I received the following email:
Dear professor Andrew Gelman,
My name is **, a resident correspondent of **. I am writing to request for an interview via email. We met once at New York Foreign Press Center one week ago.
As you may know, President Obama will travel to China, Burma and Australia from November 10-16. In China from November 10-12, President Obama will attend the APEC Leaders Meeting and APEC CEO Summit. . . .
Could you please make a comment on what kind of impacts APEC will have . . .
Looking forward to your response.Thanks.
Best regards,
**
I replied: Hi, sorry, this is outside my area of expertise. You should ask my colleague Andrew Nathan in the poli sci dept at Columbia.
And then the correspondent wrote back:
Thank you very much for your reply. I will have a try to contact your colleague. I will be grateful if you can tell me your colleague’s email. thanks again. wish you have a nice weekend.
I didn’t reply to this one. I think a reporter should be able to find someone’s contact information! (Pro tip: try googling *andrew nathan columbia political science*.)
You can be more passive aggressive than that:
http://bit.ly/1BeUhHq
I love this, but how did you do it?
Here, I’ll help you out: http://bit.ly/1jkc5K9
Ack, too late, they already covered this! Please moderate out these posts for redundancy and me not being as original as I thought? :)
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=let+me+google+that+for+you
You go to lmgtfy.com. Type the keywords you want the person to type in. Then hit the button below the text window (“Type a question, click a button”).
Cute, thanks Shravan! Bill
Oh man, Shravan, you totally should have made a lmgtfy link for “let me google that for you” and just posted that.
Deliciously recursive.
Believe me, I thought hard about whether I should do that. But I decided I’m too nice a guy.
…wouldn’t really have been appropriate. The whole point of the hack is to tell someone who should know better how to use google to find something known to them. But Shravan’s original note didn’t mention imgtfy.com, so it would have been either pointless or rude.
If you click the link, you get a page that says “let me Google that for you” in large font. A person who wanted to find out more about this curious phenomenom might very well take the approach of Googling that phrase…
So had you really met the guy a week ago?
Rahul:
Yes, I’d really met the guy. He was a real person, not like Alex from Kansas or Marty McKee from Wolfram Research. He was not trying to sell me something or waste my time, he was just a really really lazy journalist.
….. really lazy journalist with terrible grammar.
Maybe he’s been asking for that address which is not so well-known, therefeore not overflown with mails, therefore his chances to receive a reply would be greater.
People are always asking me for Nate Silver’s private email address. I hate to break it to them that Nate doesn’t respond to my emails either!