On Thursday, Amanda Hess wrote about the media talking down to women. In a piece called “Enough With the Ageist, Sexist Mom Jokes,” Hess wrote about a story in The New York Times on Tuesday and how the act of having a child does not actually lower IQ or the ability to understand complex topics.
I heard about “How to Explain Bitcoin to Your Mom” from my mother, of course, who spotted the item on the Times’ twitter feed. She is a New York Times subscriber (since the audience of the NYTimes.com is 52 percent female with a median age of 47, I assume moms are a key demographic for the newspaper), so she is well-aware of the paper’s near-constant coverage of the cryptocurrency, even though these articles are written using grown-up words and not pretty pictures. (The same cannot be said for my father: When I called and asked him “What is Bitcoin?,” he replied, “I’ve been asking everybody the same thing for months.”)