Under the headline "Dior in the Desert," the New York Times wrote about a Christian Dior fashion show in the mountains near Los Angeles:

So what does it say that Dior unveiled the first cruise collection by its artistic director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, in the desert? To be specific: in the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve in the Santa Monica Mountains in California, where it was the first brand to ever have a show?

Possibly not what Dior intended.

To many, after all, the idea of wandering in the desert — even catwalking in the desert, for that matter — is inextricably entwined with the idea of expulsion: being forced away from one's home and left to fend for oneself until a new sanctuary is found (see: Exodus).

Leave aside the preposterous idea that the Exodus involved "being forced away from one's home," which I'll address elsewhere at some other time. As the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area's official Twitter account pointed out, in a series of tweets noticed and strung together by the laist.com website, the Santa Monica Mountains aren't a desert at all; they are part of a Mediterranean ecosystem.

The Times article has yet to be corrected, as of this writing.

Given the obsessive attention the Times gave to previous National Park Service tweets challenging the factual accuracy of statements by President Trump, you'd think the Times would pay some attention to this case. Otherwise, it might suggest that the newspaper holds itself to a lesser standard of accuracy.

Even for a newspaper where hypocrisy is routine, the Friday, May 12, 2017, number of the New York Times is really something else, and it's a wonder that the paper's management was able to issue the thing without blushing. Consider:

The Times, which on May 9 issued a front-page geshrei about how "13 Men, and No Women, Are Writing New G.O.P. Health Care Bill in Senate," published a front page with nine bylined stories. The names on them were Michael, Peter, Michael, David, Michael, William, Peter, Adam, and Matthew. Not only are they all male, there doesn't appear to be a person of color among them. Donald Trump's cabinet is more diverse than the New York Times front-page bylines today, at least to judge by the race and gender categories that the Times is so fond of applying to everyone else.

Then there is the Times business section. One article inside the section is about the Canadian airplane and train manufacturer Bombadier. The Times reports:

Professor Moore, of McGill University, said he anticipated that major investors would push the Bombardier family to reduce its board membership. It holds six of the 15 positions.

He said it was less likely that the family would voluntarily abandon the company's structure, which gives its members 53 percent of voting control though they own only 13 percent of its equity. Many analysts have said that an end to the family's control would immediately lift Bombardier's share price, which has fallen about 75 percent in the past nine years.

Another Times article, also inside the business section, discusses an annual meeting of Ford, the American auto and truck company:

"Look, we are as frustrated as you are by the stock price," said Mr. Ford, whose family effectively controls the company through a class of shares that carry outsize voting rights. "A couple of people have said, does the Ford family care about the stock price? The short answer is yes — a lot."...The format also allowed some shareholders to call in. One of them, John Chevedden, commented on shareholder proposals that included eliminating the 16-votes-per-share rights attached to the Ford family's special class of stock. (The proposal failed on a vote of about 2 to 1.)

Ordinarily, you might think that underperforming businesses in which family heirs maintain control through shares that give them more rights than other, non-family owners might be a topic that would merit a column, an editorial, even a front-page or section-front trend story in the Times. That, however, might raise some potentially uncomfortable questions about the New York Times itself, which operates under the same structure, privileging managers born into the business over ordinary shareholders with more humble origins.

A third hypocrisy comes on the editorial page, where columnist Paul Krugman assails President Trump, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement by associating them with the Nazis:

In some ways conservatism is returning to its roots. Much has been made of Trump's revival of the term "America First," the name of a movement opposed to U.S. intervention in World War II. What isn't often mentioned is that many of the most prominent America-firsters weren't just isolationists, they were actively sympathetic to foreign dictators; there's a more or less straight line from Charles Lindbergh proudly wearing the medal he received from Hermann Göring to Trump's cordial relations with Rodrigo Duterte, the literally murderous president of the Philippines.

Mr. Krugman's piece attempting to tar today's Republicans by linking them, via Lindbergh, with Goering appears on the New York Times op-ed page directly opposite a piece by — wait for it — Stephen M. Walt. For Walt's strange obsession and conspiracy-mongering about the influence of Jews and Israel, don't take my word for it. The Times Book Review columnist Adam Kirsch (writing in Tablet, here) and the Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens (writing in Commentary, here) do perfectly adequate jobs of explaining what Walt is. If it's guilt by association that is the game, the Times op-ed page, and Krugman, are in a glass house with Professor Walt.

A New York Times "Memo From Turkey" — actually the memo is datelined Turkey, but is written by two Times reporters — reports on American foreign and military policy toward the Kurds and how Turkey is reacting to it. It includes this passage:

After at least a dozen Turkish attacks on the Syrian Kurdish militants last month, the United States took emphatic steps to prevent further clashes, by moving troops to the border in Humvees as a buffer between Turks and Syrian Kurds.

They even flew American flags, a symbolic and provocative move usually avoided in Middle Eastern interventions.

The Times doesn't explain what is "provocative" about flying an American flag. That may be obvious "From Turkey," but it is less than obvious to this America-based reader, who sees foreign flags flown regularly without being provoked by them.

In fact the American flag might have been flown not to provoke, but to calm or mollify the situation; to Turks, an American flag might be less provocative than a Kurdish one.

I've emailed one of the Times reporters who wrote the memo and will update this post if I hear back from him.

From the final paragraph of a New York Times article about the television series Baywatch, now a movie:

To hear it from Mr. Berk, though, that additional pressure resulted in "incredible energy" on set that only enhanced the finished film. "Because of the luck and karma of 'Baywatch,' every failure and every creative gamble has led to greater benefits," he said. "It's a Buddhist principal: turning poison into medicine."

The word the Times wants in that spot is not "principal" but "principle." It's a subtle difference, but it's the kind of distinction that readers (at least this reader) hope and expect the Times copy desk to enforce. This is the story of stuff I learned in 8th, 9th, and 10th grade English. It's the sort of thing that you'd want professional users of the English language at a newspaper that purports to be the world's best to get right consistently and without fail.

For the second week in a row, the food section of the New York Times has featured a prominently placed article about a white man devoted to extensive complaining about his supposed failings when it comes to race or gender progress.

Each article was by the same reporter, Kim Severson.

Last week the target was Thomas Keller, the chef known for his French Laundry and Per Se restaurants. Wrote the Times:

In an era when authenticity, cultural appropriation and gender and racial imbalance in the kitchen are on the minds of many cooks and diners, Mr. Keller's style of dining and the largely white, male crew of young chefs he mentors are inviting targets.

Preeti Mistry, 40, a classically trained chef with a modified Mohawk who cooks elevated Indian street food at her Juhu Beach Club in Oakland, Calif., and her new spot, Navi Kitchen in nearby Emeryville, was in culinary school when she discovered Mr. Keller's "French Laundry Cookbook." It had become an instant professional and spiritual guide for cooks of her generation.

In 2004, she visited the French Laundry. At the time, she thought it was the most amazing meal she had ever eaten. She even got to shake hands with Mr. Keller. "I left feeling like I just met Drake or something," she recalled.

But now? She views fine dining as disingenuous, built from a system steeped in oppression and hierarchy in which women, gays and other minorities — whether customers or cooks — are not treated the same.

"It's essentially haute couture, and we know haute couture appropriates from minorities and urban communities," she said. Chefs as powerful as Mr. Keller, she said, have a responsibility to address those issues. "You need to go on your woke journey."

This week the Times' chosen target is John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. Writes the Times:

Even some fans find his take on Southern history wrapped in too much romance, his style too ego-driven or his perspective sometimes skewed by his race, gender and power.... Although his staff is mostly women, Mr. Edge has also been assailed over how he portrays the role of Southern women in the kitchen. Ms. Purvis, the editor, took the alliance to task in an article she wrote last year for the magazine Bitter Southerner. She posited that men were the new carpetbaggers of Southern food writing, calling them "a barbecue-entranced, bourbon-preoccupied and pork-belly-obsessed horde of mostly testosterone-fueled scribes from outside the region of my birth."

Nathalie Dupree, the Southern cooking doyenne and a founder of the foodways alliance, put it another way. "He has indisputably done a great deal for Southern food, but it has been primarily directed at his concept of Southern food, which is by definition male," she said. "There is little emphasis on familial food, the stuff of everyday living, what it is like to fix three meals a day for one's family as many women did, both black and white."

Mr. Edge, whose new book includes Ms. Dupree in a chapter on the cooking teachers of the New South that emerged in 1980s, tried to remedy matters with a 2013 symposium centered on women at work. (I was a paid participant, arguing in favor of cake over pie in a Lincoln-Douglas style debate against the noted pie advocate Kat Kinsman.)

Mr. Edge has also been chided for paying too little attention to the story of poor whites in the South, notably by the Appalachian food writer Ronni Lundy, another founder of the alliance.... Nicole A. Taylor, the Brooklyn author of "The Up South Cookbook," was raised in the same rural part of central Georgia as Mr. Edge and has clashed with him over issues of race and power.

I'm not saying the dining section or Times food writers should ignore genuine controversies of race or sexism, particularly if the controversies are grounded in sensible grievances rather than imagined ones. But in both of these cases, the race and gender related criticism takes up so much of the space of the profile that at least this reader came away with a sense that the newspaper had an ax to grind. Is there any white male profile subject in the Times who wouldn't get this level of negative scrutiny? It's one thing if the subject is someone who is actually an active racist or sexist. But in each of these cases, neither Mr. Edge nor Mr. Keller is accused of anything like that. Rather they are just judged by critics to be insufficiently "woke." As a result, the balance and tone in each story seemed off. Instead of balanced journalistic profiles, the articles came off like doctrinaire attempts to hold each man accountable to some unattainable Times standard of perfect contemporary consciousness on race, gender, and other "oppression and hierarchy" issues.

It's one thing to have this tendentiousness on the Times editorial page or even the front page. But when the identity politics start taking over the food pages, it's off-putting to readers who don't share the Times eagerness to subject every person and topic to this "oppression and hierarchy" lens.

Yesterday's five column, top of the front-page New York Times headline: "Tax Overhaul Would Aid Wealthiest."

Today's, also top of the front-page: "Trump's Plan Shifts Trillions To Wealthiest."

What are the chances they go for the same headline again at the top of tomorrow's front page? To me, it's starting to seem redundant, but I guess that is their story and they are sticking with it.

Page A3 of my New York Times this morning orders me around: "Follow this advice from The Times's Julia Moskin, a Dining reporter since 2004, to stock your kitchen the right way...To outfit your kitchen, go to the big-box store of your choice: Upscale places like Williams-Sonoma and Sur La Table are browse-worthy, but they often charge much more for the same basic tools."

It seems bossy and presumptuous of the Times to try to tell me where to shop. Maybe I want to support my locally owned, neighborhood kitchen supply store rather than driving to some suburban Walmart. Maybe I like the service better at the higher-end stores. Maybe I'm an Amazon Prime member or credit card holder and want to shop there. Why are those options not "the right way"?

The problem with the Times advice is not just that it may not be "right" for everyone, but that it's hypocritical. Other parts of the Times, including the Dining section, frequently highlight items from expensive stores. Much of the news that appears in the Times itself is available for free on other internet sites.

The Times item appears under the headline: "Here to Help: The Only Kitchen Tools You Need." It doesn't show up on the "Today's Paper" version of the paper, just in print. It was published back in October 2016 online under the headline "These Are The Only Kitchen Tools You Need," but that version included kitchen shears, which are omitted from today's version. Are kitchen shears a tool "you need," or not? The Times seems to have had one view of the matter back in October, and a different view of it today. Does one of the two articles require a correction? ("A list of kitchen tools erroneously omitted kitchen shears from the list that you need."? "A list of kitchen tools erroneously included kitchen shears on the list that you need. In fact, you can get along okay without them."?)

I can understand the Times' impulse to try to provide some useful service to readers apart from stoking their Trump-related anxiety. Offering suggestions to readers about where to shop and what to buy might be a useful service, but this particular example of it seems to cross the line from offering useful advice over into some other zone.

Follow this advice from Smartertimes' Ira Stoll, a press critic since 2000, to edit your newspaper the right way....To please readers, frame your advice to them in ways that respect their autonomy and ability to make intelligent choices, rather than speaking to them as if they are fools.

Amid a New York Times article about a set of quadruplets who were admitted to Harvard and Yale comes this sentence:

Nigel, who wants to study neuroscience, was wait-listed and Zach, who is thinking of chemical engineering, was rejected by Stanford, so perhaps for the first time in their lives, the interests of one is pitted against those of the others.

"Perhaps" the Times writer has never had a sibling or is not the parent of them, or has never read the book of Genesis, which is all about sibling rivalry. And "perhaps" the "fewer editors" policy of the New York Times Company is responsible for the lack of subject-verb agreement between the plural "interests" and the singular "is."

The number of local news articles appearing in a week's New York Times declined to 48 in 2017 from 102 in 2009 and 153 in 2001. The number of Times reporters covering New York has likewise declined, to about 42 now from 85 in 2001, the Daily Beast reports.

A New York Times article about the ride-sharing company Uber reports:

Uber exists in a kind of legal and ethical purgatory, however. Because its drivers are independent contractors, they lack most of the protections associated with employment. By mastering their workers' mental circuitry, Uber and the like may be taking the economy back toward a pre-New Deal era when businesses had enormous power over workers and few checks on their ability to exploit it.

This is hypocritical, because the New York Times print edition is itself delivered by "independent contractors" and is full of articles written by freelance writers and images by freelance artists and photographers who are also "independent contractors." It's also inaccurate and alarmist.

Uber "may be taking the economy back toward a pre-New Deal era" — but it may not be, which is why the Times uses the weasel word "may" rather than more declarative language like "is." When New Deal institutions like Social Security, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Securities and Exchange Commission are abolished, wake me up. Until then, the Times would be better off finding ways to write about Uber without ridiculous hype blaming the company for the end of the New Deal.

Thanks to reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creator J.G. for sending the tip.

From the New York Times Book Review on Sunday, March 12, under the headline, "The Troubling Appeal of Education at For-Profit Schools":

Some two million Americans are enrolled in for-profit colleges, up from 400,000 in 2000. Those students, most of them working adults getting short-term certificates, are disproportionately nonwhite and female. They graduate with more debt than students who have attended public and nonprofit institutions, and are more likely to default on their loans.

It's amazing how the Times manages to attack the for-profit colleges for enrolling students who are "disproportionately nonwhite and female." If the opposite were the case, and the students were disproportionately white and male, the Times would probably attack the colleges for racism, sexism, and exclusivity. For the colleges, it's a no-win situation; they get attacked for any deviation from the demographic norms, in any direction.

If anyone ought to know from "the troubling appeal of education at for-profit schools," it is the Times itself, a for-profit company (at least ostensibly) that owns something called "The School of the New York Times," draped with language — "faculty," "courses," "applications," "certificate in content marketing," "admissions," "tuition," "student journeys" — stolen from actual, real educational institutions. But the "school" isn't accredited by any accreditation agency; in some respects it is more like Trump University: "we are not in a position to offer refunds. All sales are final." The "tuition" for these "student journeys" — between $6,990 and $7,990 for a 15 to 17 day trip, not including airfare — is more than a whole year of full-credit courses costs at some community colleges. The same Sunday newspaper that carries the book review also carried a full-page house ad for the student journeys. If the Times really thinks this is "troubling," as the book review headline and article — by a Times news reporter — contend, maybe they should get out of the business, or at least stop using the newspaper's journalism to attack others who are competing in the same business.

The Times arts section features a column with this note:

American Beauties is a column by Dwight Garner, appearing every other Friday, about undersung American books of the past 75 years. Used copies of books that are out of print are available from various online retailers.

Well, yes, copies of books that are out of print are indeed "available from various online retailers." But they also may be available at your local library, or your local physical, in-real-life used book store. Why the Times is editorially pushing the "online retailer" option over the other two is a mystery.

From the lead, front-page news article in today's Times:

Despite his lament that he was handed "a mess" by President Barack Obama, Mr. Trump inherited a low unemployment rate, a lack of international crises requiring immediate attention and majorities in both houses of Congress.

"A lack of international crises requiring immediate attention"?

From a news article on page A3 of the same newspaper, same day, under the headline "U.S. Forces Play Crucial Role Against ISIS in Mosul":

HAMAM AL-ALIL, Iraq — One week after Iraqi forces began their push into western Mosul, American firepower is playing an essential role in softening the opposition from the Islamic State.

The thunderous booms from howitzers near Hamam al-Alil, a town along the Tigris River, are just part of the American military's contribution to keeping the Iraqi offensive moving forward...

At Qayyarah Airfield West, a sprawling Iraq base 40 miles south of Mosul, a United States Army task force fires Himars satellite-guided rockets at targets. Apache attack helicopters, equipped with Hellfire missiles, stand ready to carry out their missions from the base's airfield.

Not to mention the punishing airstrikes by American and allied warplanes and drones. A flurry of attacks were carried out by the American-led coalition in and around Mosul on Saturday, some involving the dropping of multiple bombs.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the American-Iraqi-French offensive against ISIS in Iraq sure sounds like a crisis that requires immediate attention. As do a variety of other events, including North Korean and Iranian missile launches ("North Korea Fires Ballistic Missile, Challenging Trump," was one recent Times headline.)

From an advertisement for the New York Times on Page A7 of the same newspaper, same day:

"The truth can't be manufactured...The truth is under attack...The truth is worth defending...The truth is more important now than ever."

Don't expect a Times correction of the inaccurate Times claim that Mr. Trump inherited from President Obama "a lack of international crises requiring immediate attention," because, notwithstanding all the Times self-congratulatory self-serving hype about the "truth," this one is the sort of sweeping overstatement verging on falsehood that the newspaper passes off to its readers all the time. The best way to correct against it, in my view, is to read the rest of the paper with care, but that isn't really much of an excuse.

A Times interview with Lena Dunham and Michael Ryss about the latest episode of the HBO program "Girls" includes this rendering of a question by Times reporter Amanda Hess:

Lena, one of the most interesting things about the episode is that you can sense your investment in both characters. You're someone who's been outspoken about lifting women's voices, but you've also been put through the ringer online by strangers.

The Times has been outspoken about its desire to cut back on editing, and it has recently lost generations of experienced editors through a series of buyouts, layoffs, and other departures. Maybe the editors were busy with Oscar coverage, or the more experienced folks don't work on Sunday nights. Or maybe one just got through. But I'm pretty sure the phrase is "through the wringer," not "through the ringer." Like a clothes wringer, which is a mechanical device that was used to wring water out of clothing after washing it, before electric or gas-powered laundry dryers came into wide use.

Tuesday's New York Times, following up Amanda Gordon's reporting for Bloomberg (here and here) without giving her appropriate credit, reported on Stephen A. Schwarzman's 70th birthday party:

In the age of Mr. Trump and his famed golden penthouse, Mr. Schwarzman's party has largely been ignored except for a bit of chattering by Town & Country and sniping among the schadenfreude-loving Acela Corridor Crowd.

Perhaps Mr. Trump has normalized conspicuous consumption. On Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, there were a few smuggled snapshots of the Schwarzman party passed around, but not much in the way of great viral outcry. A small band of protesters who tried to picket the party on Saturday night did not get anywhere close to it, nor was there much media pickup on the group's message.

The collective yawn may say something larger about the shifts in the way parts of the country think about great wealth — and perhaps how they have always thought about big money.

Then the New York Times reported on the party a second time, using an anonymous source: "A person familiar with the planning who was not authorized by the host to speak on the record estimated it at between $7 million and $9 million."

A Times update last year on anonymous sourcing policy said, "granting anonymity allows us to reveal the atrocities of terror groups, government abuses or other situations where sources may risk their lives, freedom or careers by talking to us. In sensitive areas like national security reporting, it can be unavoidable." How the price tag of a birthday party fits that description escapes my understanding, but maybe I am missing something.

Today the New York Times reports on the party for yet a third time:

So Steven A. Schwarzman throws himself a 70th birthday party complete with camels, a gondolier, a 12-minute fireworks display and a performance by Gwen Stefani — with an estimated cost ranging from an improbable $20 million to a more likely $7 million to $9 million — and the tsk-tsking can be heard from coast to coast, as it is cited as one more example of the wretched, over-the-top excess of the new Trumpian era.

So which is it?

Was the Schwarzman party, as the Times claimed on Tuesday, "largely...ignored" and greeted with a "collective yawn," a sign that America has grown more accepting of conspicuous consumption? Or was the Schwarzman party, as the Times claims Thursday, greeted with "tsk-tsking ...heard from coast to coast, as it is cited as one more example of the wretched, over-the-top excess of the new Trumpian era"?

It seems difficult for both these assessments, diametrically opposed as they are, to be true at the same time. Perhaps the Times may claim that the two different takes are explained by the elapsed time — the tsk-tsking emerged on Tuesday and Wednesday as the world observed the business-section-front fireworks photograph by Ms. Gordon, my former New York Sun and Forward colleague, that accompanied the business-section-front column about how the party had been largely ignored. Or perhaps both "hot takes" are in a way phony, attempts to pretend there is some deeper cultural meaning in what really is just an attempt by the Times to generate some web traffic from writing about a party that reportedly featured fireworks, camels, a pop star, and members of the Trump family and administration.