So the New York Times Clearly Hates Mike D
- Trevor Tondro for The New York Times
- Mike D and Tamra Davis
Beastie Boy Mike D opened his Brooklyn home to the readers of the New York Times Home & Garden section yesterday and what’s more notable than any feature of his Cobble Hill townhouse is that the Times writer pretty clearly thinks that the “D” stands for dick, not Diamond.
This type of article is usually a fairly innocuous feature in the Times wherein a reporter visits celebrated rich people at their celebrated rich-people homes. However, in this specific article, there are enough passive-aggressive moments that it is not hard to believe that the writer totally hates Mike D. Oh, you need examples? Well, at one point, Mike D is referred to as a “former Beastie Boy,” and while the Times did issue a correction, stating that he is actually a “current Beastie Boy,” the dig is still in print, and lives on in the issued online correction. Plus, everyone should know that there’s no such thing as a former Beastie Boy! Once a Beastie Boy, always a Beastie Boy.
And then there’s the little matter of this sentence, which is designed to give a little biographical detail about Mike D and his family: “Mr. Diamond, who prefers not to give his age, now has two boys of his own, Davis, 10, and Skyler, 8, with his wife, Tamra Davis, a filmmaker, who also prefers not to give her age.” I mean, “who prefers not to give his age”? That is so totally the reporter’s attempt to make Diamond and his wife look like vain assholes. Which, maybe they are? Why not give your ages? Personally, I think it’s an irrelevant detail to the article but a bit of googling on my part shows that Diamond is 47 and Davis is 51, so it’s not like their ages are exactly secrets, which means that if the Times reporter wanted to include these details, she could have. I mean, hasn’t the Times ever heard of Wikipedia? Isn’t that how it usually researches most of the style pieces it does on Brooklyn? I don’t know, but that’s not really the point. The reporter didn’t really care about including their ages, she just wanted to include the fact that Diamond and Davis wouldn’t reveal their ages. Because they’re vain assholes.
So what does all this mean? Besides the fact that the Times doesn’t like Mike D? Does it mean that nothing’s sacred anymore and that all our childhood cultural icons have sold out and embraced the bourgeois lifestyle that they had always railed against? Uh, no. Of course not. Mike D grew up objectively rich in NYC and had been living what must have been a pretty nice life in Tribeca until moving to Cobble Hill. None of this really means anything, I guess, except that Mike D and Tamra Davis are sensitive about their ages. In other words, it sucks getting old no matter how rich and famous you are.
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