Henry Blodget’s Illustrated 2013 Travelogue of Flying in Coach on a Long International Flight

Andrew Leonard, writing for Salon back in 2013:

The first thing wrong with the stupidest article to be posted to the Internet in the year 2013 — and possibly the entire century — is the title: “I Was Quite Surprised By Some Things On My American Airlines International ‘Economy Class’ Flight.” Even setting aside the high probability that author Henry Blodget, the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Business Insider, wrote his account of the mild horrors of nine hours cramped in the cheap seats in order to purposely troll people like me who would ruthlessly mock him and thus drive even more traffic to his site, the low-rent search-engine optimization of Blodget’s headline would still be a crime against journalism. Blodget’s made many mistakes in the past, not least the dot-com boom-era stock hyping escapades that got him banned from the securities industry for life, but this inane tale of 34,000-feet-high horror marks a new low. The man should now be denied access to a keyboard for life, or until the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first.

My working theory has always been that both things can be true: Henry Blodget really is an idiotic jackass and he’s actually clever at crafting clickbait stories. One of Blodget’s complaints is that his laptop died after 3 hours, and he didn’t bring anything to read, leaving him 5 hours with nothing to do. I’m only slightly exaggerating when I say I’d be more likely to jump out of an airplane without a parachute than I would be to board a flight without plenty of stuff to read.

★ Friday, 25 April 2025