SUNDAY: There the New York Times goes again!

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2025

Front-page article AWOL: If you're reading the print edition of today's New York Times, it's right there on the front page.

The report was written by Carol Rosenberg. Right there on page A1, the headline on the piece says this:

To Resurrect 'Fort Lee' Name,
Army Enlists Forgotten Soldier

It's sitting right there on page A1. But if you read the Times online, the report is missing from the "Today's Paper" site. You will think you've seen a list of all the front-page reports—but this report had fallen through the cracks, and it has disappeared.

Full disclosure:

There are only five (5) reports on the front page of today's print edition. You'd think a paper like the Times would be able to link to all five on its "Today's Paper" site.

If you thought something like that, you were very wrong. As we noted again just last week, the Times "loses" articles in this way, from its print edition front page, on an amazingly regular basis.

It seems like a very dumb thing to do! To put that dumbness into a larger context, just consider the truly spectacular dumbness Rosenberg is writing about.

We've shown you the headline from today's print editions. Online, Rosenberg's report starts like this, dual headline included:

The Mysterious Life and Afterlife of Private Fitz Lee
For more than a century, this Black soldier from Virginia was remembered by nearly no one. Then this year, someone at the Pentagon found a use for him.

Pvt. Fitz Lee’s life descended into misfortune and misery after he helped rescue fellow American soldiers in Cuba in the late 1800s.

[...]

For more than a century, he was remembered by nearly no one. Private Lee, this Black U.S. Army veteran, was buried beneath a magnolia tree at the military cemetery at Fort Leavenworth in northeast Kansas.

Then this year, someone at the Pentagon found a use for him.

For decades, an Army base in Virginia was named for Robert E. Lee, the defeated Civil War general who had owned slaves. In 2021, a new law mandated the removal of Confederate names from military assets. The base was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams to honor two pioneering Black Army officers who had overcome segregation in the military.

But after returning to office, the Trump administration was determined to rewind history. A law prevented the restoration of Confederate names, so it did it in a most unusual way. The base is now called Fort Lee again and named—officially, anyway—for Fitz Lee.

And yes, that's what they actually did!

The sheer stupidity of this MAGA behavior may seem hard to comprehend. As with Fort Bragg, so too here—they wanted to restore "Fort Lee" as the name of the base, but under terms of a 2021 law, it couldn't be Robert E. Lee.

Solution! They found a different person named Lee, and they've now named the base after him. Adherents of the original name get their preferred name back—but what is supposed to be the reason for this restoration? Have we somehow Made the Name of the Base Great Again?

We humans are built for fantasy realms. As we've noted for the past 27 years, we're built for the stories, and now for the names, we dumbly choose to prefer. 

We also seem to be built for the practice of losing front-page reports in the manner we've described. There are five such reports on today's front page. On the site it calls "Today's Paper," the Times kept track of just four!

(This peculiar practice is quite common. Weirdly, the Times does this all the time!)