The Times has an interview with NYU professor and movie director Spike Lee. The paper describes him as "thoughtful, chatty and intense." From the interview:

Q. There seems to be no common ground right now. Every time Obama talks about guns, sales spike.

A. Or there's a mass shooting. After San Bernardino, they went up.

It's called scare tactics. I don't think anything good comes out of people using fear, whether it be Mussolini or Hitler.

Trump too. What's his motto? "Make America great again"? Those are code words. It's like, all right, let's put the blacks back in their place where they used to be. You know what, why not go all the way? Let's bomb churches, let's bring back Bull Connor, let's have water cannons, let's have German shepherds. You might as well. They want to rewind the clock. It's not just black folks; women too. Let's rewind when white men were in control.

Q. Let's talk about where white men are definitively in control, in Hollywood. You said your plan was to get in and to pull in as many black people as you could. I don't know if you saw the Directors Guild of America's list of minority directors hired each year, but it's so low it's almost shocking. What will it take?

It seems to me odd and not altogether fair for the Times, the morning of the Iowa caucuses, to run an article accusing Donald Trump and his supporters of "let's put the blacks back in their place where they used to be. ... Let's bomb churches, let's bring back Bull Connor, let's have water cannons, let's have German shepherds," without offering Mr. Trump or his campaign an opportunity to respond. At the least you might think such an outburst would warrant a skeptical follow-up question from the Times journalist conducting the interview, perhaps referencing that Times article quoting Mr. Trump's black friends such as Don King and Mike Tyson defending his bona fides.

Instead the Times reporter seems to buy into the racial paranoia, asking questions such as, "Let's talk about where white men are definitively in control, in Hollywood."

Here I was laboring under the apparently mistaken impression that the Jews controlled Hollywood, and thank goodness the Times is here to set the record "definitively" straight. With questions like that, why even bother having an interview? The reporter has already decided for herself what is happening.

A photo cutline in the Times refers to "Rabbi Sarah Silverman, right, of Women of the Wall." The rabbi's correct name is Susan Silverman. She has a sister named Sarah, but that Silverman is a writer/actress/comedian, not a rabbi.

A Times dispatch from Breckenridge, Colorado, reports on what the article calls "a housing crisis in ski country":

Local officials and housing experts say it is a symptom of widening economic inequality, one that is especially sharply felt in tiny resort towns hemmed in by beautiful but undevelopable public land. While the wealthiest can afford $5 million ski homes and $120-a-day lift tickets, others work two jobs and sleep in shifts to get by.

The article displays a remarkable lack of curiosity about what makes this "public land" "undevelopable." It would be a better article if it explained what "public" entity owns the land. Is it a national park, a national forest, BLM land, or state or county land? Could it be sold or leased or privatized? Are there other factors impeding the construction of additional housing on private land in the area, such as zoning laws or environmental regulations? In general, if there is a "shortage" of something, it's often the case that a government-imposed restriction is preventing supply from rising to meet demand. Instead of that interpretive lens, though, the Times prefers to look at this one through its preferred explanatory framework of "economic inequality," as if the existence of $120-a-day lift tickets is somehow what is preventing some ski lift operator from finding decent housing near his workplace.

A book review in today's Times asks irritably, "Must we read, for the umpteenth time, about the salubrious effects of faith?"

No, no one "must," not even this Times reviewer, who could have, and maybe should have, chosen to review some other book if she was so hostile to the subject matter of this one.

From a dispatch from Jerusalem in the Times foreign section, under the headline, "Arrest of Leftist Israeli Activist Underlines Political Split":

Here in Israel, it is part of a toxic tug of war over the boundaries of political discourse amid mounting international criticism of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians. The dwindling left is frequently vilified as traitorous, as empowered right-wingers create ever-narrower definitions of Zionism. And the tactics are getting uglier.

Mr. Nawi, a gay Arabic speaker in his 60s and a prominent member of an Israeli-Palestinian rights group called Taayush, was not caught in a sting by the security apparatus for either Israel or the Palestinian Authority.

It's hard to know exactly where to start with this one. This leftist activist is revealed as ratting out Palestinians who sell land to Israelis, tagging them for death, and what the Times terms as "ugly" is not the Palestinian practice of killing those who sell land to Israelis, or the leftist Israeli who collaborates with the executioners by informing, but the right wing for exposing the situation. Also very strange. and probably in violation of Times standards, is the inclusion of Mr. Nawi's sexual orientation in an article without any indication of why it is relevant. There are plenty of other people mentioned in the article whose sexual orientation is not given, perhaps because they are assumed to be heterosexual.

Hardly a day goes by without a reminder that personnel decisions at the Times happen very very very slowly.

Item: Mark Bittman, in a farewell piece for the Times Insider, reports: "In 1994, Trish Hall, then the Living section's editor, asked me if I wanted to write a column for the new Dining section. Duh — who would say no to that? Three years later (The Times doesn't often move quickly) The Minimalist was born."

Item: On November 13, the Times reported, "David Leonhardt, the founding editor of The New York Times's digitally focused The Upshot, will join the Op-Ed page in the new year as a staff columnist." Here we are in "the new year," two months later, and Mr. Leonhardt is still cranking out copy for the Upshot rather than the op-ed page. That's doubtless a huge frustration to the thousands of readers waiting eagerly for Mr. Leonhardt's copy to begin appearing on a different page, a transition so momentous that the Times considered its readers deserved at least two months worth of public notice to prepare themselves adequately.

Item: On January 12, the Times announced that Jim Rutenberg will become the paper's media columnist. Even the Times announcement acknowledged that "Jim takes over the media column almost a year after the passing of David Carr." [emphasis added. Carr died February 12, 2015.] Do Times readers get a partial refund of their subscription money for having to endure almost a year without a regular media column? If the column is so dispensable that readers could muddle along without it for almost a year, why bother reviving it?

Item: The Washington Post's Erik Wemple reports that Politico editor Susan Glasser is in talks with the New York Times in part because "Glasser's husband, Peter Baker, a longtime Washington-based reporter for the New York Times, has been in talks with editors about replacing Jodi Rudoren at the paper's Jerusalem bureau." Ms. Rudoren was gone as of January 1, which means the Times has been without a bureau chief at Jerusalem. Back in the day the paper would have sent a veteran like Ethan Bronner over to fill in, but Mr. Bronner has since left the Times for Bloomberg.

The paper can maybe save some money by leaving some positions temporary unfilled. Even a less than fully staffed Times has more reporters and editors than many other news organizations do. But when even decades-long veterans of the Times such as Mr. Bittman openly acknowledge that "The Times doesn't often move quickly," it only tends to reinforce doubts on Wall Street about whether the Times management is moving quickly enough to keep up with the publishing industry's digital transformation.

"Wealth Inequality Rising Fast, Oxfam Says, Faulting Tax Havens" is the headline over a Times dispatch on the front of the business section. Not a mention of the fact that Oxfam, as a non-profit, is itself a "tax haven" of a sort. Nor, for all the words in the story, is any space or attention given to any source or organization that might suggest that the inequality is less a problem than the advocacy group claims it is. If there's any difference between the Times article and what an Oxfam press release would say, it escapes me. Okay, it was a holiday weekend. But if reporters and editors are going to just play along with these holiday weekend press releases by practicing stenography rather than skeptical, good journalism, what is the point of paying for the newspaper rather than just signing up for the Oxfam publicity list?

A Times dispatch from Iowa suggests that snowshoeing is some sort of luxury activity. "While he has yet to shoot anything during this campaign, unlike Mr. Cruz, it is probably also unlikely that Mr. Rubio will be shot on film doing anything really fancy-pants, like windsurfing or snowshoeing, anytime soon," the Times says.

This seems like a sentence that was edited in Manhattan or Washington, rather than somewhere like rural Maine or New Hampshire or Western Massachusetts, where snowshoes aren't "fancy-pants" but rather just a practical way of getting to your traps or maple taps or ice fishing hole or outhouse or wood pile or cabin if you can't afford a snowmobile or if the dirt road hasn't been plowed.

One of the most strange news articles ever appears on the front of the business section of today's Times. It begins:

WASHINGTON — It has been nearly 18 years since Hillary Clinton used the term "vast right-wing conspiracy" to describe the conservative forces arrayed against her husband's administration. But the suspicion about right-wing plotting remains as current on the left as, well, Mrs. Clinton.

Readers would have been better served by a straightforward preview of the issues in the case. (The Times legal reporter already did that.) Instead this is something confusingly halfway between an effort to investigate and prove a right-wing conspiracy and an effort to debunk the conspiracy claim. If the conspiracy claims are false, why even bother to repeat them? It's the second Noam Scheiber article in recent weeks that seems weirdly off in terms of tone for a Times news article. He came to the Times news department after 14 years at the left-of-center New Republic and having written a book criticizing President Obama for not spending enough taxpayer money, a conclusion the Times' own reviewer criticized as "polemical," "glib and premature." I'm not saying someone with that background can't turn around and write straight-down-the-middle news articles for the Times, but on the basis of this article and the other one I wrote about, I am not seeing it happening.

As an editor the word "only" is usually a red flag for me. It's an easy way for a reporter to slip in his or her own opinion about whether a number is so high as to merit concern or so low as to not be worth fretting about. A fine example is this paragraph from a dispatch from Regensburg, Germany, which appears in today's Times under the headline "Benedict's Brother Says He Was Unaware of Abuse":

Reports of physical and sexual abuse in the choir, the Regensburger Domspatzen in Bavaria, first emerged in 2010 as part of a nationwide wave of revelations linking officials of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany to the mistreatment of children. But an internal report by the church identified only 72 cases of abuse in the Regensburg Diocese, most involving severe corporal punishment.

"Only" 72 cases of abuse? Seems like a lot to me. The story could have been improved by editing out the words "But" and "only."

Under the headline "Privilege, Pathology and Power," Times columnist Paul Krugman writes:

it's obvious, even if we don't have statistical confirmation, that extreme wealth can do extreme spiritual damage. Take someone whose personality might have been merely disagreeable under normal circumstances, and give him the kind of wealth that lets him surround himself with sycophants and usually get whatever he wants. It's not hard to see how he could become almost pathologically self-regarding and unconcerned with others.

Who are the people that Professor Krugman presumes to assess as not merely spiritually damaged, but extremely so? Professor Krugman briefly mentions Donald Trump, then quickly advances to his real targets, Sheldon Adelson and Paul Singer. Professor Krugman warns of a "march toward oligarchy," which he describes as... well, here it is:

Oligarchy, rule by the few, also tends to become rule by the monstrously self-centered. Narcisstocracy? Jerkigarchy? Anyway, it's an ugly spectacle, and it's probably going to get even uglier over the course of the year ahead.

What's really ugly is Professor Krugman's name-calling. "Jerkigarchy?" "Pathology"? "Extreme spiritual damage"? If Professor Krugman differs with Messrs. Adelson or Singer on tax or monetary or foreign policy, let him discuss the substance. Instead, he prefers to hurl insults. Who is the "jerk" here, really? Who is the pathological one? Since Professor Krugman is so comfortable issuing armchair psychological assessments, is it possible that he is projecting?

Anyway, the notion that America is an oligarchy run by Mr. Adelson, Mr. Singer, or any other right-of-center billionaire is laughable. They opposed the Iran nuclear deal. It happened anyway. Same with ObamaCare. Same with tax increases. They backed Republican presidential candidates like Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Rudolph Giuliani; instead America elected Barack Obama. When left-wing billionaires like Warren Buffett or George Soros weigh in on public policy in directions with which Professor Krugman agrees, one hears not a peep of protest from the professor about their pathologies. It is pathetic.

At least Professor Krugman and the Times opinion section did not illustrate the article with aerial photographs of the residences of Messrs. Adelson or Singer, or with photographs of them and their family members. Professor Krugman and the opinion section apparently are leaving it to the "news" section and the front page to sink to that level of nastiness when it comes to the treatment of billionaires with right-of-center political views.

The lead, front-page news article in today's Times is a perfect example of why I find the newspaper both indispensable and infuriating. It's indispensable, because who else is paying close enough attention, and has enough space, to report that "the lobbying firm run by Norman Brownstein" was mobilized to preserve the "loophole." Mr. Brownstein and his firm have been the topic of extensive coverage over at our sister site FutureOfCapitalism.com, but the Times leaves out all his Democratic connections.

The infuriating part of it is that the entire Times story comes from the perspective that a real estate spinoff somehow ought to be a taxable event, and that the failure to tax it is a "loophole," the preservation of which "and other changes related to real estate trusts meant that the tax deal would be $1.06 billion more expensive to the federal government." The assumption is that a tax increase is money that the government can count on, even before it has been imposed. There's no effort to look at it from the perspective of shareholders, or to say that the tax increase to make a previously tax-free transaction taxable would hurt the market value of investments owned by individuals.

There's a lot of good raw information in the Times, it's just maddening to so often have to read past the political spin and adjust to compensate for it.

From the "Metropolitan Diary" column of today's New York Times:

Sun (not his real name) is a talented singer and rising star whom I hit up on Twitter (where all modern romances begin) to see if I could set up an interview. We exchanged phone numbers and quickly became online friends.

While I was in New York last month, we linked up, went back to my Airbnb and did the whole "Netflix and chill" thing, which ended where you expect it would, with sex. Really good, toe-curling sex.

Is this "all the news that's fit to print"? Is this what has become of what was once a serious newspaper? It has turned into a place where readers can send in sex stories featuring fake names and have them printed? Is there no editor of the paper who is embarrassed by this sort of thing or who thinks the space might be better used for something else, like, you know, actual journalism?

Reader-contributor-participant-watchdog-community member-content co-creator Colin writes:

yesterday's Times had an article about the rise of a new political party in Spain which said the following:

"Having an ambivalent stance on Catalan independence has really hurt Podemos," said Federico Santi, political risk analyst at Eurasia Group, a think tank based in London. "They've not really managed the step from protest party and critic of the main parties to one that can build its own platform."

The problem here is that Eurasia Group is neither a think-tank -- it's a for-profit consultancy (it describes itself as a "political risk research and consulting firm") -- nor based in London. While it has an office in London, its headquarters, as plainly stated on its website, is New York City.

The Times food section today features an article about broilers. It includes this sentence: "Our mothers pressed them into service for steaks and chops (which I must admit my mother ruined by cooking them until they were gray and dry)."

If the Times reporter has a complaint about his mother's cooking, let him address it to her in person (if she is alive). Or take it up in psychotherapy. Instead, Times readers are hauled along into the middle of this intra-family conflict, in which the mother isn't given a chance to respond to the accusation. She might have replied that the Times reporter ought to be grateful that she fed him at all, given the way he was to end up publicly griping about her cooking before an audience of hundreds of thousands of Times readers.

Times reporters who use the paper's columns (and the time of readers) to complain about family members without allowing the family members a chance to respond are a recurrent problem. For an earlier example, see here.

Some editor could have made the copy conform to the Ten Commandments simply by deleting the parenthetical clause,. That editing move would have made the editor's mother proud.