The writer purports to make a case about the profit motives of the New York Times, but the graphs are presented without broader context. A more convincing graphic might be to put these graphs side-by-side with Google Books Ngram Viewer graphs of the same terms, since the Google Books data would presumably represent a wider sample of the culture at large.<p>The writer of the Twitter thread does mention Google Trends in passing, but only to hand-wave it away by saying that we "don't see corresponding spikes." Citation needed, I guess, since the Google Books data (which strikes me as a better comparison corpus than Trends) often _does_ show a large uptick, suggesting a given trend is more cultural than specific to the NYT. And in many cases, how could the data _not_ show a spike, given that a lot of the words on the graphic (e.g., "intersectionality," [1] "mansplaining," [2]) were not part of common parlance a decade ago?<p>That said, there are certainly also cases where the slope on the NYT graph for a given word is much steeper than the corresponding uptick in the Google Books data (e.g., "sexism" [3], "patriarchy" [4]). To some extent, I think this is to be expected, because the respective publication schedules + subject matter of news sites vs. books leads the former to react more quickly and decidedly to short-term linguistic trends. Nonetheless, I think singling out cases where the NYT clearly diverges from the culture at large would go further to make that author's point -- which, I should be clear, I think is reasonable one and strikes me as basically "right," and I believe it's an argument that could probably be illustrated by data. I'm just not convinced that the data presented in the Twitter thread makes the powerful case that the author claims.<p>[1] <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&year_end=2019&year_start=1970&content=intersectionality&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cintersectionality%3B%2Cc0" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&year_end=2019&year_start=1970&content=mansplaining&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cmansplaining%3B%2Cc0" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&year_end=2019&year_start=1970&content=sexism&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csexism%3B%2Cc0" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&year_end=2019&year_start=1970&content=patriarchy&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cpatriarchy%3B%2Cc0" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&...</a>