The New York Times has a staff editorial calling on federal and state governments to push colleges to end preferential admissions treatment for children of alumni.

"Preferential treatment for legacy admissions is anti-meritocratic, inhibits social mobility and helps perpetuate a de facto class system. In short, it is an engine of inequity," the Times editorial says. "Continuing to give applicants an advantage simply because of where their parents went to school is, as one critic called it, 'a form of property transfer from one generation to another.'"

The humor here is in the Times denouncing, as obviously unfair, "property transfer from one generation to another." From the New York Times' own news article about the naming of A.G. Sulzberger as publisher: "A. G. Sulzberger will be the sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family to serve as publisher since its patriarch, Adolph S. Ochs, purchased the paper in a bankruptcy sale in 1896."

From a "Times Insider" account by Katrin Bennhold that appears in the Times under the clickbait headline "A Once-in-a Lifetime Reporting Dilemma: Should I Take My Clothes Off?":

Nudism, I discovered, was not just a quirky lifestyle choice. For many people from the former Communist East, it is among the cherished traditions that have faded somewhat since the Berlin Wall fell. Nudism had been a mini-rebellion against a Communist dictatorship, and it also represented the egalitarianism that now makes some Easterners nostalgic.

"There wasn't the social jealousy there is today, because no one was rich and nurses and engineers were paid the same," said Thomas Bandelow, a 40-year-old teacher swimming farther down the beach. "In an economy of scarcity, everyone is equal."

Nudity, too, is a leveler. And it, too, was changed by reunification.

In other words, everyone had to line up for the bananas when they were available in East Germany. But everyone could afford them.

The front-page New York Times news article about protests in Hong Kong begins, "HONG KONG — Anti-government protesters clashed with Hong Kong riot police on Tuesday, crippling the airport for the second straight day and targeting a potent symbol of the city's position as a global center of commerce and finance that is essential to China."

Anti-government isn't the correct word here, unless the Times plans to start using it to describe, say, anti-Trump protests here in the U.S. The protesters aren't anarchists, at least so far as I can tell from other news coverage. They just oppose the policies that the Chinese Communist authorities are pursuing in Hong Kong, in violation of the liberty of the people who live there and in violation of the one country, two-systems agreement by which Great Britain turned authority in Hong Kong over to China. Instead of describing the protesters as "anti-government," why not describe them as "pro-freedom" or "pro-democracy" or "pro-rule-of-law."

The second paragraph of a news article on the front of the business section of today's New York Times reports, "Mr. Trump has long carried on a one-sided feud with Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, over some of the company's business activities and also over what the president refers to as 'The Amazon Washington Post,' though Mr. Bezos owns the newspaper personally, not as a corporate asset."

"One-sided"?

The Bezos-owned Post constantly depicts Trump in the most sensational terms as a threat to democratic norms, and Trump defends himself, and the Times sees it as a "one-sided" feud? Come on.

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.