The Times chose to run a question and answer-style interview with one (just one) of the many MacArthur Foundation "genius" prize fellowship winners on the cover of its arts section. Never mind that winners of right-wing awards never get the attention in the Times that the left-leaning MacArthur geniuses do. Here is a portion of the Times interview with Brooklyn-based painter Nicole Eisenman:

Q. Do you feel that one of the reasons you were able to move toward painting and greater fluidity of meaning was that things had changed over the course of the 1990s, the art world was becoming a bit more open and your anger was less urgent?

A. Well, in some ways I think that conversation around queer politics is more or less over because of the success of the gay community in mainstream culture. Now the conversation has shifted to class, and that's where I want the focus of my work to be. There, and on race and trans politics as well.

The lead story of my Saturday Times print edition here in Boston carried the subheadline, "Conservatives Viewed the House Speaker as Not Anti-Government Enough." By later editions, the subheadline had changed to "Surprise Announcement May Help Avert Another Government Shutdown."

The editor who killed the early subheadline displayed some good judgment in improving it. Alas, that judgment did not extend to editing the rest of the news article about the resignation of Speaker Boehner. It reported, "His downfall again highlighted the sinewy power of a Republican Party faction whose anthem is often to oppose government action....With antigovernment fervor helping to prompt Mr. Boehner's decision, several candidates for the Republican presidential nomination were quick to try to capitalize on the animus."

What are these people talking about with the "antigovernment" language or "oppose government action." These Republicans are some of the same ones who want to build a fence along the Southern border and deploy more border patrol personnel there, use the government's power to ban abortion and stem cell research and flag burning, invade Iraq and Afghanistan, and collect cellphone data for antiterrorism purposes. The Times just doesn't get it. The House Republicans aren't anarchists or rebels. They aren't even anti-government. They are vehemently anti-Obama. But in the American system, the president is not the same as the government. The House of Representatives is also part of the government.

I don't expect the Times to agree with the House Republican critics of Boehner. But as the editor who fixed the subhead (but not the rest of the story) realized, the Times does have a responsibility to describe their views accurately rather than caricature them inaccurately as something that they are not, i.e., "antigovernment."

Back in March, the Times ran a front-page news article by Ben Hubbard under the headline, "Saudi Justice, Harsh But Able To Spare The Sword." The gist of it was that Saudi justice is more lenient than it is commonly given credit for:

No aspect of Saudi justice draws more attention than punishments like beheading or amputation. But Saudi legal practitioners say that penalties are on the books to deter crime and that the system limits their use....Saudi Arabia executed 88 people in 2014, while 35 people were executed in the United States.

At the time, SmarterTimes found the story troubling. In a post headlined, "Apologists for Saudi Beheadings," we noted, "The Times doesn't mention that America's population is more than 10 times that of Saudi Arabia, so on a per capita basis, the Saudis are using capital punishment more than 20 times as much as the U.S. does. And the U.S. is considered bloodthirsty on this issue by a lot of Europe and Canada, where capital punishment is effectively nonexistent."

An update is in order. The Independent reports:

Saudi Arabia has executed at least 175 people in the past year, at a rate of one every two days, according to a report by Amnesty International.

The kingdom killed 102 convicted criminals in the first six months of 2015 alone, putting it on course to beat its 1995 record number for the calendar year of 192. Those killed included children under the age of 18 at the time of the offence, and disabled people.

Amnesty, which alongside the AFP news agency keeps a record of the number of people the Saudi government kills, said the execution rate suddenly surged in August last year and continued to rise under the new King Salman from January.

So far the Times hasn't seen fit to give its readers this update on the Saudi death toll, leaving readers with the false front-page impression of leniency.

Maybe King Salman figured that if even the New York Times wasn't going to give Saudi Arabia a hard time about its public beheadings, there wasn't much downside in upping the pace.

The New York Times Company is planning to make money by selling in-person access to a key official in Iran's oil ministry.

A Times staff member, Brenda Erdmann Hagerty, sent an email Friday soliciting sponsorships and selling tickets to the conference, which is set for October 6 and 7 at London. The email, a copy of which was obtained by SmarterTimes.com and which is reproduced below, pronounces the Times "Oil and Money" conference "delighted to announce that H.E. Seyed Mehdi Hosseini, chairman of the Oil Contract Restructuring Committee at the Iranian Ministry of Petroleum, will be attending in person."

Admission to the conference and to a "Petroleum Executive of the Year" dinner honoring ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson costs $4,091 including tax at current exchange rates, though the Times is offering some promotional codes beginning with "INYT," for International New York Times. The conference venue is the InterContinental Park Lane London, which conference organizers tout as "the epitome of modern elegance."

On a per-day basis, the $4,091 price for the two-day London event is even pricier than the $6,995 that the Times has been charging for a 13-day tour of Iran guided by a Times journalist. The conference promotional material suggests that something of high value is on offer: an inside track on investing in Iran's state-controlled oil and gas resources, which had been off-limits to Western companies because of sanctions related to Iran's nuclear weapons program. "Iran opening to foreign investors, how much and how soon?" the conference invitation email from Ms. Hagerty says. "Book your place today to ensure that you get first-hand insight from the key influencers within the Iranian petroleum industry."

The news that the Times is selling $4,000 tickets for face time with Iranian oil decision makers at a fancy London hotel is likely to trigger criticism at a moment when a reporter of the Washington Post, Jason Rezaian, is languishing in a Tehran prison where conditions are known to be considerably harsher than at the Park Lane. Even advocates of the Iranian nuclear deal such as President Obama have acknowledged the "likelihood" that Tehran will use some of its post-sanctions-relief revenue to fund terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and regional military adventurism. The Iranian government remains on the State Department's list of sponsors of terrorism and its human rights abuses are well documented, as are its anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and assistance to forces that killed American troops in Iraq.

The list of high-profile American firms that are sponsoring the Times-hosted-and-convened conference include Chevron, ExxonMobil, and the Carlyle Group. The agenda for the two-day conference does include one session devoted to "the impact of global climate change policy," but no environmental groups are listed as sponsors and none of their representatives are listed as speakers.

The Times conference web site promises potential sponsors that "The Times can deliver on a wide variety of goals— thought leadership, V.I.P. client treatment, generating borrowed interest via media (print, online, social), introductions to individual delegates."

The conference is slated to begin with a welcome from Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, a New York Times Company executive whose title is "president, International." A press release for the conference and announcing Mr. Tillerson as the 2015 "petroleum executive of the year" lists two New York Times employees as media contacts.

Established news organizations have been expanding into the conference and events business as more traditional revenue streams such as print advertising and subscription sales have declined because of the Internet. But the business can be perilous from a reputation perspective; the Washington Post's plan to sell access to "salons" at its publisher's home was denounced by that paper's ombudsman as "an ethical lapse of monumental proportions." Journalistic ethics watchdogs have yet to weigh in on the propriety of the Times plan to sell access to an Iranian oil official so soon after it has been editorializing in favor of President Obama's effort to bring Iran sanctions relief. Critics of Iran or of the oil industry, which has been targeted for divestment by campus climate-change activists, also have yet to weigh in.

The one conference session that focuses on geopolitics includes as a panelist Alastair Crooke, whose conference bio touts that he has "has 20 years of experience working with Islamist movements, particularly Hamas and Hezbollah as well as other Islamist movements in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East." A 2009 profile of Mr. Crooke in Mother Jones spoke of "the weirdness of Crooke's embrace of even the looniest doctrines of the Iranian ruling clique."

A copy of an email from the Times promoting the conference, obtained by Smartertimes.com

The rest of the email from the Times promoting the conference, as obtained by Smartertimes.com

National Review's Kevin D. Williamson does a pretty fine job of pointing out some of the absurdities of a New York Times dispatch from Ramallah.

And another Web site has what it says are details of the reporter's personal history as a protester and advocate against Israel.

Mark Bittman's farewell Times op-ed column includes this sentence: "I'm sorry, too, that more progress hasn't been made in reducing the marketing of junk food to kids and on limiting the ease with which children can buy soda." What would he do? Require ID and set a 21-year drinking age for soda?

A Times "Upshot" article by Josh Barro interviews several economists about the possible effects of Jeb Bush's proposed tax plan on economic growth. The article includes this passage:

"This is four smart people who made an educated guess based on looking at other models," said Joel Slemrod, a public finance economist at the University of Michigan. "If I had to pick a number, I would have picked a lower number."

Of all the possible economists the Times could have chosen to include, they picked Professor Slemrod. I'm pretty sure that his son is Jonathan Slemrod, who is policy director of Marco Rubio's presidential campaign. Professor Slemrod's views or comments on Jeb Bush's tax plan probably are not colored by his son's job with the campaign of a competing Republican presidential candidate, but even so, you'd think this might be the sort of thing the Times might want to either disclose to its readers or take into account in choosing whose comments to include in the story, no?

The Times misstep that's causing all the buzz this week is the newspaper's publication, and then unexplained partial unpublication, of a chart highlighting the Jewish religion of members of Congress opposed to the Iran deal. That graphic, which used the color yellow to mark the Jewish members and high-Jewish-population districts, is reproduced before and after the changes in Yair Rosenberg's Twitter feed, which also carries a series of illuminating comments about the matter. (A Times spokeswoman explained to the Washington Post's Erik Wemple that "After a number of readers raised questions, editors took another look and decided that that element of the graphic put too much emphasis on the question of which Democrats opposing the deal were Jewish...singling those lawmakers out in a separate column of the graphic seemed unnecessary, and struck some readers as insensitive.")

Just as egregious, and possibly even more so, is a Gail Collins column on the Times op-ed page. In urging readers to be informed about the presidential race, the column comments glancingly, "your friends are going to expect you to update them regularly. If you can't, be prepared to take an active part in discussions about the Tom Brady divorce rumors."

If the Times thinks that "divorce rumors" involving the New England Patriots quarterback qualify as news that is "fit to print," it can write an article about them that includes actual reporting. But in the absence of such reporting, and in the absence of any divorce filing, slipping the "rumors" into print using the vehicle of a political column on the op-ed page seems like an example of the sort of irresponsible salacious celebrity gossip-mongering you'd expect from a tabloid, not from the Times.

Elsewhere, in the newspaper, the technology columnist Farhad Manjoo makes a similar digression that some editor should have excised. Amid a column about the new iPhone, Mr. Manjoo writes:

Across large swaths of the globe, in other words, the iPhone is a status symbol, which is not to say that it's frivolous — unlike a Prada suit, the iPhone is one status symbol that you'll still find extremely useful.

I'd like to be a fly on the wall of the advertising executive responsible for Prada's New York Times advertising budget when he read that sentence. Who is to say that a Prada suit isn't useful, anyway? It keeps the wearer warm (or cool) and comfortable, providing an elegant appearance that just might help its wearer impress someone that needs to be impressed (a client, a job-interviewer, the person who assigns the restaurant tables...). Fashion criticism from Farhad Manjoo is like sports celebrity gossip from Gail Collins. They should leave it to the pros and instead stick to their own specialty. Even star columnists sometimes need editors.

A dispatch in the Times sports section about the ouster of Red Sox television broadcaster Don Orsillo reports, "The acquisitions of players like Rick Porcello, Pedro Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez have not worked out well."

The player the Times means is Pablo Sandoval, not "Pedro." The newspaper should run a correction.

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

A Times article about Donald Trump's proposal to tax carried interest as ordinary income reports, "the fiscal impact of taxing carried interest income at ordinary income rates would be small: about $2 billion a year in added revenue within a nearly $4 trillion federal budget."

The Times cites no source for this "$2 billion a year" claim.

A February 2013 Times op-ed estimated the annual revenue increase from such a change at between $11 billion and $13 billion. I challenged that estimate at the time, but the Times declined to correct it.

A 2013 Times news article reported, "Changes to the treatment of carried interest could bring in $17 billion over 10 years, according to Congressional estimates."

So now the Times has provided three different estimates of the revenue consequences of this change, with no guidance to readers about which estimate to believe or why the estimates differ so widely. It's disappointingly bad journalism.

The same Times article about Mr. Trump reports:

"We're the most highly taxed nation in the world," he said, incorrectly, on Fox News last week. "That's why taxes have to come down."

In fact there is a definition by which America is "the most highly taxed nation in the world," which is the "total tax revenue in U.S. dollars" at all levels of government. According to this OECD chart, that amounted to $4,266,409,900,000 in 2013, far more than either Japan or Germany, the next closest. If one looks at tax revenue per capita or as a percent of GDP, one gets different results. But it's not accurate for the Times to state flatly that Mr. Trump is incorrect about this.

Two articles in today's New York Times discuss the presidential candidates and their relations with Wall Street or the banking industry. A front-page article, headlined "Banking Ties Could Hurt Joe Biden in Race With Populist Overtone," reports on Vice President Biden's links to the credit-card industry in Delaware, framing it as a potential vulnerability. A second article appears on the front of the business section and is headlined, "Candidates' Divergent Views on Wall Street." It reports that Jeb Bush was "a paid adviser to Lehman Brothers and Barclays immediately before the financial crisis."

What's odd is that neither article mentions that Bill and Hillary Clinton were paid $875,000 in 2013 for four speeches to Goldman Sachs. You'd think that if the less recent banking connections of Mr. Bush and Mr. Biden are such big news for the Times, Mrs. Clinton's Goldman connections would at least be worth a mention in at least one of the articles. They are both pretty long. The business section article also reports that Mrs. Clinton supports increasing the capital gains tax so that "a wealthy speculator who sells a stock after holding it for two years, for instance, would pay a 39.6 percent tax rate on any gains — the same top rate that is taxed on ordinary income." But that top rate applies not only to "speculators" but to people who had to sell the stock for some other reason — say, to pay unexpected family medical bills. And 39.6 percent substantially understates the tax that applies. After state and local taxes and the ObamaCare extra tax applies, the government can wind up with more than half of every dollar of income.

The state superintendent of education of Louisiana, John White, has responded to an op-ed piece in the New York Times. A further response is here.

The Times Sunday Review section features a confessional piece by a waiter at an unnamed fancy restaurant. He claims: "Grown men wearing Zegna and Ferragamo would sit at the bar chanting, 'We are the 1 percent!'"

I find this hard to believe, but perhaps I am just traveling in the wrong circles.

The New York Times has a long article about the "bruising workplace" of Amazon.com. It claims in a headline, "the company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions."

An Amazon executive, Nick Ciubotariu, has a LinkedIn post rebutting the Times article and explaining problems and inaccuracies with it.

A professor of journalism at the City University of New York, Jeff Jarvis, who is an Amazon shareholder, has a post complaining that the Times article "lacks two key attributes: context and — I can't quite believe I'm saying this — balance."

A few other points are worth mentioning. First, it's hard not to see the Times article as akin to its alarmist coverage of Rupert Mudoch when Mr. Murdoch was trying to buy the Wall Street Journal. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and is an investor in Business Insider, and the Times seems to take a special pleasure in targeting owners of rival news organizations. If the Times reporters were just interested in how a corporate culture of data-based, challenging radical skepticism drives success, they could have written a piece on Raymond Dalio's Bridgewater Associates. Instead they chose to write about Mr. Bezos's Amazon.

Second, while the pieces by Mr. Ciubotario and Mr. Jarvis have gotten some attention around the web, less attention has been paid to an interview that Mr. Bezos gave the Telegraph. It appeared the same day as the Times article, which did not include a Bezos interview. The Telegraph article begins with a portrayal of Mr. Bezos going to the movies on the weekend with his children (a subtle rebuttal of the claim in the Times article that Amazon is somehow a family-unfriendly workplace). The Telegraph article concludes with Mr. Bezos saying, "Almost all the people I work with on a daily basis, are paid volunteers – at this point I've been working with them for more than a decade, and they can do whatever they want, they could be sipping margaritas on a beach, but they're here. Paid volunteers are the best people to work with as they're here for the right reasons."

That concept of "volunteer" gets right to the policy nub of the Amazon article. No one is forcing anyone to work there. Doubtless some will respond to the Times article with demands for additional regulations — overtime or caps on weekly hours for white-collar workers, additional family or medical leave. But as the facts in both the Times article and the LinkedIn post suggest, to some degree the labor market is self-regulating. For prospective employees, there's no lack of transparency about the work conditions. If Amazon is really such a terrible place to work, it will have trouble finding and retaining high-quality workers, and its reputation with customers might even suffer.

The usual disclosures apply when I write about Amazon: I'm a book author so the company affects me. This site and its sister site FutureOfCapitalism.com are Amazon affiliates, deriving revenue when someone clicks on a link to Amazon and buys something. I don't own stock in Amazon but do own stock in at least one competing retailer. I am a member of the Amazon Vine program that sends me items in exchange for writing reviews on Amazon. I shop at Amazon sometimes. In this case I should also disclose, too, that I know both of the authors of the Times article.

The New York Times manages to publish an obituary of Jerome Kohlberg Jr. that, bizarrely, omits any mention of the fact that he owned the Vineyard Gazette, which he bought in 2010 from the Reston family. That is quite a lapse.