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Using the highly-advanced technology of Readability.info, resident statistician Andrew Krucoff and sidekick Chris Gage compare readability between writers at New York, the New Yorker, and the NY Daily News. Oh-so-much-more inside — including "expert testimony"!

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THE REPORT:
To determine the readability of esteemed members of the media, we employed an online analysis tool developed by technologist David Taylor which measures word usage, syllables, and sentence length among other factors to calculate ease of reading scores. Using articles written by New York magazine's Adam Platt [this week's review of Per Se], Daily News's Lloyd Grove [today's column on Billboard], and the New Yorker's Sasha-Frere Jones [this week's roundup of summer pop singles], we discover some amazing results... or do we? Your guess is as good as ours, so we turned to resident genius on books and stuff, Maud Newton, to get her thoughts:

Leave it to a computer programmer to design a readability test that's incomprehensible. According to the test, Sasha gets more readable when he's calling Nick Hornby's criticism "doo-doo butter."

Background on "Readability grades" is available here, which surely explains why Lloyd Grove's column is "unreadable."

Corollary data is cross-referenced that measures brain synapse activity when reading these articles. We rigged an iPod and a wireless router with a Pringles can to Chris Gage's cat to get these results. The poor thing died in the name of science.... and so did Lloyd Grove.