Reading through the Yiannopoulos ms with editorial notes in full.
1. He's just a terrible writer, full stop. That's (mostly) not about politics, it's about laziness
2. The ed notes have the exasperated tone of professor grading a paper from a sophomore who thinks he's clever
1. He's just a terrible writer, full stop. That's (mostly) not about politics, it's about laziness
2. The ed notes have the exasperated tone of professor grading a paper from a sophomore who thinks he's clever
I say "mostly" not about politics because Yiannopoulos' writing experience is at Breitbart, whose rhetorical aims are not precision, clarity or fact but merely slapdash partisanship. It's not where he would learn to be a good writer even if he had had such an inclination.
Breitbart awards "cleverness" over good, solid writing/journalism, which is a lazy, snarky partisan writer's dream job. It also means Yiannopoulos was utterly unprepared for an environment where even a low standard of rhetorical rigor was required, i.e., a "big five" publisher.
(Which is not to imply Yiannopoulos is a victim of Breitbart's low standards; I strongly suspect he was delighted to have a gig that required nothing of him but "cleverness" to get a modicum of notoriety. Effort does not appear to be his strong suit.)
My suspicion is that S&S's take on Yiannopoulos was that they could take his work and fix it in the edit. But the sheer volume of the editorial notes (along with the crash schedule of production) strongly suggests this belief was... optimistic.
So S&S dropped him, Yiannopoulos self-published, he sold well enough to his committed fans, and I suspect he will never become a better writer because he has no reason to. Being lazy and "clever" works well enough for his purposes. There's a moral there somewhere, I'm sure.
And now, as compensation for discussing such an unpleasant fellow in detail, please accept this picture of a cat. 
