The business section of today's Times contains an article about magazines using the Internet to sign up new subscribers. The article quotes the president of American Online claiming that AOL had sold 500,000 subscriptions to Time Inc. magazines in the past 5 months. The Times writes that the "figures beg a compelling set of questions for the magazine industry," and then proceeds to list a number of questions: "Will subscriptions gained online be as reliable as those obtained through traditional methods? Is there a possible liability in the vogue on the Internet for signing up so-called 'evergreen' subscriptions?" This is a pretty loose use of the expression "to beg the question," which technically is a description of a fallacy in logic, the fallacy of assuming as proved the very thing one is trying to prove. The article goes on to paraphrase a publishing executive as saying that "if less than 50 percent of subscribers did not fulfill their payments, then Time Inc. risked sending out millions of free issues to people who never intended to pay their bills, or 'bad-pay copies.'" That is an awkward, sloppily written sentence in several ways, but once you figure out what the Times seems to be attempting to communicate, it seems clear that the sentence would make more sense if the word "less" were replaced with "more."
Tony Schwartz: A letter to the editor in today's New York Times that purports to be from the creator of the original "Daisy" political advertisement from 1964 is signed "Tony Schwarz." A news story in Friday's Times referred to the creator of the political ad as "Tony Schwartz." It's unlikely that Mr. Schwartz legally changed the spelling of his name over the weekend.