Conspiracy theory du jour: Slate secretly controlled by Microsoft!

Slate, Microsoft, conspiracy...

We know this one sounds totally crazy. The only people who believe Microsoft controls the media are Linux junkies who subsist on Everquest, Jolt and Internet porn. So we’re a little baffled that the seemingly normal Andrew Hearst seems to have subscribed to that theory:

“One of the weirder style sheet idiosyncrasies I’ve noticed in recent years is Slate’s use of superscript for ordinal suffixes—e.g., the ‘st’ in ’21st.’ [Ed.—i.e., 21st]…I know of no respectable publication, print or online, that shares this style sheet tic…But all becomes clear when you consider Slate’s long association with Microsoft, the company that launched Slate and owned it for almost a decade before selling it to The Washington Post Company a few months ago.

AW+

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