Zoo Station
Jon Friedman wonders, with some justification, whether the New York Times is doing its readers a service by hiring Bono to write for its op-ed page.
I have no idea whether Bono will do a good job, but hose readers already have to put up with the columnar stylings of David Brooks and Maureen Dowd twice a week, plus supposed economist Ben Stein every other Sunday. While I doubt that Bono is making it to the op-ed pages on his journalistic merits, how could adding him to this stable make it appreciably worse?
Labels: Ben Stein, Bono, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, New York Times, op-ed columnists, stupid publishing tricks
Hip to Inflation Now
The New York Times every so often puts together a truly wonderful graphic, and today's illustration of what makes up the consumer price index is one of those every-so-often occasions. It is to pie charts what homemade lemon meringue pie is to those monstrosities that McDonald's passes off as apple "pies."
And it shows, in detail, the amount of work that goes into approximating the complex space of consumer spending in a large country into one dimension.
Labels: consumer price index, Excellent graphics, inflation, New York Times
Department of Cry Me a River
The lead article of one of the sections of the New York Times last week touched on one of the defining issues of our generation. Yes, the problems that rich New Yorkers have when they try to garden at their upstate summer homes are surely worthy of almost two whole pages in the newspaper, although some might wonder why the editors relegated this concern to the "Escapes" section.
To ... ardent gardeners, the flower beds and vegetable plots of their second homes are a sublime refuge, a place to leave the workaday world behind. Outsiders might view these primarily untended plots as the weekend equivalent of work camps, full of a slate of catch-up chores and the unceasing demands of hundreds of little vegetative voices: water me, feed me, weed me, protect me. They’d be right. Second-home gardeners do have it rough.
Yes, the rest of you wage-slaves trying to cope with heating costs or layoffs or simply making ends meet don't have it rough the way that the upper crust does.
Meet your so-called liberal media.
Labels: garden woes, New York Times, second homes
