Contrarianness is a great and good thing—when driven by reason and facts. But contrarianness for its own sake is often the very definition of asininity.
Sing it, brother!
For what it's worth, my answer to the question of what's wrong with Slate has all to do with the way that they organize their content. Just look at the URL for Goldberg's essay: http://www.slate.com/id/2143233/
id/2143233/? Just what you'd expect from an online magazine underwritten by Microsoft.
To take another example, consider the Blogging the Bible series.[1] Note that I didn't link to it. The reason is that there isn't a stable url, slate.com/bloggingthebible for example, where I can go to reliably get to the feature. The best I can do is http://www.slate.com/id/2143176/entry/0/, but of course I only found that because there happens to be a link to it on the splash page, which there might not be on some other day.
And since I'm criticizing online magazines, let's add that the magazine most in need of a "What's the matter with X" feature is Salon, which is pretty much unreadable these days.[2]
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1 Which series is not recommended by this writer. It's just that I couldn't be troubled to dig to find a series that I actually like.
2 With the exception of King Kaufman's Sports Daily, of course.
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