Time & Perspective Quote by Arthur Hays Sulzberger

Sulzberger’s line has the clipped impatience of a man who spends his days watching information get turned into theater. He opens with a modest rule of public speech - no platitudes - then immediately flips it into a defense of the obvious. The move is canny: he acknowledges the sin (empty feel-good generalities) while arguing that “obvious” truths aren’t the same thing. Sometimes the obvious is simply the part everyone is incentivized to dodge.

The real target is a modern attention economy before we had the phrase. “This generation” isn’t just kids-these-days grumbling; it’s a diagnosis of cultural selection bias: the public, and often the press, will bypass what is clear, boring, and actionable in favor of what is darkly interpretive, grievance-ready, and niche. “Concentrating on the negative and the obscure” describes a taste for complexity that flatters the audience’s sophistication while conveniently postponing responsibility. If the problem is arcane, no one has to fix it; if it’s negative, we get the emotional charge of critique without the drag of construction.

Coming from a publisher - and specifically Sulzberger, long tied to the Times’ self-image as a civic institution - the subtext is also defensive. He’s talking about readers as much as speakers: a public that punishes plain talk as “simplistic” and rewards pessimism as “serious.” The sentence is a warning about how democracies metabolize information: not by absorbing it, but by finding clever ways to look past it.