"How Covid Became a Red State Crisis," was the headline over Paul Krugman's column in Friday's New York Times. "It's crucial to understand that we aren't facing a national crisis; we're facing a red-state crisis, with nakedly political roots," Krugman wrote.

Saturday's New York Times front-page news article provided a reality check with a report that "the C.D.C. described an outbreak in Provincetown, Mass., this month that quickly mushroomed to 470 cases in Massachusetts alone, as of Thursday.": "The outbreak in Provincetown, Mass., this month sprouted after more than 60,000 revelers celebrated the Fourth of July gathering in densely packed bars, restaurants, guesthouses and rental homes, often indoors. On July 3, there were no cases in the town and surrounding county. By July 10, officials noted an uptick, and by July 17, there were 177 cases per 100,000 people. The outbreak has since spread to nearly 900 people across the country."

So, Provincetown, Mass., and, later down in the Times article, Dr. Robert Wachter, chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco:

"I thought two months ago that we were over the hump," Dr. Wachter said. In San Francisco, the most highly vaccinated big city in the country, 77 percent of people over age 12 are vaccinated.

And yet, the hospital where he works has seen a sharp rise, from one case of Covid-19 on June 1 to 40 now. Fifteen of the patients are in intensive care.

California and Massachusetts are not "red states," but rather are predictably and consistently Democratic in presidential politics, at least in recent years. So Krugman's column seems far from the facts.

The lead, front-page news article in today's New York Times reports on problems counting mayoral votes at New York City's board of elections. "For the Board of Elections, which has long been plagued by dysfunction and nepotism, this was its first try at implementing ranked-choice voting on a citywide scale," the story reports.

The nepotism reference is unexplained for print readers, but for online readers there is a hyperlink to an article from October 2020, "Inside Decades of Nepotism and Bungling at the N.Y.C. Elections Board." It reports:

Employees include Beth Fossella, the head of voter registration and mother of a former Republican congressman from Staten Island, Vito J. Fossella; Thomas Sattie, director of ballot management and son of the former Brooklyn Democratic district leader Maryrose Sattie; Pamela Perkins, administrative manager and wife of Democratic City Councilman Bill Perkins; Raphael Savino, deputy general counsel and brother of Joseph Savino, the former Bronx Republican leader; and Daniel Ortiz, deputy clerk in Brooklyn and son of Assemblyman Felix W. Ortiz, a Democrat.

The list of relatives stretches even to the agency's computer programmers, including Rubén Díaz III, a Democrat who is the son of the Bronx borough president and grandson of a City Council member.

From the New York Times Company's 2021 Proxy Statement:

Certain Members of the Ochs-Sulzberger Family Employed by the Company during our 2020 Fiscal Year. A.G. Sulzberger was employed as Publisher of The New York Times during 2020. See "Compensation of Executive Officers" for a description of his compensation. David Perpich, who was employed as head of the Company's standalone products group, was paid $724,077 in 2020 and received a grant under the 2020-2022 long-term performance award program with a target value of $200,000. James Dryfoos, who was employed as executive director, technology compliance, was paid $292,104 in 2020 and received time-vested restricted stock units with a grant date fair value of $5,700. Pamela Dryfoos, who was employed as executive director of finance for the Company's standalone products group, was paid $236,043 in 2020 and received time-vested restricted stock units with a grant date fair value of $5,700. Mr. Dryfoos, Ms. Dryfoos, Mr. Perpich and Mr. Sulzberger are all fifth-generation members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family.

Now, it could be that nepotism at a government agency leads to dysfunction, but nepotism at a newspaper, even one operated by a publicly traded company controlled by a family trust, leads to excellence. Absent some explanation, though, of why nepotism is bad in one place but good in another place, it's hard not to find a bit of humor in a newspaper published by a "fifth-generation member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family" earnestly campaigning against the city Board of Election employing, as a computer programmer, the grandson of a city council member. The computer programmer can't control who his grandparent was. The New York Times makes no assertion that Rubén Díaz III, or the other individuals named, is unqualified for the job or incompetent, or that he was hired over anyone better qualified but without a family connection to city government. Such issues might be worth investigating, but without them, the naming of family connections may seem like a cheap shot. As with many other traits, a family connection can be both a strength and a weakness. The New York Times Company's status as a family business makes it unusually well qualified to investigate problems with nepotism but also subject to accusations about double standards and hypocrisy when pursuing such investigations.

The second page of the business section of the Sunday New York Times carries conflicting reports about the 30-year fixed mortgage rate. At the top of the page, the Times reports "Mortgage rates are up. Bankrate.com 30-year fixed, 3.29%, +0.41 points."

At the bottom of the page, under headings "consumer rates" and "borrowing rate 30-year-fixed mortgages," the Times publishes a chart with a declining rate showing "last week 2.4%."

What's the 30-year fixed mortgage rate? 3.29%? Or 2.4%? Sometimes there may be different rates depending on whether it is a conforming or jumbo mortgage, or whether one pays "points" initially to buy down the rate. But absent any such explanation for the variation, it's confusing, or at least not helpful, to readers for the Times to report two different rates on the same page.

This sentence appears on the front page of this morning's New York Times: "Mr. Rivas, 37, a construction worker, and his girlfriend were riding a train home from Lower Manhattan last month when he said a man screamed at them for no reason."

What happened on the train last month? Mr. Rivas said something? Or a man screamed at him? I think the Times is attempting to communicate that the screaming happened last month, not the saying. If so, it'd be better written: "Mr. Rivas, 37, a construction worker, said he and his girlfriend were riding a train home from Lower Manhattan last month when a man screamed at them for no reason." As is, the phrase "last month" is dropped into the sentence closer to "said" than it is to either "riding" or "screamed," making it sound like the interview with the Times happened last month.

The Times article has three bylines. How many reporters does it take to follow the Strunk and White elementary principle of composition: "Keep related words together"?

This problem is not confined to the Times. Here's a sentence from an editorial in this morning's Wall Street Journal: "Media and progressive activists blamed the Hamas-initiated war on Israel, as they always do, but the White House did not go along." What does the phrase "on Israel" modify? The word "war," as in, a "war on Israel," like a "war on drugs" or a "war on crime"? Or does "on Israel" modify the word "blame," which is far away in the sentence. I think the Journal editorialists—generally among the world's sharpest wordsmiths—were trying to communicate something like, "Media and progressive activists blamed Israel for the Hamas-initiated war, as they always do, but the White House did not go along." Again, the fix is the Strunk and White elementary principle of composition: "Keep related words together."

A New York Times obituary of the Nobel laureate economist Robert Mundell reports:

His ideas were promoted with evangelical fervor in the 1970s particularly by two economists: Arthur Laffer, who became known for the "Laffer curve," postulating that lower tax rates would generate higher government revenues, and Jude Wanniski, an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, whose opinion pages took up Professor Mundell's cause after a series of lunches and dinners at the Midtown Manhattan restaurant Michael's, which were later described by Robert Bartley, The Journal's opinion editor, in his book "The Seven Fat Years" (1992).

The Times obituary name-checks "The Seven Fat Years" but the obituary-writer can't have bothered to have actually read it with any care. If he had, he'd have realized that the dinners with Mundell were not at Michael's in Midtown. That restaurant is a publishing industry hangout that opened in 1989 as a sibling of the Santa Monica, California, establishment that opened in 1979. Rather, as Bartley described it, "Michael 1 is a restaurant for Wall Street wannabees. Nestled on Trinity Place thirty steps south of the American stock exchange, it draws the financial world's young and maybe rising...On some nights in the mid-1970s, it was also the site of extraordinary seminars in economics."

This merits a correction along the lines of "Michael 1 in Lower Manhattan was the restaurant where Robert Mundell and Robert Bartley had dinners to discuss economics. An obituary of Mundell incorrectly confused it with a different restaurant, Michael's, that is in a different Manhattan neighborhood and that was not yet open at the time of the Mundell-Bartley dinners."

In general I am a fan of Jane Brody's health column. Today's has an inaccuracy about the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She writes:

Of course, in recent decades many of the policies of the department Mr. Vilsack now heads have contributed mightily to Americans' access to inexpensive foods that flesh out their bones with unwholesome calories and undermine their health. Two telling examples: The government subsidizes the production of both soybeans and corn, most of which is used to feed livestock.

Not only does livestock production make a major contribution to global warming, much of its output ends up as inexpensive, often highly processed fast foods that can prompt people to overeat and raise their risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and kidney disease. But there are no subsidies for the kinds of fruits and vegetables that can counter the disorders that render people more vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It's not accurate that there are "no subsidies" for fruits and vegetables. The federal government awarded $13,482,784 in grants in 2020 under the farmers market promotion program. The Department of Agriculture spent $231 million in 2020 buying fresh fruit—apples, grapes, oranges, pears, plums, grapefruit. In 2020 the USDA's $72 million Specialty Crop Block Grant program included federal funds to the Alabama Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association for an "education and promotion campaign," to the Alabama Department of Agriculture for research on disease-resistant peach rootstock, to a "marketing and promotion campaign for Alabama watermelons," and to Arizona to research "biological fungicides to manage late blight in celery." Those are just states beginning with the letter "A." The Environmental Working Group, which tracks farm subsidies, reports $159 million in total payments from 1995 to 2020 under the "tree assistance program," including $2,154,433 to cover citrus losses in California and smaller sums targeted to "NY fruit growers" and "fresh market peaches." And that doesn't even take into account state and local subsidies for farmers markets and orchard operators, which in many cases are considerable. Try, for example, typing the word "orchard" or "apple" into ProPublica's New York State Subsidy Tracker. One might also describe the lower property tax rate often applied to agricultural land (compared to residential, retail, or office property) as a subsidy.

It's certainly possible that federal fruit and vegetable subsidies are less generous or less lucrative for farmers than those for soybeans or corn. But to state that there are "no subsidies" for fruits and vegetables is just not accurate. How are legislators or voters supposed to rein in out-of-control government spending when the newspaper won't even provide an accurate account of the existing vast expenditures?

From the "Corner Office" interview in the Sunday Business section with the senior partner of PwC, Tim Ryan, described by the Times as "a white, male, Irish-Catholic millionaire.":

What was your childhood like?

I grew up in Boston, and then I moved right over the city line into a town called Denham. I was very, very, very middle-class, lower middle-class. We didn't have much at all. My dad worked three jobs. He worked at Boston Edison and The Boston Herald. When one of those two were on strike, which was all the time, he would work as a garbage man. My mother worked at a supermarket. And we were taught to work hard. We all got jobs at 14, and I remember lying about my age so I could get a job at the supermarket. I have no childhood memory of doing homework.

There is no Boston suburb—or any Massachusetts city or town—called "Denham." Ryan probably means Dedham. This is the sort of thing that ideally a careful Times copy editor would catch, query, and fix before publication, or that, failing that, the Times would publish a correction of post-publication. We'll see whether they bother with correcting it or whether they just shrug it off and ignore it like many of the other factual errors pointed out here.

A New York Times article about Cornel West seeking tenure at Harvard includes this paragraph:

By the time Dr. West returned to Harvard in 2017, Mr. Summers was long gone. Harvard's current president, Mr. Bacow, "actually has some decency," Dr. West allowed.

It's odd for the Times to refer to "Dr." West but "Mr. Summers" and "Mr. Bacow," since Bacow, Summers and West all have Ph.D. degrees, and none of them is a medical doctor. Also, it's not accurate that Summers was "long gone" from Harvard. Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor, and the Times itself reported as recently as 2020 that Summers had a voice in economics faculty hiring decisions.

A recent item here faulted the Times for criticizing Rush Limbaugh for having "pushed dangerous lies, at one point likening the coronavirus to the common cold." I pointed out that the Times itself had published that comparison. That generated some pushback in the Smartertimes comments. For what it's worth, the Times did it again in David Leonhardt's morning newsletter. Leonhardt writes, "The accumulated scientific evidence suggests the chances are very small that a vaccinated person could infect someone else with a severe case of Covid. (A mild case is effectively the common cold.)"

The same Leonhardt column also overestimates the problem of vaccine resistance, blaming experts who say people should keep wearing masks and distancing even post-vaccination. Leonhardt writes, "Nationwide, nearly half of Americans would refuse a shot if offered one immediately, polls suggest." The link goes to two somewhat older polls from a single organization. The column fails to cite other polls, which show vaccine hesitance has been declining and is at less than a third of the population. In the New Yorker, Atul Gawande, interviewed by David Remnick, says, "We now have more than seventy per cent of Americans reporting that if they had the chance to get the vaccine today, they would take it. That is higher than we've seen, and I think that will continue to rise." Here is a poll from Ipsos showing 71% of Americans agree "If a vaccine for Covid-19 were available to me, I would get it." Gallup had a similar finding: "71% of Americans are now willing to be vaccinated, up from 65% in late December and the highest recorded since July."

A news article in today's Times reports, "Sleep experts also recommend exercising, not eating dinner too late, having a before-bed routine, and cutting back on news and social media in the evening — good advice for anyone, especially these days."

How far to cut back? The article does not specify. Maybe the Times should make its website or mobile apps unavailable in the evenings.

This is the latest in a series of admissions from the Times that its own product can be bad for you. See the earlier post, Times Advises Readers How To Stop Reading It.

From the New York Times obituary of Rush Limbaugh: "Last year, as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the nation, Mr. Limbaugh pushed dangerous lies, at one point likening the coronavirus to the common cold."

The Times itself has made the same comparison at least twice. In a health section article, a physician on the Yale medical school faculty wrote, "The symptoms of Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, clearly cover a broad spectrum of illness, ranging from life-threatening pneumonia to what seems like a really bad cold."

And in a news article, Vivian Wang of the Times reported, "For many with mild infections, the coronavirus could be virtually indistinguishable from the common cold or seasonal flu, said Dr. Jin of the University of Hong Kong..."

I haven't done a thorough review of Limbaugh's Covid-19 coverage, but if the best the Times could come up with as an example of "dangerous lies" was the common cold comparison, the Times is holding Limbaugh to a different, and higher, standard than it exemplified in its own coverage.

The Times publishes a question-and-answer format interview with Peter Daszak, identified by the Times as a member of "A team of experts selected by the World Health Organization to investigate the origins of the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic." The print Times says, "A specialist in animal diseases and their spread to humans, Dr. Daszak has worked with the Wuhan Virology Institute."

"Worked with" seems quite a vague way of putting it, especially given the speculation (extensively explored in this New York magazine article) that the Wuhan Virology Institute was somehow responsible for the outbreak via a leak or accident. The Times doesn't appear to have asked about that possibility, at least according to the question-and-answers published in the newspaper. A U.S. State Department "fact sheet" issued last month reported that the Wuhan Institute of Virology "has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China's military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017." Was Daszak aware of that work? The Times does not appear to have asked.

A business section article in today's Times reports:

China was, and remains, an authoritarian country under Communist Party rule. But the nature of its authoritarianism has become much harsher under Xi Jinping, the party's top leader since late 2012. Mr. Sun's case exemplifies the country's drastic turn from a nation striving for economic and social, if not political, liberalization to one increasingly operating in an ideological straitjacket.

Mr. Xi has steadily undermined China's civil society — the businesspeople, lawyers, civic groups and many others who make up the fabric of a nation's daily life. People in many countries take civil society for granted. In China, where the Communist Party had sought to fill all roles, civil society was budding in 2003.

Since Mr. Xi came to command, it has been virtually wiped out. Journalists with an independent bent have been silenced. Lawyers are jailed. Officials, even retired ones, know to keep their mouth shut. Businesspeople tread carefully to avoid crossing the government.

It would have been nice if the Times had asked Daszak how he thought about such questions in connection with his work "with the Wuhan Virology Institute," or in investigating the outbreak.

What percentage of coronavirus cases result in no symptoms?

An opinion piece in today's print New York Times reports, "An estimated one in five people who develop Covid-19 never have symptoms."

That estimate conflicts with other information published by the Times. In August 2020, a Times news article reported:

The study's estimate that 30 percent of infected people never develop symptoms is in line with findings from other studies. In a television interview on Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tendered 40 percent as the figure.

"The good news about Covid-19 is that about 40 percent of the population have no symptoms when they get infected," Dr. Fauci said.

The Times repeated the 40 percent estimate in a November 2020 news article: "up to 40 percent are asymptomatic, according to C.D.C. research."

As the Times news article reported, "Discussions about asymptomatic spread have been dogged by confusion about people who are 'pre-symptomatic' — meaning they eventually become visibly ill — versus the truly asymptomatic, who appear healthy throughout the course of their infection." That's a fair point. What's odd is the Times changing the number from 40 percent in the November news article to 20 percent in the February op-ed, without explaining to readers why the estimate for asymptomatic cases has suddenly been cut in half.

The New York Times obituary of George Shultz is strange. The print headline is "Statesman Who Guided U.S. Toward the End of the Cold War." The jump headline over the end of the piece is "George Shultz, 100, Who Helped End The Cold War, Dies." I would have gone with "Statesman Who Guided U.S. Toward Victory in Cold War," or "George Shultz, 100, Who Helped Win The Cold War, Dies." For whatever reason, though, the Times headline writers seem loath to admit that the U.S. won the Cold War.

This isn't just a headline problem with the obituary, either. The Times obituary says, "Mr. Shultz lived long enough to see his most lasting legacy from the Reagan years come largely undone." This is followed by a long dirge about the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. But Shultz's most lasting legacy was not the INF treaty but the defeat of the Soviet Union, the freeing of the captive nations, and the emigration of Soviet Jewry. None of those legacies have come undone.

The Times obituary claims "relations with the Soviet Union were at rock bottom when Mr. Shultz became the 60th secretary of state. Moscow and Washington had not spoken for years." That's misleading. Reagan sent at least two letters to Brezhnev. In a January 1982, letter to refuseniks, Reagan wrote, "We have been in touch with Soviet officials at high levels to seek resolution of this question." On February 18, 1982, Reagan had the Soviet Ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, to dinner at the White House.

In May 1982, Reagan transmitted to Congress an exchange of diplomatic notes extending a fishery agreement between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. It's possible this agreement was extended without speaking but only through written communications, but the Times makes it sound like there was a total absence of U.S.-Soviet communications until George Shultz swept onto the scene and miraculously mended relations. That is nonsense.

From a column in the business section of today's New York Times:

Some of the news this month has been so stressful that many of us have needed reminders to unclench our jaws and stop staring at our screens.

In my recent column about creating a digital detox plan, I outlined methods like setting no-phone zones in the home — keep devices out of the bedroom! — and turning off app notifications. Some of us might need more extreme measures, like restricting access to the news.

For example, you can temporarily block your smartphone from accessing certain websites and apps, such as Twitter, CNN and even The New York Times — whatever may trap you in anever ending cycle of bingeing on doom and gloom....Temporarily blocking access makes it just a bit harder to check the news, which helps break the compulsive desire to doomscroll. Try these steps when you need a breather, like on the weekends or during dinner.

This is a great idea. Skip the New York Times for the entire weekend. Better yet, skip it for an even longer period of time. It's actually kind of funny to see the Times issuing indications like some leak of documents from a tobacco or sugary beverage or fossil fuel company—the company knows that its product is unhealthy for you, and some farsighted employees want to help consumers gradually wean themselves off the product, but the company hasn't quite figured out how it will make money or what it will sell instead once people figure out that its main product is harmful.