This morning's—the January 3, 2021—print New York Times Sunday Book Review includes a review that begins with this sentence: "Barring some variant of an 'October surprise,' the upcoming presidential election seems unlikely to turn on questions of foreign policy."
"Upcoming presidential election"? Is the Times talking about 2024 already? Or am I caught in a time warp? October 2020 is already behind us.
The online version of the review indicates that it was "published Oct. 6. 2020" and "Updated Dec. 21, 2020." Whoever did the updating must not have been paying too close attention.
The Times editors have the job of running an online operation and simultaneously running a print operation. Sometimes the two get too far out of synch, as seems to have happened here, with the print version of a review appearing nearly three full months later than the online version. That is a long enough lag to make the lead sentence of the review obsolete.
While I can understand how this happened, it is nonetheless a bit jarring. Given all the editors the Times employs, and all the money print subscribers pay, you'd think the paper would be a bit more attentive to smoothing out these issues. That way readers of the print book review can spend more time focusing on the books and ideas, and less time stopped in their tracks trying to understand why the Times is speculating in January about a possible October surprise in an election that happened the previous November.