An anti-Semitic cartoon published by the New York Times is the topic of a piece I wrote for the Algemeiner, and a second follow-up piece. I occasionally wonder if the time I spend criticizing that newspaper for its coverage of Israel and Jewish issues is worth it; these sorts of situations, in which even the vice president of the United States is marking the problem, the Times itself is apologizing, and a columnist of the Times is faulting his own newspaper for mainstreaming anti-Zionism, help to provide some validation on that front. At least I saw where this was headed, or what was involved.

One of the best things about the election results in Israel was the opportunity to write this column for the Algemeiner.

A news article on the front of the Times business section about President Trump's choice to head the World Bank, David Malpass, reports, "Big questions remain about how Mr. Malpass, a little-known Treasury Department official who has previously criticized multilateral institutions for overstepping their authority, will run the 75-year-old institution."

Today's print New York Times carries a special section about how President Trump is wrecking the environment. I stopped reading at this sentence: "Mr. Trump's regulatory ambitions extend beyond Republican distaste for what they considered unilateral overreach by his Democratic predecessor; pursuing them in full force, Mr. Trump would shift the debate about the environment sharply in the direction of industry interests, further unraveling what had been, before the Obama administration, a loose bipartisan consensus dating in part to the Nixon administration."

A photo cutline on the front page of the arts section of Saturday's Times, at least in my home-delivered print New England edition, reads, "The audience is unseen for the first half of 'Springsteen on Broadway,' which debut's on Sunday."

My hardcover Times Manual of Style and Usage insists, "debut. Use it as a noun (made a debut) or a modifier (debut recital), never as a verb (debuted)."

Even if one were to use it as a verb, doing so by adding an apostrophe "s" seems like a particularly egregious way of going about it.

A front-page New York Times news article reports about the backfiring of Senator Elizabeth Warren's decision to take a DNA test and disclose the results in connection with her claims of Native American ancestry: "Allies in Boston pointed out that, in Ms. Warren's recent re-election effort in Massachusetts, there was no evidence that the DNA announcement hurt her standing among voters."

These "allies" may have pointed that out, but it's the job of the Times to apply some skepticism and fact-checking before passing those claims along to Times readers. Here is a November 28, 2018, press release from UMass Amherst about the results of its most recent poll:

The New York Times obituary of Harold Levy, a chancellor of the New York City public schools, includes this passage:

Appointed on an interim basis by the Board of Education in January 2000, explicitly against the wishes of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Levy, a small, energetic man who arrived at his new office in a pinstriped suit carrying a pillow embroidered with "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished," faced daunting challenges directing the nation's largest public school system.

It was a behemoth with 1.1 million students, 84 percent of them from minority groups; 78,000 teachers whose contracts were expiring and whose ranks faced heavy retirement losses; an aging infrastructure of 1,145 schools, most of them overcrowded and decrepit, and a $13 billion budget that experts called inadequate.

An article on the front of the Times business section reports on companies that are offering online banking services:

Several other established companies are also moving in. Acorn, which attracted four million customers to its investing app, is about to start offering its customers a debit card to spend their money. And SoFi, originally an online lender, has added a bank account offering this year. Even Amazon is rumored to be working on a checking account for younger customers.

The New York Times has a highly favorable architecture review of the two-year, $205 million renovation of the Ford Foundation's Manhattan headquarters, an update that apparently includes the conversion of the former president's suite into new conference rooms named after Wilma Mankiller and Fannie Lou Hamer.

The New York Times has now issued a formal correction of the error in the North Korea editorial it published last week. The error was the subject of a Smartertimes item.

The Times correction reads: "An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly said that President Trump's special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, has yet to meet a North Korean official since his appointment. Mr. Biegun has met several senior North Korean officials, but he has not held working-level talks with his designated North Korean counterpart, the vice foreign minister Choe Son-hui."

A New York Times article about the Presidential Medal of Freedom reports: "Mr. Obama honored President George Bush."

Because there have been two presidents named George Bush, that sentence in the New York Times isn't particularly helpful. In cases, such as this one, where it's not easily or immediately apparent from the context which president is meant, the Times would do its readers a favor by using middle initials — George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush — to distinguish.

In case you were wondering, it was George H.W. Bush who received the medal from Obama.

In a front-page New York Times news article about the presidential prospects of Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, comes this passage: "Throughout his political career, he has championed populist platitudes like the 'dignity of work' that have resonated with working-class voters in all corners of Ohio while also supporting liberal social causes like women's reproductive rights and L.G.B.T.Q. rights."

The Times repeats the language in a photo cutline: "Mr. Brown has championed platitudes like the 'dignity of work' that have long resonated with working-class voters in all corners of Ohio."

A "platitude," according to my authoritative Webster's Second Unabridged dictionary, is "commonplaceness, dullness, insipidity; as there was much platitude in his remarks" or "a trite, dull, or commonplace remark, especially one uttered as if it were a novelty or matter of importance."

A New York Times editorial, "North Korean Nuclear Shell Game," about the Trump administration's North Korean nuclear diplomacy complains about "no deadlines, no verification regime, no penalties for noncompliance," and asserts, "Mr. Trump's special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, has yet to meet a North Korean official more than two months since his appointment."

Never mind the hypocrisy and inconsistency — the Times cheerleads for sketchy nuclear deals with Iran and even with North Korea when they are reached by Democratic administrations, but once a Republican gets into office, all of a sudden the Times editorials sound like they are being ghostwritten by Frank Gaffney.

Never mind that the Times doesn't even acknowledge the Trump administration's significant accomplishment of achieving the safe release of three Americans who had been held hostage by North Korea.

From the latest article in the New York Times' coverage of the Harvard admissions affirmative action case:

Claire Jean Kim, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of California, Irvine, said the Harvard lawsuit is the "continuation of a historical dynamic that's been around for almost two centuries."

It's been a long time in coming since Smartertimes first reported on the trips back in 2014, but the New York Times is finally suspending the money-making, journalist-guided luxury trips it has been running to Iran. The Algemeiner has news of the Times decision.