THIS PERSON DOESN’T EXIST ANYMORE!

Positano is essentially an outdoor photo studio. (Wiki photo)

A “potted history” is a low-quality and superficial summary of past events. To me, it comes with a note of fraud; a Wikipedia cut-and-paste job. 

I propose a new genre, similar low-quality and fraud-adjacent. The potted present.

Two examples found me on the same day: One in “Doing the Work,” a very high-profile cover story by Ian Buruma in Harper’s and the other in “The Case Against Travel,” a stratospherically high-profile article by Agnes Callard in The New Yorker. 

Both Buruma and Callard are writers I hugely admire. So let’s set that aside. I find much to like in both articles. But the two writers’ use of the potted present reminds me that I see it as a serious flaw in a piece of writing—and its use suggests that writers have been vigilantly maintaining their ignorance about the lush and robust and strange ways that people live now, ignorance that in many cases could be remedied if they simple read the reporting in the very publications for which they write.