An excellent question from Paul Goldberger, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for his architecture criticism for the New York Times: "How can @nytimes write whole piece on new Apple hq, cite design details, and never mention architect, Norman Foster?"

The offending Times story is here.

The replies to Mr. Goldberger's Tweet are also worth a quick scroll — quite a few mention that the Times is not what it once was and that the newspaper is laying off a bunch of editors.

Foster's involvement would be particularly interesting to the Times' New York-based readers because of his involvement on the World Trade Center site and in a largely aborted plan to redesign the New York Public Library.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, and it's just a coincidence, but it sure looks possible that Times columnist David Brooks read my criticism of his column and, in a subtle way, responded in his own column. Here's the back and forth:

My June 23 criticism:

From David Brooks' column, offering advice to people in their 20s:

"If you are going to be underemployed, do it in a way that people are going to find interesting later on. Nobody is ever going to ask you, 'What was it like being a nanny?' They will ask you, 'What was it like leading excursions of Outward Bound?'

This is bad advice in so many ways. First (in unfortunately classic David Brooks fashion), it is outward-directed rather than inner-directed. Who are these "people" that Mr. Brooks thinks one should live one's life to impress? Isn't it instead better to live in a way that suits one's own character? If someone loves little children but hates the woods, maybe that person would be better off as a nanny than as an Outward Bound leader.

Mr. Brooks' June 30 column, riffing on what Cass Sunstein calls the difference between "tuners" and "spinners":

It should be said that both spinning and tuning are patterns of social interaction. They are patterns of being outer directed (now there's a social category type with legs!).

Some people are inner directed. Their way of being in the world is based less on a pattern of interaction and more on a way of projecting what's inside to the surrounding environment. Let's call these people projectors.

I'd say a lot of heroes are projectors. Their primary attachment is to an ideal. They can go through life faithful to that ideal and carry on despite a blizzard of abuse or indifference. I'm thinking of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Aung San Suu Kyi.

On the other hand, there are some projectors whose primary attachment is to some psychosis, some emotional or narcissistic wound. They project outward from that. I add this distinction because every social typology has to have a slot for Donald Trump.

Again, maybe it's just a coincidence that Mr. Brooks is making an "outer directed" and "inner directed" distinction in his column just a week after I called him out on "outward-directed rather than inner-directed." But maybe my piece prompted him to think and write about it. If I did, great, and if not, and it happened without my having had anything to do with it — well, that's great, too. Like nearly all such distinctions, it can become a false dichotomy, if one takes it too far. But it can, I find, also be a useful way of thinking about things.

Also, so long as we're tying up loose ends from that David Brooks episode, it's worth mentioning, too, that the Times ran a letter to the editor, under the headline, "Child Care Is A Worthy Job," making some of the same points I did.

From David Brooks' column, offering advice to people in their 20s:

If you are going to be underemployed, do it in a way that people are going to find interesting later on. Nobody is ever going to ask you, "What was it like being a nanny?" They will ask you, "What was it like leading excursions of Outward Bound?"

This is bad advice in so many ways. First (in unfortunately classic David Brooks fashion), it is outward-directed rather than inner-directed. Who are these "people" that Mr. Brooks thinks one should live one's life to impress? Isn't it instead better to live in a way that suits one's own character? If someone loves little children but hates the woods, maybe that person would be better off as a nanny than as an Outward Bound leader. Maybe the person has other family obligations or social ties that make the nanny job geographically feasible or desirable but would make the Outward Bound job, requiring extensive travel in remote wilderness locations, a strain. Moreover, what it to say that either being a nanny or being an Outward Bound leader makes a person "underemployed"? Maybe those jobs are the right calling for some people. Not everyone can be, like Mr. Brooks, a New York Times columnist, bestselling author, NPR commentator, and Yale professor, and not everyone who isn't all four of those things is "underemployed."

I used to hire a lot of people, and I still do some college interviewing and scholarship application reviews, and when I find that someone has child-care experience, I don't view it as their having been "underemployed," I view it as having been valuable training in humility and patience-building. Sometimes I do indeed ask about it. And, while, as an Eagle Scout, I also value wilderness experience, all other things being equal, I might even prefer the person with child-care experience over the Outward Bound person, because the Outward Board person has a higher risk of having the sense of entitlement that is a killer in a workplace situation. The nanny may have changed dirty diapers, while the Outward Bound leader person may have guided people whose parents paid thousands of dollars in hopes that their children would experience a challenge that had been absent in their lives so far. New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. — Brooks's boss — is a well known Outward Bound graduate and former board chairman, so in addition to being wrong, Mr. Brooks's point allows him to score brownie points with his own employer (or one of the four of them).

From a New York Times theater review by Elisabeth Vincentelli of an off-Broadway production titled "36th Marathon Of One-Act Plays: Series C":

Most one-act plays have, by default, a tight focus: between two and four characters, unity of time and place. "The Good Muslim," on the other hand, ambitiously moves seven characters through a fast-food prep area, a porch, the subway and even virtual reality....

Until reality catches up, Aliah lets off steam by playing a game that appears to involve the mating rituals of white preppies. Then one day she has a terrifying encounter on the subway, a brief moment that evokes the racist harassment that's been flourishing during the past few months.

I read "the racist harassment that's been flourishing during the past few months" as a reference by the Times to reality (or some imagined New York Times version of reality) outside the play. If that is indeed how it was intended, it's not clear to me what the Times is talking about. Do they mean the Washington witch-hunt against individuals of Russian nationality? If it's anti-Muslim sentiment the Times has in mind, the paper might keep in mind that Muslims may be of any race; Islam is a religion, not a race. If it's anti-Semitism, which the Times was briefly obsessed with before it became clear that the bomb threats causing the evacuation of Jewish institutions were largely the work of an Israeli-American Jewish teenager, the same race/religion distinction applies.

Anyway, if there's genuinely a wave of racist harassment flourishing anew in President Trump's America, it'd be great to see the New York Times handling it with thorough and prominently placed news reporting rather than with this odd aside in a theater review.

A New York Times staff editorial about the Supreme Court's Decision in Matal v. Tam includes this unusual passage:

The decision is likely to help the Washington Redskins, who lost their trademark protections in 2014 after years of complaints from Native American groups. At the time, this page supported the Trademark Office's decision, and we still regard the Redskins name as offensive. Based on this case, however, we've since reconsidered our underlying position.

It's great to see the New York Times editors come around on this point. So long as they are readjusting their past editorial positions to bring them into conformity with modern and sensible First Amendment jurisprudence, how about a review of the paper's longstanding advocacy of campaign finance "reform" — i.e., stifling limits on the political speech that the First Amendment protects?

"C.E.O.s Say They're Confident, but Merger Numbers Don't Lie" was the headline on Andrew Ross Sorkin's June 12 New York Times column blaming President Trump for a lack of corporate deals. Mr. Sorkin wrote:

If you can't remember reading about a big deal announced recently, that's because there hasn't been one. The reality is that since Mr. Trump was elected, mergers have fallen off a cliff.

The numbers tell the story: So far this year, the number of deals and their size are at the lowest level since 2013....

Yes, the prospect of an early morning Twitter tirade from Mr. Trump may be holding back deal making. And that's not confidence inducing.

Funny, just a few days later Amazon announced it would buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. The New York Times published a shopping cart full of stories about the deal exploring just about every possible angle, but I sure haven't seen any sentences or columns crediting Mr. Trump or his administration for the deal. (Likewise with the recently announced deal by PerkinElmer to buy Euroimmun Medical Laboratory Diagnostics AG for $1.3 billion.) It's a double standard. Deals don't happen, and Mr. Trump gets blamed. Deals do happen, and Mr. Trump doesn't get any credit, at least from the Times.

New York Times book critic Dwight Garner begins a review of a book that came out in 1984 by writing, "The 1980s, that otherwise deplorable decade, was a fertile era for satire."

It's a deplorable way to start a review, for a variety of reasons. Mr. Garner doesn't say what he found deplorable about the 1980s. Was it the economic growth? The tax cuts that allowed Americans to keep more of their own money? The Berlin Wall's fall, a Cold War victory that allowed millions to escape the misery of Soviet Communism? The stock market rally?

The way that the opinion of the 1980s is stated as though it is obvious and widely shared, rather than argued or explained, is the sort of thing that readers such as myself who don't share it find off-putting. It's particularly off-putting when it comes not on the paper's opinion page or editorial column, where one expects left-wing opinions, but in a book review, where a reader might expect to find informed and well-argued opinions about books rather than blunt, sweeping, and unsupported statements about entire decades.

Maybe Mr. Garner was trying to be funny. But I didn't think it was funny.

Under the headline, "Oskar Eustis: The First Time I Burned Money (and Found My Calling)," the Times arts section features a first-person piece by Mr. Eustis, who "has been the artistic director of the Public Theater since 2005." Highlights:

I was born in 1958 and came of age in the '70s. I was raised in Minnesota by progressive Democrats (on my father and stepmother's side) and deeply committed Communists (my mother and stepfather).... After my parents' divorce, my mother married a second-generation Communist. She then converted and remained a passionate and committed party member until her death in 2014. ...

In Ann Arbor, the Living presented the first site-specific piece I had ever seen: "The Legacy of Cain." It brought the audience on a procession through Ann Arbor, stopping at buildings, from the R.O.T.C. to the police station, which it saw as representative of the military-industrial complex. At each building, it led a ceremony, formal and almost religious, to reject the building and all it stood for. At the bank, the Living handed out Monopoly money to ceremoniously burn, representing our rejection of the commodity-driven financial culture of capitalism. The audience burned the play money; I burned my real money, all of it. It was a foolish, even silly gesture — although I don't remember how much, I'm sure I had to borrow from a friend just to get back to Minnesota. But I'd had an experience that would stay with me forever: The seed had been planted that my radical artistic impulses could be connected to my political engagement.

The problem with the first-person approach is that it prevents the Times from subjecting the story to the sort of skeptical questioning that makes for better journalism. How can someone have been a committed communist all the way to 2014? Did she acknowledge the crimes of the Soviet Union? If the police represent "the military-industrial complex," who will protect vulnerable members of society from predatory criminals such as rapists or murderers? And why burn the money instead of giving it away to someone else who might have needed the money more?

The Times hasn't even enabled the comments feature on the online version of the article, so readers who want to raise any of these issues alongside the article on the Times website are out of luck.

The next time a Times journalist calls up a business or politician with pesky or hostile questions, maybe the subject of the story should just say, "sorry, I want the Oskar Eustis treatment — that is, the ability to tell my side of the story in my own words, unchallenged by probing questions or indeed any questions from Times journalists." As a business tactic, I suppose this is cheaper for the Times than hiring reporters. And there may be some instances where the first-person is appropriate. It's not clear to me that this particular case was one of them.

Incidentally, the Times has a long-running quasi-obsession with children of communists. There weren't really ever that many American communists (at least so we are reassured by those who thought concern about them was paranoid), and yet it's almost to the point where one wonders whether are any of them remaining who haven't yet been recipients of warmly nostalgic coverage in the Times' columns. It's as if children of communists are a New York Times demographic niche target.

The New York Times business section publishes an interview with Jenna Wortham, a staff writer for the New York Times magazine. It's not clear who conducted the interview; the byline on the article is "By Jenna Wortham," which makes it sound like she interviewed herself. Here is a passage from the interview:

What are your thoughts on Juicero, the $400 Silicon Valley system for squeezing juice that raised bucketloads of venture money but has faced questions over its effectiveness?

It's up there with the greatest Ponzi schemes of our lifetime....

This seems to me like reckless and irresponsible journalism on the part of the Times. A Ponzi scheme is a crime. In Juicero's case, no one has been charged with a crime. If the Times has investors or customers or former employees or current employees or competitors of the company, or government officials, who want to criticize it on the record on the basis of actual evidence, that is one thing. But to have a Times reporter just shooting from the hip on the topic, without allowing the company a chance to defend itself to Times readers, seems shabby, and a departure from basic standards of journalistic fairness. It would be a case for the Times public editor, but the Times just eliminated its public editor position, even though it claims to be awash in cash from the surge of new paying anti-Trump subscribers. So Smartertimes.com will have to suffice.

"U.S Drug Deaths Climbing Faster Than Ever," is the headline over a New York Times front-page news article.

Why is this happening now? The Times article mentions a state lawsuit accusing "five drug companies of abetting the opioid epidemic." But there's no explanation offered at all for why drug companies today would be more rapacious than they were, say, five or ten or 15 years ago.

The Times leaves causes other than "drug companies" completely unexplored. Could the wave of state- and local- level marijuana legalization and decriminalization campaigns have played any part? The Times doesn't get into the question. Could it have anything to do with the fact that we had a president, in Bill Clinton, who owned up to drug use, and another, in Barack Obama, who wrote about using cocaine? Again, the Times doesn't get into it. It all seems like a fine topic for additional Times reporting.

The Times is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution with a series of op-eds under the rubric "Red Century." It's hard to articulate precisely how tone-deaf this is; imagine marking the 100th anniversary of Hitler's rise with a series of elegiac articles headlined "Brown Century." For a flavor, check out this piece headlined "The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism":

The party inspired loyalty for reasons beyond simply an affinity for Marxist ideas. It was the campaigns Communists ran against police brutality, the practice of lynching and the Jim Crow laws that made their politics relevant to the lives of ordinary people. In the North as well as the South, on soapboxes on the streets of Harlem as well as on plots of sharecropped land in Alabama, Communist organizing addressed the bread-and-butter concerns of black people....She was one of many victims of the Red Scare that crushed American Communism and spurred purges, blacklists, deportations and a few high-profile executions.

Whipped-up fear of foreign terror around outsider Communists like Ms. Jones finds an echo today in the rhetoric of criminal immigrants and the scaremongering about "radical Islamic terror." The techniques of McCarthyism have resurfaced, this time to evoke the threat of terrorism rather than Communism...What American Communists, at their best, pioneered was to show how effectively grass-roots movements can challenge the racism, state violence and economic exploitation that people face in their daily lives, and connect those fights to a broader vision of a just world.

This is just so much nonsense. It wasn't the "Red Scare" that crushed American Communism. It was the fact that communism doesn't work and was disclosed to be, in the Soviet Union, a system for brutally oppressing and murdering tens of millions of people. Concern about "radical Islamic terror" isn't "whipped up fear" or "scaremongering" but genuine, as anyone who had friends or relatives killed or injured on September 11, 2001, on Pan Am Flight 103, in the bombings of Israeli buses and cafes, or at the Boston Marathon could tell you.The American Civil Rights movement wasn't led by Communists. Rather, the Communists were trying to infiltrate, exploit, and glom on to it for their own nefarious purposes. The past century wasn't a "Red Century" but an American century in which the achievements of freedom, democracy, and capitalism decisively defeated Communism everywhere except in the imagination of the editors of the New York Times op-ed page. The whole article — the whole Times series — is a misguided exercise in pro-Communist nostalgia, retrospectively and reprehensibly airbrushing a murderous ideology.

New York Times book critic Dwight Garner, reviewing a novel, writes:

It is impossible to read anything in 2017, or write anything, without thinking of America's political and moral predicament. It's tendentious to mention it in every review, but I am thinking about it while writing every line of every review.

Trust me, it's not "impossible." I've done it myself. The election was back in November of last year. It's not as though it's the week after the September 11 attacks. If someone can't read or write anything at this point without having his mind on the current political situation, he might want to calm down and get some broader perspective. In the meantime, Mr. Garner's disclosure — and his editor's allowing the claim about impossibility to make it into print — helps explain a lot. The Times staff are all freaking out about Trump all the time, even when they aren't telling readers about it. In some ways, it might be less tendentious if the critics did mention it in every review, because then readers could discount for it, rather than not being aware of it.

Times art critic Holland Cotter has a long piece about Henry David Thoreau, about whom a new exhibit has opened at the Morgan Library and Museum. The article begins:

When my father was in high school he worked summers as a lifeguard at Walden Pond. As a kid, I used to hang out there, bird-watching, reading from a slender volume of Henry David Thoreau's journal and soaking up Transcendentalist vibes from the big glacial bowl of clear water ringed with firs and footpaths.

There's a rule in journalism that "alliteration trumps all the other rules," but even so the reference to "firs" set off my b.s. detector. There just aren't a lot of fir trees at Walden Pond or for that matter in Massachusetts forests outside of Christmas tree farms. Don't even take my word for it; a 2013 study in the journal New Phytologist by Boston University biologists listed 43 species: gray birch, paper birch, American ash, red maple, white oak, American elm, etc. — no firs. That study focused on deciduous trees rather than conifers, but conifers in Massachusetts are more apt to be Eastern hemlocks or white pine than fir trees.

Bloomberg's Matt Levine does a fine job of explaining why the New York Times news article about hedge fund manager pay is totally inaccurate. Mr. Levine writes:

"Even the lowest-ranking manager on Alpha magazine's expanded top-50 list made more money in 2016 than any big United States bank executive," reports the New York Times, incorrectly. Lloyd Blankfein owns 2.7 million shares of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which were up about $158 million in 2016; add $7 million of dividends and his $22 million in official compensation and you get about $187 million, putting him easily into the top 25. Jamie Dimon's numbers at JPMorgan Chase & Co. -- 10.4 million shares (including options), almost $210 million in capital gain, $19 million in dividends and $27 million in reported compensation -- put him at about $256 million; the cutoff for the top 10 hedge-fund managers is $410 million. Of course we don't usually think about a bank chief executive officer's stock price appreciation as compensation, but if a hedge-fund manager's returns on his own capital count as pay, then so should the bank CEO's.

It'll be interesting to see whether the New York Times corrects this inaccuracy or if it just lets it slide.

Saturday's Times column by Bret Stephens, about President Trump, the FBI, and Russia, carries this passage:

On Friday, I asked an astute source with long experience in the intelligence community if he suspects a smoking gun.

"I would guess there is something on paper or derived through witness questioning that has given the bureau an opening, assuming that Trump's actions are in response to growing concern about the Russian probe," he replied, while adding the caveat, "Since we're talking about Trump, a rampantly insecure ego, such an assumption isn't mandatory."

On March 15, 2016, Times editors Dean Baquet, Matt Purdy, and Phil Corbett issued "new guidelines on anonymous sourcing."

They wrote: "Material from anonymous sources should be 'information,' not just spin or speculation." They went on, "Sources who demand anonymity give up the opportunity to have their speculation or interpretation reflected in our stories, and such quotes will no longer be allowed except in the rare instances when the direct quote is pivotal to a story."

What is a "guess," if not speculation?

Mr. Stephens doesn't say whether this "astute source" is still serving in the intelligence community, and if so whether it is an American intelligence source or one from some other country. He doesn't say why the source needed anonymity, that is, why he was afraid or unwilling to have his name attached to the characterization of Trump. He also doesn't say on what basis the intelligence source assesses that Trump has "a rampantly insecure ego."

If I had to guess myself — not anonymously — I'd say that Mr. Stephens' source is James Woolsey, a former director of Central Intelligence. Mr. Stephens praised Woolsey on Twitter back in January as "one of the most talented and intelligent people around," which is a longer way of saying "astute." And Mr. Woolsey has been giving on-the-record interviews critical of Trump's firing of Comey.

Maybe the Times op-ed page has different standards than the news section when it comes to anonymous sources. If so, Times readers deserve to know what they are, in a transparent, public way, in the same way that the news section has made its guidelines public. If the op-ed page has lower standards than the news department does on anonymous sources, it'd be interesting to hear why. The news department standards refer to the need "to protect our precious credibility." Is credibility considered less precious at the Times op-ed page?