spends a huge amount of words alluding to why he thinks The Cut's story is total horseshit — and let's be clear, it was a comically bewildering story by any standards. But all of those details are pointless when the story abruptly concludes with "Well, she said it to the police so I guess it's likely not bullshit". If anything, I wanted more words of reflection by Patrick, explaining what made him so willing to bet an extravagant amount of time and money in investigating something so trivially affirmed? AFAICT, his skepticism starts from the assertion of "Banks just don't let an average person take out $50k in cash in a day". How is that assertion addressed by the fact that the victim gave the police a brief report of events? As if it wasn't possible that someone who fabricated this massive story in NYMag wouldn't also fib to the police?

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

The assertion is addressed by:

1. The discovery of new facts that explain why a bank that won't let the average person take out $50k in cash would still plausibly let this person take out $50k in cash

2. The story having (verifiable) details that would be unlikely to exist if someone fabricated it, unless they went through a massive effort to fabricate a perfect story. While it is possible to fabricate a story that would pass thorough scrutiny, most fabricated stories would show inconsistencies or otherwise fall apart if looked at this closely.

[danso]

Here's the graf that most resembles a thesis statement:

> Then, I read the article, with a particular attention to the paragraph quoted above. I felt that several elements of this paragraph were inconsistent with the standard practice of banking.

The quoted paragraph that he refers to:

> When I reached the bank, I told the guard I needed to make a large cash withdrawal and she sent me upstairs. Michael [a member of the scamming team] was on speakerphone in my pocket. I asked the teller for $50,000. The woman behind the thick glass window raised her eyebrows, disappeared into a back room, came back with a large metal box of $100 bills, and counted them out with a machine. Then she pushed the stacks of bills through the slot along with a sheet of paper warning me against scams. I thanked her and left.

How does "The Bank of America branch that she named by address (in the police report) has a second-floor teller window" a meaningful verification of the NYMag's problematic paragraph? Unless you think that literally the main problem with the NYMag graf is the first sentence: I told the guard I needed to make a large cash withdrawal and she sent me upstairs

> The story having (verifiable) details that would be unlikely to exist if someone fabricated it

She knows there's a Bank of America on 1 Flatbush Avenue. You really think that someone who spent months writing and working with an editor to publish a massive fabrication is too lazy to actually visit that actual location, especially when it's a short subway stop from her home?

[jccalhoun]

> > 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.

Agreed. The author could have written, "it turns out the writer was from a wealthy family, grew up in a 200 year old home, and is president of the family's $2 million charity."

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

I generally hate long form articles. Something about this one was sufficiently different that I enjoyed reading it from start to end.

I think a big part of it is that there isn't any actual bullshit filler, and a lot of interesting information (even though it may not be critical for the TL;DR of the story). Most long form articles end up describing irrelevant details like the weather on the day of the interview, or the interior decoration of someone's house. Here, it's immediately clear why every piece of information is included, the article shares a lot of background information but tells something interesting with every paragraph.