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Sins Of Omission: Does Provocative Opinion Writing Leave Things Out?

I never said that, not even once

3 min readMay 18, 2023
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This past weekend I was sucked into an article in the Times, titled “,” by Nicholas Kristof.

What a title! How could you not click on that? Just reading it gave me a little rush of dopamine. That villainous little almond! Thank goodness I drink oat milk, not almond milk! I felt a little virtuous immediately.

That villainous little almond!

Then I started reading. The enemy wasn’t just the almond. It was farming. The enemy wasn’t simply farming. It was the way water was priced, or that it wasn’t priced, instead, given away through first-come first-served historical irrigation rights. But throughout the article, frequently enough, it was all about farmers irrigating almond orchards.

As if there was nothing else that takes up a lot of water.

Let me think for a minute. No, I don’t need a whole minute. Hey, how about beef?

Hey, how about beef?

It’s no surprise there was an uproar in the comments section. As of this moment, 1760 comments have poured in. The second favorite Reader’s Pick, by a writer going by the name TJ, pointed…

Sharmila Shankarkumar
Sharmila Shankarkumar

Written by Sharmila Shankarkumar

Writer living in New York. Published in McSweeneys, Slackjaw, and Points In Case. Winner of writing contests you've never heard of.

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