Worst of Times, and best

I've never liked the Times' TV critic, Alessandra Stanley; too often I feel like she was watching a different program than me, and inattentively at that.

So I wasn't surprised to reach this by the Times' public editor, Clark Hoyt:

THE TIMES published an especially embarrassing correction on July 22, fixing seven errors in a single article — an appraisal of Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman famed for his meticulous reporting. The newspaper had wrong dates for historic events; gave incorrect information about Cronkite’s work, his colleagues and his program’s ratings; misstated the name of a news agency, and misspelled the name of a satellite.

“Wow,” said Arthur Cooper, a reader from Manhattan. “How did this happen?”

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.

Hoyt doesn't mention Stanley's name until the seventh paragraph; I guess his point is it was an institutional failure, but I don't think it is, based on years of reading Stanley.

She has a singular disregard for the facts, getting things consistently wrong in both small details (the order of events in an episode, the interpretation of a character's words) and the overall big picture.

The full article, "Cronkite's Signature: Approachable Authority," is worth a read just for the kicker... which in the online version consists of:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 22, 2009
An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 1, 2009
An appraisal on July 18 about Walter Cronkite’s career misstated the name of the ABC evening news broadcast. While the program was called “World News Tonight” when Charles Gibson became anchor in May 2006, it is now “World News With Charles Gibson,” not “World News Tonight With Charles Gibson.”

Obama's America vs. Old Europe

A.A. Gill has a pitch-perfect piece in the Times that captures what President Obama's visit to Europe has been all about.

IT’S invariably the little things, the unconsidered, off the cuff, in passing, unrehearsed things that snag our attention, and seem to be telling of the bigger things. In the case of Barack Obama’s first visit to London and the Group of 20 conference to save the endangered habitat of bankers and real estate salesmen, it was the handshake with the bobby that seemed to be emblematic. In a forest of waving palms, this handshake meant more.

As the president stepped up to 10 Downing Street, he leant over, made eye contact, said something courteous, and shook the hand of the police officer standing guard. There’s always a police officer there; he is a tourist logo in his ridiculous helmet. He tells you that this is London, and the late 19th century. No one has ever shaken the hand of the policeman before, and like everyone else who has his palm touched by Barack Obama, he was visibly transported and briefly forgot himself. He offered the hand to Gordon Brown, the prime minister, who was scuttling behind.

It was ignored. He was left empty-handed. It isn’t that Mr. Brown snubbed the police officer; he just didn’t see him. To a British politician, a police officer is as invisible as the railings.

But the rest of us noticed. Because in this country that still feels the class system like a phantom limb, being overtly kind to servants is the very height of manners, the mark of true nobility. Being nice to the staff is second only to being nice to dogs as a pinnacle of civilization. Remember: a butler’s not just for Christmas. Apparently, the Obamas searched every cupboard and closet in Downing Street to personally thank all the servants for looking after them. That’s classlessly classy. ...

The Obamas were likely also surprised at how black the old white colonial country is. Ethnic diversity is shamelessly and embarrassingly pushed to the front of every publicity shot. Michelle Obama went to a girls school where a gospel song was performed and where she made a surprisingly moving speech. All the world leaders’ wives are herded together in cultural outings of excruciatingly bland probity, but Mrs. Obama rose above it, and seemed to really inspire this group of young girls. It was noticed. The rest of the women grinned and clutched their handbags, apparently wondering when they could get away to Harrods.

Spinning racism as conservation

The New York Times has a startling article centering around a shuttering ice cream shop, The Great Divide, that unflinchingly presents the racist views of some residents of a rapidly-changing Queens community as some latter-day version of Jane Jacobs:

The closing of the beloved neighborhood spot strikes many residents as simply the latest sign of the death of old Bellerose. The bowling alley, another local hangout that some considered the beating heart of Bellerose, closed a few years back, to eventually be replaced by a Staples, among other stores. Several years ago, the nearby movie theater closed, and the building now houses a martial arts supply business.

There have been other changes, even more unsettling to some residents in this neighborhood, long a mostly white enclave of families of Irish, Italian and German stock. ...

The transformation has come as a shock to many of the neighborhood’s earlier settlers, some of whom say they wonder whether magazines tucked into seatbacks on flights between Mumbai and Kennedy Airport advertise homes in Bellerose.

And many residents are not surprised that the developers who plan to tear down the Frozen Cup are Indian immigrants. Some of the same developers recently opened a Quality Inn down the road in Floral Park, an establishment, Mr. Augugliaro said, that “stands out like the Taj Mahal.”

Nice start; nevermind that the shuttering of long-time neighborhood institutions is normal in all neighborhoods -- where was the Times when the bowling alley and movie theater closed. Or was that not a story because it wasn't bought by the same people who created the Taj Mahal?

And yeah, let's call it a divide and morally equate the people on either side; nevermind that one side is racist against the other. Let's just call it a he said, she said thing.

While New York is often praised as a gorgeous mosaic, ethnic tensions are hardly unknown in the city, especially in neighborhoods that undergo rapid demographic shifts. Sometimes tensions are expressed overtly; other times, they lurk under the surface, revealing themselves in conversations that can be heard in local bars and living rooms.

That is the case in Bellerose.

Yeah, racism is presented as two-sided ethnic tensions! And note the understated language -- "ethnic tensions are hardly unknown in the city". Ha! The killing of black kids by whites, the killing of Sikhs by whites, the killing of hipsanic kids by whites -- just tensions that are hardly unknown.

Harshad Patel, who lives with his family in Floral Park, immigrated to the United States in 1981. Before entering the hotel business, he worked as a restaurateur, a metal lathe operator, a water plant operator and a sewage treatment worker. He also ran an electroplating business.

He said he was perplexed by the veneration of the Frozen Cup.

“If they have so much feeling,” he said of the establishment’s devotees, “let them buy it. Let them run the Frozen Cup if they want to.”

But the business would not survive, he insisted. “Nowadays,” Mr. Patel said, “there are so many flavors on the market and so many places to go.”

To drive home his point, he made a public offer. If someone wanted to run the Frozen Cup for the next 10 years, he promised to sell the place at a $100,000 loss.

“Let me see,” he said with a grin. “Who is coming forward?”

See, Patel's views aren't the centerpiece of the article, because it's what some white residents think that really matter. So there's no response to what Patel says in the piece, the Times just quotes him and moves on.

As officers of the Queens Colony Civic Association and members of other community groups, Angela and Michael Augugliaro have been among the most vocal opponents of the plan to replace the Frozen Cup with a hotel.

But as they sat in their living room, they expressed unhappiness with what they see as other undesirable changes in the neighborhood: street vendors selling halal gyros; traffic congestion near the Indian and Pakistani grocery stores on Hillside Avenue; newly created mini-mansions, many of them occupied by extended South Asian families.

“They’re turning the neighborhood into a third-world country,” Mr. Augugliaro said. “We don’t want it over here to look like Richmond Hill or Jackson Heights,” he added, speaking of Queens neighborhoods with sizable South Asian populations.

As he spoke, Ms. Augugliaro shook her head in disapproval at some of his remarks, and he seemed to pick up on her unspoken criticism.

“I’m not a racist,” Mr. Augugliaro quickly added. In fact, he said, he was tired of the subject of race coming up so often. “What does race have to do with it?” he asked.

The couple later recalled a morning years ago when they saw an old man in an orange turban walking on the sidewalk with a curved sword slung from his waist like the one they remembered from the Ali Baba cartoons.

The man was a Sikh, and the object was a Kirpan, a sword carrying religious symbolism and worn by some adherents of the faith, though often a smaller version of the Kirpan is worn on a necklace under a shirt. The couple laughed as they recalled the scene.

“It was like a total shock,” Ms. Augugliaro said.

Yup, he's no racist.

Many of the South Asians who live in Bellerose have only good things to say about the neighborhood. On a snowy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Francis Thomas, the Indian-born owner of India Kitchen, a restaurant on Braddock Avenue, stood at the counter and said relations between the races in Bellerose were good. “They’re tolerant,” Mr. Thomas said of the people of Bellerose.

Yes, because tolerance is the highest value we aspire to here in America; it's weird for the Times to insert this paragraph, when so much of the article shows the residents aren't tolerant, and that'd it'd be weird for any South Asians to think that.

Instead the Times takes ordinary politeness, an unwillingness on the part of South Asians to speak ill to a newspaper about their neighbors, as a 'there's nothing here to see, move along' sentiment.

Next door to the India Kitchen, however, at a pub called Fuzzy’s Bar, where a grill called Wolf Dawg serves burgers and “hot dawgs,” patrons griped about their immigrant neighbors as “Jeopardy!” played on two small television sets.

“Everybody wants to bring their country here,” said Bruce Holloway, one patron who lives in Bayside, Queens. “They don’t want to look like Americans, they don’t want to dress like Americans, and they don’t want to speak English.”

“But they do come for the benefits,” volunteered his drinking buddy, who gave his name as Franco and said he grew up in Bellerose and used to go to the Frozen Cup for strawberry ice cream with chocolate sprinkles. And of the South Asian grocery stores, he added, one of which opened a month earlier down the block and had the word “bazaar” in its name, “It’s not the kind of store an American goes into.”

Of the newcomers, a group he describes simply as “the Indians,” he said, “They change everything that’s been here.” And he wondered aloud, “Where the hell do they get the money from?”

This is one of the things that drives me crazy about the Times -- they habitually think it's okay to use white as an euphemism for American. So the article is structured so that quotes about how no 'American' would go into a store, that South Asians don't want to look like 'Americans', aren't juxtaposed by a different view, they just float by.

Imagine if the guy was saying Jews aren't Americans or no American would go into a Jewish deli; it wouldn't be buried in the midst of a paragraph, there'd be an expert talking about how this kind of anti-Semitism is engrained among certain subcultures -- there'd be some sort of overt recognition that this statement isn't normal or correct.

But for the Times, apparently it's normal and no cause for alarm that an established, declining ethnic group is racist toward neighbors who are saving their community.

Heck, maybe racism really is just the new family values!

I'll buy one

Does the NYTimes.com not have copy editors?

Obama Team Anything but Shy and Retiring: Dan Gerstein, a Democratic communications consultant, said that while Mr. Emanuel had a reputation for clashing with others, he also got things done. “He wasn’t able to round up votes for Nafta by being a bullying, hyperpartisan ideologue,” Mr. Gerstein said of Mr. Emanuel’s role at the Clinton White House, where he helped to secure passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. “This caricature of Rahm as this raging bull in a China shop is wrong.”

Times gets lost in Africa

Elinor Burkett turns in one of those standard white woman goes to Africa pieces in today's issue of the always-backwards Times Travel section that's notable only for its fantastic photo, and this crazy sentence:

For decades until 1914, Namibia was a German colony, South West Africa, and even 94 years after Germany lost it as the spoils of defeat in World War I, the Teutonic imprint on Swakop, as locals call the city, remains unmistakable."

Wow--41 words delineated by 6 commas!

Not to mention such rhetorical flourishes as 'spoils of defeat' and 'Teutonic imprint'.

Burkett, who teaches journalism(!), follows immediately with another sentence nearly as claustrophobic:

The standard plats du jour are schnitzel and bratwurst; the architecture of the old prison, the train station, the jail and dozens of other structures is late 19th-century Munich; and the streets are so tidy that Kaiser Wilhelm, for whom the main avenue was named until the government changed it six years ago, would be proud.

The article's 2,089 words are chopped up into many similar sentences that have hopelessly lost their way--by my count, 134 commas, 11 emdashes and 6 semicolons are scattered in amongst just 64 sentences.

Elinor really needs to read Isak Dinesen.

Photo of tourists climbing one of the Sossusvlei dunes, which rise as high as 1,000 feet, by Evelyn Hockstein for the Times

Idiot New York Times take on diversity

Edward Wyatt of the Times seems to disbelieve the reality of America's racial diversity, painting it as something that exists only within the artificial construct of the United Nations.

Generation Mix: Youth TV Takes the Lead in Diversity Casting: The red-carpet area at the premiere of the Disney Channel’s new Cheetah Girls movie last week looked less like the typical Hollywood cast party than some sort of United Nations session.

Adrienne Bailon, who plays Chanel in the trio of Cheetah Girls, drew on her Ecuadorean and Puerto Rican roots and chatted in Spanish with a television interviewer. Meanwhile Kiely Williams, an African-American actress who plays Aqua, and Sabrina Bryan, who plays Dorinda and whose real name is Reba Sabrina Hinojos, answered questions and waved to fans.

Deepti Daryanani, an actress from Calcutta, and Rupak Ginn, an American actor whose parents emigrated from India, wore outfits inspired by their roles in the television movie, “The Cheetah Girls One World,” in which the group travels to India to star in a film after one of its members misunderstands an invitation to Bollywood as one to Hollywood.

Other Disney stars in attendance included Brenda Song, the daughter of a Laotian Hmong immigrant father and a Thai-American mother, who starred in the Disney Channel movie “Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior”; Anna Maria Perez de Tagle, a daughter of Filipino and Spanish parents, and her “Camp Rock” co-star Roshon Fegan, who is part Filipino; and Shanica Knowles, an African-American actress who plays a high school rival of Miley Cyrus’s character on “Hannah Montana.”

It's almost like Wyatt didn't read his own quotes:

“This group of people is reflective of the life we all live right now,” said Debra Martin Chase, an executive producer of “The Cheetah Girls One World,” which will be shown Friday on the Disney Channel.

“One-third of the U.S. population is now nonwhite,” said Ms. Chase, one of a handful of prominent African-American producers in Hollywood. “That is reflected in the Disney Channel projects because they are committed to diversity. It has been a priority for them all along.”

Wyatt goes even further down his alice in wonderland path, citing as diversity the fact that the new 90210 has a couple of minor characters who are non-white, including one who's playing a fake ethnic role:

And “90210,” the updated version of the seminal 1990s teen drama set in Beverly Hills that will begin this fall on CW, features two minority cast members: Tristan Wilds, an African-American actor previously seen in HBO’s “Wire,” and Michael Steger, a multiethnic actor who plays an Indian film director in “The Cheetah Girls One World.” Mr. Steger, of Ecuadorean, Norwegian and Austrian descent, will portray an Iranian-American high school student in “90210.”

The article for all its wrong-headedness does, I think, mean well; but maybe the Times needs to take some lessons from Disney on this:

Gary Marsh, president for entertainment for Disney Channels Worldwide, said that executives at the company talked every day about how to promote greater diversity in front of and behind the camera.

“It’s something we work really hard at to make it look effortless,” he said. “We constantly push directors and casting directors and producers to make different decisions than they might otherwise make.”

Going to the dogs (and snakes)

What the heck is Chris Duncan of the AP thinking?

Rockets agree to send pick, Greene, Jackson to Kings for Artest: NBA front-office sources confirmed to ESPN.com that Ron Artest will be dealt to the Rockets in exchange for Houston's first-round draft pick in 2009, ex-King Bobby Jackson (who arrives with a $6.1 million expiring contract) and the draft rights to Donte Greene.

After wavering for more than two months, Artest elected not to opt out of the final year of his contract for $7.4 million by July 1. But the forward immediately announced he regretted his decision, saying the Kings had misled him on their interest in a long-term contract extension. Artest also said he couldn't see himself playing in Sacramento beyond next season.

Artest apologized to the Kings a few days later but one week after that, Artest demanded a trade, claiming he had been blinded to his career well-being by his friendship with the Maloof family, which owns the Kings.

Joe Maloof responded sharply to Artest, warning the forward to muzzle himself.

Yeah, by all means, let's equate black athletes with dogs whenever possible.

Then again, this is the organization that on at least two occasions has made the same ridiculous spell-check-related mistake:

Gore told the AP he hoped the speech would contribute to "a new
political environment in this country that will allow the next
president to do what I think the next president is going to think is
the right thing to do." He said both fellow Democrat Barrack Abeam and
Republican rival John moccasin are "way ahead" of most politicians in
the fight against global climate change.

New Yorker's Obama moment

Lee Siegel gets it right in the Times with his take on why the New Yorker Obamas cartoon was a dumb idea (and why those idiot liberals who are joining the conservative backlash against the criticism don't get it):

The problem is that the cartoon accurately portrays a ridiculous real-life caricature that exists as literal fact in the minds of some people, and it portrays it in terms that are absolutely true to that caricature. An analogous instance would have been a cartoon without commentary appearing in a liberal Northern newspaper in the 1920s — a time when Southern violence against blacks was unabated — that showed a black man raping a white woman while eating a watermelon. The effect of accurately reproducing such a ridiculous image that dwelled unridiculously in the minds of some people would have been merely to broaden its vicious reach. The adherents of that image would have gone unsatirized and untouched.

In satire, absurdity achieves its rationality through moral perspective — or it remains simply incoherent or malign absurdity. The New Yorker represented the right-wing caricature of the Obamas while making the fatal error of not also caricaturing the right wing. It is as though Daumier had drawn figures besotted by stupidity and disfigured by genetic deficiencies — what might have been a corrupt 19th-century politician’s image of his victims — rather than the corrupt politicians themselves, whom he of course portrayed as swollen to ridiculous physical proportions by mendacity and greed.

But if that very same New Yorker cover had been drawn in a balloon over the head of a deranged citizen — or a ruthless political operative — it would have appeared as plausible only in the mind of that person. The image would have come across as absurd and unjust — a version of reality exaggerated to the point of madness.

By presenting a mad or contemptible partisan sentiment as a mainstream one, by accurately reproducing it and by neglecting to position the target of a slur — the Obamas — in relation to the producers of the slur, The New Yorker seems to have unwittingly reiterated the misconception it meant to lampoon. No wonder so much political humor nowadays contents itself with the smug deriding of the worst aspects of the “other side.” At a time when it is almost impossible to attach a universal meaning to anything, the crossroads linking satire to its target can be very hard to find.

Si at the center of the storm

There's an interesting profile of Condé Nast's Si Newhouse by Richard Perez-Pena in the Times that reminds you at its best journalism is all about giving you entree into worlds and people you otherwise would not encounter, to your loss.

Mr. Newhouse goes to work daily in chinos and an old sweatshirt — a small, quiet grandfather, a man of plain looks, heading an empire that revolves around images of beauty and youth. Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue, refers, laughingly, to “his unique sense of style.” ...

“He runs his business more like an old-fashioned proprietor, according to his interests, his tastes, like Henry Luce or Hearst did,” says Reed Phillips III, managing partner of DeSilva+Phillips, an investment banking boutique.

When asked what motivates Mr. Newhouse, people who know him rarely mention power or money. They talk about his devotion to his work, his penchant for arriving at the office before dawn, his intense interest in design details and his curiosity about Hollywood, politics and art.

In discussing people or things, “Si uses the word ‘attractive’ the way other people might use the word ‘spiritual,’ ” says a former senior executive who requested anonymity because he didn’t want Mr. Newhouse to consider him disloyal. “It means to him a sort of roundedness and depth.” ...

His greatest passion is movies — the only topic besides his magazines, his colleagues say, that can make him almost chatty. He recently sent a DVD of the film noir classic “D.O.A.” to some of his editors, eager to discuss it afterward. Graydon Carter, editor in chief of Vanity Fair, says his annual Hollywood issue was the chairman’s idea.

Mr. Newhouse follows politics but, unlike so many media moguls, has no interest in having a political voice. In fact, people who have worked closely with him for years say they have no real idea what his political views are.

He is so shy that several years ago, when the company opened its Frank Gehry-designed cafeteria, a chic forest of undulating glass and titanium panels, he initially wandered about with his lunch tray, reluctant to impose on other diners — or, some employees speculated, he was just unwilling to endure small talk. After a while, it was decided that the table to the right of the registers would henceforth be his.

Idiot abroad

Why is it in a city that's 60% immigrant or the children of immigrants, the Times' standard for what's non-standard continues to be that of some stodgy white person?

As always, the Sunday Travel section provides the fodder, with the always-reliable Matt Gross reprising his role of wide-eyed whitey abroad, this week in South Korea with an article headline The Weird, Wild and, Ultimately, Sublime (note to the Times: Labeling a nation's cuisine 'ultimately sublime' doesn't balance out calling it weird and wild:

To understand where these trends were coming from — and, I hoped, to discover the next ones — I spent a week eating the weird and the wild, the tasty and the comforting, and, more than once, the sublime. Oh, I also ate lots and lots of kimchi. ...

Let’s begin with the familiar: barbecue.

Oh, thanks for letting us know right away what you consider normal.

Then, there's this:

“To be honest with you, Koreans just think that if it’s an expensive bottle, then it’s good — ’cause they take a bottle and they drink it like a shot!” said Daniel Gray, who operates the SeoulEats.com food blog and who accompanied me through many meals. “But it’s starting to get more refined. Now they’re starting to learn the difference. They’re starting to say, ‘O.K., I’m going to enjoy this bottle, I’m going to pair this with the right food.’ ”

That's another consistent Timesian, to go to a foreign country and use an American as a guide. Cause it's too hard to actually talk to the natives, and it's so much better to get information third-hand!

Imagine a French paper coming to the U.S. and seeking out a French expat to guide them through Southern BBQ--how much credibility would we give to that?

Indeed, as in a lot of other Times travel articles, Gross seems to manage to interact entirely with Americans during his visit to Seoul--not one person quoted or mentioned in the piece is Korean.

Talk about weird.

Out of step

What is it with the Times--along with Chris Matthews, they consistently don't seem to believe something is 'mainstream' unless it's white.

The latest example is the insistence in a photo caption that a white guy singing Mexican music is going to be its basketball Jesus.

Born in the U.S.A. but at home south of the border, Shawn Kiehne, a k a El Gringo, is out to bring Mexican music into the American mainstream.

The musician himself seems interesting, but really, the article is just tone deaf--for one thing, there's no evidence this guy's music is drawing in whites:

“There are Mexicans everywhere now,” he said. “I’m playing in Iowa, Arkansas, Kansas City, Minneapolis and Kentucky. In these places, deep in Middle America, the shows are packed, and it’s all Mexicans. Davenport, Iowa? There are Mexicans in Davenport, Iowa?”

For someone who proclaims how in touch he is with his Mexican brothers, it's embarassing that he doesn't seem to know there are Mexicans in Iowa--anyone who knows anything about the immigration debate knows Iowa's been a hotspot, with its rapid demographic change feeding both xenophobia and a more interesting cultural climate.

And Kiehne ends the article by overtly conflating white and mainstream:

“Ricky Martin helped make it O.K. for white Americans of my generation to like Latin music,” he said. “I want to do the same thing for norteño. I want it to appeal to mainstream white America while staying true to the Mexican sound.”

Tracking misses

The Sunday Times, in all its glory.

Carolina?
It may be a small world, but the Times seems intent on making it 1 country smaller by consistently referring to the non-existant entity of 'Korea'.

Imported Plays? Small World, Jason Zinoman: IN the last year I have seen shows in Off Broadway theaters from, among other places, Argentina, Canada, England, Ireland, Israel, Korea, Poland, Russia and Scotland. New York is as much a global theater capital as ever, so why doesn’t it always seem that way?

Small boy, big memory
Broadway, Before It Was Their Job, Erik Pippenberg: I wish newspapers did more 'biographical' features, where they ask a series of notable people the same question. The Times asked some theater people their memories of the first show they saw on Broadway; one made me laugh out loud.

Edward Albee
'Jumbo'
2005 — Lifetime Achievement
2002 — Best Play (“The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?”)
1963 — Best Play (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”)

THE first Broadway show I ever saw was in 1935. I know I was about 6 years old, and I don’t think I’d even been the 26 miles it took to get from Larchmont to New York City by then.

The show I saw was at the old Hippodrome Theater — a wonderful space, as I recall it — and it was a musical starring a small elephant and Jimmy Durante. It had a score by Rodgers and Hart, and it was called “Jumbo.”

It had in it such songs as “My Romance” and “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.” It probably hooked me on theater, but I’m sure the hook was the small elephant.

Alexis was under 30
Sometimes you undermine what you thik you're doing with unwitting word choice. Jerome Gary, one of the executive producers of a new documentary that tracked four young Arabs on a journey to see the U.S., doesn't seem to realize his backhanded view of his subjects.

De Tocquevilles From the Middle East, Elizabeth Jensen: Even though Americans weren’t initially the intended audience, Mr. Gary called his subjects “our own little Arab de Tocquevilles,” referring to the 19th-century French author whose “Democracy in America” helped the fledgling United States understand itself.

If you repeat it enough...
There's a starry-eyed piece in the Times about Chinese Americans and earthquake relief for China that reads as if it were written by someone who read up on the state of Chinese-Taiwanese relations in Wikipedia; it also lumps in the problems in that very specific situation with the rest of the Chinese diaspora.

If nothing else, the piece could've benefited from some basic editing.

Setting Politics Aside to Help Victims of China Earthquake, Kirk Semple: The fund-raising by groups on both sides of the Taiwan-China political divide comes amid an apparent warming in relations between the two. Wu Poh-hsiung, chairman of Mr. Ma’s Nationalist Party, crossed the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait, which separates the island from the mainland, and met with President Hu Jintao. The sides agreed to end a nine-year freeze on formal talks about tourism and the start of regular direct charter flights between them.

China has sought to assert sovereignty over Taiwan since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, an effort that Taiwan’s leaders have rejected. But with Mr. Ma’s election in March as Taiwan’s president, relations between the two governments have warmed.

They're not puppets
There's an interesting article in the Times that could be a telling detail about the much more important and larger issue of American Jews thinking supporting Israel means supporting the conservative faction of Israeli politics.

I mean, if I ran a parade in NYC for a country and every year most people from that country living in NYC didn't show up, I'd start wondering what else I don't get about that country that doesn't involve floats and marching bands.

For Parade Celebrating Israel, an Effort to Include Those Closest to It, Paul Vitello: For years, organizers of the Salute to Israel Parade have puzzled over a little mystery. While the annual parade attracts tens or hundreds of thousands of marchers and spectators — most of them American Jews — one group that might be expected to show up and salute has almost never shown up: Israelis. ...

Mr. Miller has a couple of his own. “For a long time, we were an English-speaking group of people organizing a parade in support of a Hebrew-speaking country,” he said. “They may have felt unwelcome.”

“Or there may be cultural gaps between American Jews and Jews from other parts of the world,” he added.

Israelis interviewed last week — some of whom have attended the parade and others who have not — saw a multitude of factors in play: cultural, political, religious, existential and some too complicated to explain to anyone not Israeli.

“These are very big questions, and I don’t know if it is possible to answer without going into a very long, long conversation,” said David Borowich, 38, a Manhattan financial executive who holds dual citizenship and has served in the Israeli Army. But in one sense, he added, the answer is simple: Israelis do not hold parades.

“Israelis have rallies,” he said. “They have demonstrations. The idea of a parade is kind of an American thing.” ...

Some Israelis said that American Jews seemed less inclined than Israelis to criticize Israeli government policies, at least openly — a phenomenon they described as a kind of “guilt gap.” Other Israelis said the obverse was also true. “When you are in Israel, you can criticize all you want,” said Shimon Azulay, an Israeli filmmaker who has lived in Tenafly, N.J., for seven years. “But many of us feel that when we are away, we must never talk about the corruption and such, that we must close ranks.”

Starving children

Every so often you read a statistic that just makes you say Wow!

New York Times, Andrew Martin, One Country’s Table Scraps, Another Country’s Meal : As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.

The study didn’t account for the explosion of ready-to-eat foods now available at supermarkets, from rotisserie chickens to sandwiches and soups. What do you think happens to that potato salad and meatloaf at the end of the day?

A more recent study by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Americans generate roughly 30 million tons of food waste each year, which is about 12 percent of the total waste stream. All but about 2 percent of that food waste ends up in landfills; by comparison, 62 percent of yard waste is composted.

Code pink

Kate Zernike set out to write a piece about when a woman might be elected president; I wish she had spent more time trying to write a decent article about when a woman might be elected president.

From tone to facts, the entire piece, She Just Might Be President Someday, is riddled with the stereotypical starry-eyed tone women running for president have to overcome.

It's more cheerleader than quarterback:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton may or may not become the first female president of the United States, but if fate and voters deny her the role, another woman will surely see if the mantle fits.

Deny her the role? As if it was rightfully hers, and those meanies aren't giving it to her because she's a woman?

Caveats abound: as Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, emphasized last week, this thing is not over. And these predictions may prove as false as any by the time the first woman takes the oath of office — whether in 7 months or 9 years or 9.

Is Zernike serious? She goes out of her way to write 'caveats abound' about Clinton not winning the presidency this year? Really? I don't think it's a statement that needs to be qualified, unless you live in Hillaryland.

With all that said, there are few obvious candidates, particularly among Republicans, perhaps because there are about twice as many Democrats among women in elective office nationwide. Sarah Palin, the Republican governor of Alaska, is on many lists — she’s known as a reformer as well as for riding a motorcycle and referring to her husband as the “first dude.” On the Democratic side, the names that come up most seem to be Govs. Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, both Obama supporters.

Asked to name a potential first woman as president, though, even the shrewdest political strategists said they couldn’t think of anyone. Most people disqualified their prospects as soon as they identified them — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for example — for one reason or another.

Wait, are there obvious candidates, or not? She lists some, then says even the smartest analysts couldn't think of any. So are these names coming from dumb non-experts? Or herself? Or what?

Mrs. Clinton has won 17 primaries. She has soundly defeated the assumption that a woman could not raise money, or that women would not donate (they make up about half of her contributors).

Emily's List has been around for decades, but it was Clinton who put to rest the notion that women can't raise money? If that notion still exits, how would anyone explain all the high-profile female politicians, including both senators from the nation's most expensive media state?

But almost anybody — and particularly women — will discount the idea of a woman as dark horse.

“No woman with Obama’s résumé could run,” said Dee Dee Myers, the first woman to be White House press secretary, under Bill Clinton, and the author of “Why Women Should Rule the World.” “No woman could have gotten out of the gate.”

Women are still held to a double-standard, and they tend to buy into it themselves.

Yeah, attractive, amazingly intelligent woman with an unbelievably charismatic speaking style and superb organizational skills are routinely dismissed by our society... sheesh.

Identify a female politician with Obama's astonishing traits first, before saying that person couldn't make it with his resume.

Mrs. Clinton easily cleared the bar with many voters on her ability to be commander in chief, making it easier for people to see a woman in that role. Still, most people assume that the burden will fall on women to prove toughness — of a certain kind.

Mrs. Clinton seemed to have the most success in the last months, fighting like a mama bear for her cubs.

If voters thought Clinton really was fighting for her cubs rather than herself, this race wouldn't be over. And she's had the most success in the last months? Not back when she had the delegate lead?

On other wish lists is Maria Shriver, with the Kennedy allure, a strong following among women, and a husband who is said to eye the White House but can’t run because he was not born in this country.

And of course, some Democrats dream of Chelsea Clinton, who has revealed herself to have her father’s ease and her mother’s discipline.

Who is Zernike talking to? Who out there is pining for celebrity reporter Maria Shriver to be president?

And Chelsea Clinton? Someone who refuses to answer large blocks of questions when she's out there rah-rahing it up for her mom?

But for many women, whether or not they support Mrs. Clinton, the long primary campaign has left them with a question: why would any woman run?

Many feel dispirited by what they see as bias against Mrs. Clinton in the media — the “Fatal Attraction” comparisons and locker-room chortling on television panels.

“Who would dare to run?” said Karen O’Connor, the director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University. “The media is set up against you, and if you have the money problem to begin with, why would anyone put their families through this, why would anyone put themselves through this?”

For this reason, she said, she doesn’t expect a serious contender anytime soon. “I think it’s going to be generations.”

It's ultimately this type of language that makes sexist voters question whether a woman can be president.

'Dare to run'?! Come on, the type of women who otherwise would want to be president are going to not run because they're afraid of the campaigning?

Give me a break--as if all the other things that come with the presidency pale in comparison to people being mean to you when you're running.

Zernike's piece, which in tone and logic reads like it belongs in some cheery woman's magazine, is a disservice to its cause. It's almost as if in printing such a weak sister piece the Times signals it isn't taking the subject seriously.

Which is a shame, since it's a topic that certainly merits sober discussion.

Stating the obvious

Jan Hoffman's article in the Times about suburban white people being laid-off, The Language of Loss for the Jobless , ends with a bizarre sequence of sentences that make me wonder if her reporter's notes got mistakenly posted on the website.

A PUBLIC tennis court in the suburbs reverberates with gruff thwacks, the players almost all middle-aged men and women. It is 10 a.m., on a Wednesday. “How’s it going?” “Tough.” “Yeah.”

Don’t ask? Ask? How? Three monosyllabic words — “How are you?” — take on a spectrum of inflections. Breezy (“How are ya’!”). Earnest (“How are you?” — sotto voce). Funereal (“How are you?”). And, more recently, they translate as polite code for, “Lose your job yet?”

Patty Nigro, a hairstylist in West Caldwell, N.J., whose salon chair can double as a therapist’s couch, says that these days, she doesn’t ask. “It’s a sad, sour time for people, and it’s a touchy subject,” Mrs. Nigro said. The appointment is their opportunity “to escape their worries, to have a treat.”

The hair salon as economic indicator: “The haircuts and hair color, those are the necessities because they’re looking for work,” Mrs. Nigro continued. “But all the extra feel-good things about yourself — the massages, the facials — those are being cut.”

Experts suggest that people take a gentle, open-ended approach: “ ‘Well, how are you doing, what’s new with you,’ ” recommended Ms. Baber, “Not, ‘Why are you here in the middle of the afternoon, are you taking the day off?’ ”

The replies can deflect or invite pity parties, create entree for further questions, provide cover.

The new euphemisms: “They freed me up for my future!” “I got a great severance package.” “I’m between successes!” “We’ve been a two-career family for so long that we decided one of us should stay home with the kids.” “I’ve decided to take my career in a different direction.” “I got tired of the commute so I’m working out of the house.”

Many people remain uncertain about whether a call intended to express concern will be interpreted as condescending or intrusive. But an investment banker from Manhattan who has seen many colleagues laid off recently recommended erring on the side of being helpful:

“Call! Say: ‘Hey, I have no idea what you’re going through or what you need, but I’d love to have coffee with you. Maybe there are a couple of introductions I can make,’ ” said the banker, Joshua Schwartz. “Even if you can’t be helpful or they don’t take your offer, it’s the right thing to do.”

Five colons within nine paragraphs?!

Whatever happened to integrating your quotes in with the story?

Europe, no longer frozen in time

There's so much dreary jingoistic writing in the Times travel section that the exceptions leap out at you. Here's Dan Barry, whose thoughtful article is only slightly undermined by its American-centric headline, Does the ‘Real’ Ireland Still Exist? .

It's one of the few articles in the Times as a whole that acknowledges our antiquated notions of what a Frenchman looks like, what makes a German dish, who lives in an Irish city, only works if you ignore the impact of economic and demographic changes over the last few decades.

(Now if only the Times could start publishing articles like this about non-Western countries!)

Yes, you can find a thatched cottage here and there, if you try. Yes, you may even encounter a white clot of sheep blocking your rented car’s path, raising from musty memory some postcard caption about Irish Rush Hour. But to wander about, looking to bag with a digital camera some approximation of a time-faded Irish postcard, is to miss the complexities of a country that is thoroughly enjoying its wealth and adapting to its European Union membership while at the same time trying to preserve its dreamlike landscape and proud cultural heritage.

You may indeed hear a young Irish woman suddenly break into song in Kinvara. But you may also walk around the corner and be served dinner by a young man with an Eastern European accent instead of a brogue. Travel 10 miles up the road to Gort and you might wade into a celebration of Brazilian culture, staged by a transplanted community that is now an integral part of that old market town.

There you have it: delightful, post-millennial Ireland. ...

A change in infrastructure is one thing; a change in culture is quite another. And nowhere is this change more strongly felt than in Gort, about 40 miles northeast of the cliffs and just a dozen miles from Kinvara. My mother grew up on a farm near there, and I’ve been visiting Gort since the 1970s. I have watched it gradually grow from an aged and insular town to a bedroom community for Galway City, some 20 miles away. Farms I remember are now Levittown-like subdivisions.

The real change, though, is in Gort’s new and sizable Brazilian community, attracted in part by job opportunities at a local meat-processing plant. The impact has been extraordinary: Brazilian music nights in one of the pubs, Brazilian necessities — from maracuja to mandioca — in the shops, and a Sunday Mass said in Portuguese. There has been the usual awkwardness in this marriage of two distinct cultures, but for the most part the newcomers have been warmly accepted; for example, when carbon monoxide from a faulty oil burner killed two Brazilian men nearly three years ago, townspeople banded together to raise money to help the families.

And every June, Gort serves as host to a traditional Brazilian festival called the Quadrilha. The town center comes alive with folk dances and passionate sambas that could never be confused with an Irish step dance, while the air fills with the aroma of Brazilian cuisine that could never be confused with brown bread and tea.

I do wish Barry had made some acknowledgement that the 'Brazilians' are in many cases by birth now Irish; and I'm sure the 'usual awkwardness' glosses over some pretty ugly patterns; but at least he's trying.

Missing the face in the mirror

There's an interesting piece in the Times about the English-language cable channel available in the U.S. financed by the Russian government, Russia Today-- A Voice of Mother Russia, in English .

The piece delves pretty deeply into the channel, but pays scant attention to the premise behind it and the other similar channels it names--that Americans get such a xenophobic version of what's going on in other countries that those countries need to pay for their own news channels here to 'balance' all the toxic coverage.

Yeah, of course it's not good to have a channel paid for by the government trying to 'cover' itself--but at least it's obvious what's going on there.

I'd say what's worse is that most Americans are oblivious to how skewed the coverage in American media can be. If someone doesn't even know they have a problem, it does make it tempting to smack them upside the head to try and open their eyes.

Stephen Heyman: But several of Russia Today’s journalists said they were earnestly trying to tell Russia’s story. “No one is telling me what to say,” said Peter Lavelle, the effusive host of “In Context.” Nevertheless, he said, the channel does take certain views. “Part of our mission is public relations,” he added.

Some of the channel’s specials seek to expose and correct Western biases about Russia. An episode of “Cracking the Myths” about Russia’s economy opens with Jay Leno-style street interviews with Americans, who guess that most Russians subsist on penny-a-day incomes or wait in line for hours to get bread (Watch the Video). The show then offers scenes of Russian prosperity, like a shopping mall brimming with members of the expanding middle class.

Mr. [Andrei] Richter [the director of the Moscow Media Law and Policy Institute and a journalism professor at Moscow State University] said that this tendency to shape opinions reveals one of the channel’s flaws. “The idea of Russia Today is that our country is in a very hostile media environment,” he said. “The idea is very rotten because if you believe you’re in a hostile environment, you want to persuade others that what they think is not true.”

The concept of state-sponsored news aimed to viewers abroad is not new. During the cold war Western-financed radio stations like Voice of America, which began broadcasting in Russian in 1947, existed in part to counter Soviet spin. Russia Today has inverted the recipe, broadcasting in English from Russia in the hopes of improving Russia’s increasingly ominous image in the West. And it is but the first in what has become a veritable parade of state-financed anglophone news channels.

Since Russia Today’s debut Iran (Press TV), China (CCTV-9), France (France 24) and Qatar (Al Jazeera English) have created their own English news networks. Al Jazeera’s English spinoff is clearly the leader of this pack, drawing on the credibility of its Arabic-language counterpart and the deep pockets of the emir of Qatar.

Ben O’Loughlin, an international relations professor at the University of London’s Royal Holloway campus, studies the emergence of state-financed news channels jockeying to have a voice in what he calls “the anglosphere.”

“The journalists at Russia Today probably don’t see themselves as political pawns,” Mr. O’Loughlin said. “They might say their goal isn’t objectivity, it’s balance — having both sides. If we’re interested in a pluralistic global media, then in many respects this could be a good thing, but that’s very provisional.”

For at least one viewer the question of the channel’s independence is irrelevant. Alexandr Polin, a Manhattan event planner who left St. Petersburg in 1991, said he considered it propaganda, but not in the Soviet style. “I watched a documentary yesterday about AIDS,” he said. “In Soviet times they would never say that people were sick somewhere.”

Mr. Polin said that Western news coverage often eclipsed the good things happening back home: “It’s not only Mafia, Red Square, vodka and prostitutes.”

Groping for the dragon

So the NYTimes has launched a new blog, Rings, which "covers the 2008 Beijing Games from every angle -- the politics, the arts, the culture, the competition."

Hmm, let's see--so far none of the 14 points are from an Asian or Asian American, and contributor George Vescey's recommended 4 books to read to understand China are all written by Western journalists.

Wonder if they know the Chinese proverb, about the blind men and the elephant.

After 17 years--he's an American

What is it about journalists tagging non-white people as foreign?

James Agnelos' Hot Off the Presses: The Newsstand Stays: FOR 17 years, a forest green newsstand has stood near the corner of Third Avenue and East 77th Street. For most of those years, a friendly Pakistani who identifies himself only as Malik has earned his livelihood selling newspapers, sodas and snacks from inside the stand’s four small walls.

Words in the wrong places

The Times on Sunday--the best, and the mediocore.

Thanks for doing the math
Dennis Lim's Centenarian Director’s Very Long View:

WHEN referring to the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, it is now — and has been for some time — customary to affix the phrase “world’s oldest active filmmaker.” The operative word is “active.” Mr. Oliveira, who turns 100 in December, has made at least one movie a year since 1990 (when he was 82). ...

The cultural critic Edward Said, in his writings on “late style,” identified two versions of “artistic lateness.” One produces crowning glories, models of “harmony and resolution” in which a lifetime of knowledge and mastery are serenely evident. The other is an altogether more restless sensibility, the province of artists who go anything but gently into that good night, turning out works of “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.”

Inside Sacks' mind
David Coleman's In Praise of Early Adapters :

IF you were to say that Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who has made as much sense of the human mind as any writer has, has a passion for objects and subjects whose appeal is less than obvious, it would not really be an understatement.

It might just mean you are not especially imaginative — not able to fathom, for instance, why Dr. Sacks would want a favorite picture of a cuttlefish on the cover of a paperback edition of his book “An Anthropologist on Mars,” even when, as his own publisher noted, it had nothing to do with the book’s contents.

Or that, at the least, you are not familiar with Dr. Sacks’s best-selling memoir, “Uncle Tungsten,” in which he detailed how, during his boyhood in World War II England, he sought refuge in the abstract purity of elemental metals. And he still does. “I love dense things,” he said cheerfully, ticking off the densities of tungsten, iridium and platinum.

He also loves ferns and cycads, believing that plants that make a garish show of their sex organs — what we call flowers — are perhaps a bit vulgar. “I feel that flowers are Johnny-come-latelies,” he said, noting that ferns predated flowering plants by more than 200 million years.

Only in New York
Jennifer Blyer's ‘Prewar’ Apartments, Rising Just Down the Street:

PREWAR used to refer to sturdily built apartment houses with high ceilings, walls so thick you couldn’t hear your neighbors and perhaps black and white tiled floors in the bathroom.

It also used to mean stately edifices built before World War II.

Such fine points apparently have not stopped developers who are building a 20-story luxury condominium at 535 West End Avenue at 86th Street, with apartments of up to 14,000 square feet and prices from $8.5 million to more than $25 million. The developers are describing the building as prewar, both in advertisements that have appeared in recent weeks in anticipation of the building’s opening in summer 2009 and on a large sign wrapped around the scaffolding at the construction site.

Wendy Streule, a graduate student in art history at Rutgers University, noticed the sign a few days ago when she and friends were strolling along West End Avenue.

“ ‘Twenty-first Century Pre-war Residences,’ ” she announced to her friends, reciting the words on the sign. “What war? Are we expecting something else? It’s a bit of an oxymoron.”

TV brings us together
Laura M. Holson's Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK):

SAVANNAH PENCE, 15, says she wants to be in touch with her parents — but also wants to keep them at arm’s length. She says her father, John, made sure that she and her 19-year-old brother, Alex, waited until high school before they got cellphones, unlike friends who had them by fifth grade. And while Savannah described her relationship with her parents as close, she still prefers her space.

“I don’t text that much in front of my parents because they read them,” she said. And when her parents ask who is on the phone? “I just say, ‘People.’ They don’t ask anymore.”

At first, John Pence, who owns a restaurant in Portland, Ore., was unsure about how to relate to his daughter. “I didn’t know how to communicate with her,” Mr. Pence said. “I had to learn.” So he took a crash course in text messaging — from Savannah. But so far he knows how to quickly type only a few words or phrases: Where are you? Why haven’t you called me? When are you coming home?

When his daughter asks a question, he typically has one response. “ ‘OK’ is the answer to everything,” he said. “And I haven’t used a question mark yet.” He said he had to learn how to text because his daughter did not return his calls. “I don’t leave a message,” he said, “because she knows it’s me.”

Savannah said she sends a text message to her father at least two or three times a day. “I can’t ask him questions because he is too slow,” she said. “He uses simple words.” On the other hand, her mother, Caprial, is more proficient at texting and will ask how her day was at school or how her friends are doing. (Her mom owed her more facile texting skills to being an agile typist with small hands.)

Early on, Savannah’s parents agreed that they had to set rules. First, they banned cellphone use at the dinner table and, later, when the family watched television together, because Mr. Pence worried about the distraction. “They become unaware of your presence,” he said.

Detainee equals terrorist
Scott Shane's The Unstudied Art of Interrogation

HOW do you get a terrorist to talk? Despite the questioning of tens of thousands of captives in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last six years, and a high-decibel political battle over torture, experts say there has been little serious research to answer that crucial question.