stephen.nyc

Tag: New York Times

  • now I'm fucking grieving and crying šŸ™

    — Stephen Petrey (@stephen.nyc) 2026-08-12T14:03:32.176Z
  • Nearly 300 episodes later, Hot Ones still gets it

    Nearly 300 episodes later, Hot Ones still gets it

    From The New York Times:

    ā€œā€˜Hot Onesā€™ was just the dumbest idea of all time,ā€ Schonberger said, only half-joking. ā€œHow is it, philosophically, that the dumbest idea is the best?ā€

    ā€œItā€™s like, well, we canā€™t just have people get drunk or high,ā€ he went on, ā€œbut I think we can get people to eat spicy food, which might just be hilarious.ā€

    It’s true. The best ideas, are almost exclusively the dumbest ones. Hot Ones came about at the perfect time too. Right around the same time Hot Ones was taking off, the Hot Pepper Challenges were making the rounds on YouTube and the web. Sean Evens and the show came onto the scene at the perfect time. I hope their spicy wings burn bright and strong forever ????

  • Death, Through a Nurse’s Eyes

  • New York has been re-classified as a sub-tropical climate region

    Measurable climate change has slowly been affecting the coastlines of the Americas for several years now. That’s no secret of course. Rising coastlines, ravaging seas, devastating hurricanes, and superstorms have been battering coastal cities and don’t seem to be letting up. Even, tourist island havens have been completely wiped off the Earth.

    It doesn’t end there of course. Even the Southwestern regions are having trouble keeping up with extreme storm systems. We’re nearing hurricane season, and due to a weakened arctic jetstream, we may see more extreme weather phenomena as more “blocking” events become the norm. Think brutal heatwaves and more and more frequent intense winter storms.

    All of that is separate from the larger story ā€” year over year climate temperatures since 1972, has risen in steadily here New York. So, as a result, the region has now been reclassified as a sub-tropical climate region. As someone who grew up in Texas, it’s wild that NYC and the Lone Star State have climatological patterns in common. Granted, Texas experienced very long humid summers, while NYC’s summers a tad shorter. But that humidity, is particularly rough.

    Here’s more climate types documented across the US:

    Current as of February 2021 according to Wikipedia

  • Christopher Plummer Has Died

    Last night, we watched Knives Out to celebrate Christopher Plummer’s life and incredible career in film. He has a wonderful presence on the big screen, a big heart and the most beautiful voice. I’m going to miss him. Rest in peace.

    If you’ve never seen Beginners, watch it. Right now. Don’t wait any longer. It’s that great.

  • An Inside Look at The New York Times Publishing Tech Stack

    An Inside Look at The New York Times Publishing Tech Stack

    As a WordPress Guy, and advocate for online publishing ā€” I’ve always been curious about the New York Times digital publishing “stack.” A lot has changed since the printed word.

    Text editors, paragraph blocks, header arrangements, interactive graphs, revision history, and data structures ā€” journalists these days have a lot more responsibilities to handle than just a story. They’re more akin to data scientists or librarians handling meta-data with caution and organizational finesse than the classical depiction of journalists.

    I was surprised to read that the New York Times employs a CMS called Oak, which was built on the backbone of a simple text editor called ProseMirror. An un-opinionated open-source text editor. I was taken back by this line: 

    ProseMirror structures its main elementsā€Šā€”ā€Šparagraphs, headings, lists, images, etc.ā€Šā€”ā€Šas nodes. Many nodes can have child nodesā€Šā€”ā€Še.g., a heading_basic node can have child nodes including a heading1 node, a byline node, a timestamp node and image nodes. This leads to the tree-like structure I mentioned above.

    It’s neat to see their CMS take on a node-tree structure (which is ultimately a appropriation other have taken as well such as HTML/XML/JSON). It’s smart. I would have loved to see what their process and CMS looked like before.

    Did you notice the parent-nodes have a similarity to another data structure paradigm, say blocks? In WordPress-land, blocks are coming soon, and once that happens, the data-structure pandora’s box will have been opened. In the simplest, most modest comparison, Gutenberg will only have parent blocks. No children. But that could all change later down the road. 

    Food for thought: if the New York Times can transition to a successful implementation of complex data structures, modern CMS composer capabilities ā€” surely WordPress/Gutenberg could employ similar techniques and follow in that same spirit.