BEHIND THE CURTAIN CONTINUED: Lozada to the underwear drawer!

MONDAY, MAY 8, 2017

Part 5—Valley of the Dowds: The New York Times has gotten our week off to a helpful start.

On the paper's reimagined page A3, the always helpful Here to Help feature is headlined as shown below. No, we aren't making this up:

Here to Help
HOW TO GET KETCHUP OUT OF A BOTTLE

Readers, we sh*t you not! Nor does the self-parodic behavior end there.

How to get ketchup out of a bottle! The Times proceeds to offer four ideas designed to help us accomplish this task. Clownishly, these suggestions come from no less an authority than Professor Anthony Strickland (no middle initials), "a senior lecturer in the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Melbourne in Australia."

(On the brighter side, we can imagine that no American professor was willing to lend his or her name to this particular gong-show.)

Long ago, a fellow named Clemens composed a famous passage. In it, he burlesqued the way we rubes are inclined to fall for the blandishments of such learneds, or at least for the mugging and clowning of a pair of fallen royals.

Years later, Meredith Willson composed a famous musical about Professor Harold Hill, who sold a line of trombones.

Our own grandfather toured New Brunswick in the 1880s with a troupe of trained monkeys, performing under the name Professor Wormwood. (This seems to have been a franchise of some kind.) To its credit, Harvard University has finally acknowledged its debt to Grandfather Rufus—in this case, to the show he instantly mounted in the wake of Lincoln's death.

(Click here, scroll to the bottom. Then click two more times.)

Professor Hill sold a line of trombones; this morning, a colleague dispenses free advice concerning the world's ketchup flow. This performance is in line with the New York Times' brand, which is built around the bogus idea that subscribers are being exposed to the world's brainiest discourse.

The pimping of this bogus brand is endless. Comically, today's "Here to Help, the ketchup edition" tells us where we can go for more erudition of this type:

For more life tips, look for
Smarter Living at nytimes.com.

We sh*t you not! The professor's discussion on ketchup retrieval has been placed at a site called "Smarter Living!" The endless performance of this jive lies at the heart of this newspaper's highly successful brand.

Twain's Arkansans couldn't quite see that the duke and the king were frauds. In River City, Iowans believed that their children would learn how to play those trombones.

Years later, Garrison Keillor invented Lake Wobegon, a mythical Minnesota town where "the children are all above average." And sure enough:

Today, the Times is offering ketchup acquisition advice from a molecular engineering professor Down Under. Even worse, the Washington Post hit "peak Lozada" in yesterday's Outlook section.

Or at least, we hope they did.

Lozada, of course, is Carlos Lozada, a callow scribe who can no longer be dismissed as a callow youth.

Lozada graduated from Notre Dame in the class of 1993. Later, he pounded out a master's degree at an even loftier school, Princeton. These credentials made him fully employable within the upper-end guild.

Lozada has been at the Washington Post since 2005. Here's what Baron and Merida said in 2014, when Lozada moved on from a "stellar" run as editor of the paper's high-profile Sunday Outlook section:

BARON AND MERIDA (10/13/14): We are delighted to announce that, after a stellar five-year run as editor of Outlook, Carlos Lozada will become The Post’s new nonfiction book critic, writing regular weekly reviews and contributing to online coverage of nonfiction books and long-form nonfiction.

From his perch in Outlook, Carlos has already established himself as a fresh voice in Post criticism, writing everything from essays on book-title trends (“The end of everything”) to reviews of high-profile books on politics, foreign policy, economics and culture, such as Mark Leibovich’s “This Town,” or William Deresiewicz’s “Excellent Sheep.”

This summer, Carlos developed a detailed proposal on how to reimagine the role of the nonfiction book critic for a digital age–and proceeded to pitch himself for the role. He had a great idea, and we agreed that he’d be perfect for it.

Refreshingly, that pitch came from the Post's aptly-named "WashPost PR Blog."

As with A2 and A3 at the Times, Lozada had done some reimagining. In the process, he pitched himself for this reimagined role as the Post's non-fiction book critic.

The suits thought Lozada's ideas were great. They thought Lozada himself would be perfect for the role in question, which would be new. improved and better.

As one part of his idea, Lozada's reviews now appear beneath an embarrassing brand at the Post (Book Party). Sad but true! Yesterday, the callow fellow was "partying hearty" in a massive, sprawling spread on Outlook's high-profile front page.

It seems to us that Lozada's review offers us a horrible look behind a journalistic curtain. What sorts of folk lurk behind that screen, at the top of our upper-end guild?

We strongly suggest that you read Lozada's immensely sad, but highly familiar and highly instructive, 2700-word book review from yesterday's Outlook section. Where once the Dowdism only crept, eventually the Dowdism conquered, just as Katherine Boo had warned the world in 1992, when Lozada was still just a senior in college.

(Perhaps for obvious reasons, the Washington Monthly doesn't make Boo's prophetic piece available on line.)

Lozada's mammoth review concerns a new tome by David Garrow. In his review, Lozada sticks his long Dowdistic nose deep into the underwear drawer and, like one of "the four extant mammal species of the suborder Vermilingua (meaning 'worm tongue') commonly known for eating ants and termites," he never withdraws his big long nose from that perfumed location.

The underwear drawer in question belongs to Barack Obama—rather, to a much younger such person, to the Barack Obama of the 1980s. When the rewards become too vast within the tents of a nation's "press corps," this seems to be where the noses of such grasping folk end up.

At any rate, Lozada's review captures one of the major obsessions of the upper-end mainstream press corps of the Clinton-Gore-Clinton era. In part because the Chaits, the Dionnes, the Drums, the Maddows never pushed back against this conduct, Donald J. Trump is in the White House, and your national discourse lies in ruins.

It would be hard to summarize the leering vapidity Lozada assembles in this pathetic piece. Did we mention the fact that his review runs almost 2700 words? That he never quite gets his big long nose out of that underwear drawer?

The blame for this may lie in part with Garrow himself, whose book isn't available yet. The blame may lie with Sheila Miyoshi Jager, as associate professor at Oberlin who seems to be crying, three decades later, because the young Obama asked her to marry him only twice, when he apparently should have made the traditional third attempt at the prize.

Whatever! Jager seems to be out of her mind, though Lozada never seems to notice. In a scathing review in the New York Times, Michio Kakutani seems to suggest that the same can be said of Garrow himself.

Without being able to see the endless book in question (1460 pages!), we can't evaluate the extent to which Garrow himself stays in the underwear drawer. But Lozada enters it in his first few grafs and never chooses to exit.

Funny this! Garrow won a Pulitzer Prize for Bearing the Cross, an 800-page history of the whole freaking civil rights movement. In that book, he managed to restrain himself from living his entire life inside Dr. King's drawer.

On one early page of that book, Garrow discusses Dr. King's romance, early in graduate school, with a young "white" woman he wanted to marry. Somehow, Garrow managed to do this without suggesting that the episode meant that Dr. King was an Uncle Tom, a self-hating black, a person lacking an inner core or a horrible person in general. On pages 375 and 376 of that same book, Garrow briefly discussed Dr. King's later (extra-marital) "sexual athleticism" without spinning out of control and consigning Dr. King's soul to eternal damnation.

Although we haven't read his new book, it sounds like Garrow wasn't able to restrain himself in these ways in his new book, which Kakutani describes as a literary nightmare. One thing is quite clear, however. Lozada seems to care about nothing but life in the drawer.

Let's pray this is peak Lozada! As he noses around where a man of his low moral intelligence doesn't belong, he draws the dumbest, ugliest judgments from the dumbest and weirdest types of "evidence."

These associate professors today! Lozada builds an endless review around the recollections and claims of a 53-year-old associate professor who seems to be out of her freaking mind, or something somewhat like it. Thirty years later, Jager still seems to be yammering and complaining about the fact that Obama didn't ask her to marry him for the required third time.

Thirty years later, Lozada laps this puerile nonsense up. He fingers himself as he goes on and on and on, displaying the product about which Boo gave warning decades ago.

Lozada has long been a weirdly unintelligent, callow presence at Outlook. Yesterday, he thoroughly jumped the shark. We ask you to consider the possibility of putting his ridiculous piece into this primal framework:

When the rewards are very large, the wrong kinds of people will perhaps be attracted to journalism. When the people at the top of a newspaper are lounging around in $20 million summer homes, the values within such organizations will possibly rot away, in the manner observed over the past thirty years.

Beyond that:

When the Dionnes, the Chaits, the Beinarts, the Drums refuse to warn liberals about this rather obvious process, we the liberals will fail to see what's happening right before us. In an action which will engulf the gods in laughter, we will stage our heroic march on January 21, 2017—roughly twenty-five years too late, exactly one day after Trump has taken the oath!

Alas! When we peek behind the curtain, we see a long line of Lozadas. Boo issued her warning long ago, but a long line of liberal careerists refused to repeat what she said.

Dearest darlings, use your heads! Such things simply aren't done!

When we peak behind the curtain, we also see a long line of Harold Hills. They very much like to mug and clown, providing us with the type of pleasure Twain described at the circus.

They like to pretend to consult the professors. They like to say they gave us Our Own Rhodes Scholar. This makes us feel smart and good.

They huddled in their summer homes on Nantucket just down the road from their owner, Jack Welch. Inside that grasping, clutching world, they developed the culture of Trumpism long before Candidate Donald J. Trump came along.

As in River City of old, we liberals can't seem to see who these people actually are, and our leaders refuse to tell us.

Tomorrow, we'll present the most comical story from this long line of cultural clowns. People are dead all over the world because of such comical conduct.

Tomorrow: The three faces of Rachel's TV

Spending on health care for seniors Down Under!

SATURDAY, MAY 6, 2017

This planet of us the chimps: On Thursday evening, we the liberals were promised a special treat.

The promise of our special treat came right at the start of a certain "cable news" program. A certain unnamed cable news host promised us this special treat, pulling back a terminological curtain as she did:

UNNAMED CABLE NEWS HOST (5/4/17): And thanks to you at home for joining us tonight.

Big show tonight. Congressman Adam Schiff is live here with us tonight, looking forward to that.

We've also got one of the chief architects of the Affordable Care Act with us here tonight, to talk in some detail about the consequences today of this huge political news out of Washington...

I'll just say, as an aside, if you know somebody that doesn't like cable news because they, in particular, don't like paying that much attention to left-versus-right or red-versus-blue politics, but they are worried about the practical consequences of what happened here with this [health care] vote today, you might want to call them and tell them to watch.

What we're going to do, particularly in our second segment here on the show tonight—

This is the A block. In the B block, we'll have that very, very nuts-and-bolts discussion about the practicalities. So you have time to make that call, in case you know anybody who's in that boat. That is coming up tonight.

So extremely cool! If we stuck around for the "B block," we would actually get to hear a very, very nuts-and-bolts discussion about the practicalities of the Republican health care bill!

According to the cable host, we even had time to call our friends to tell them they should watch! We could call them during the "A block!"

A question entered our heads. Why hadn't we heard some such discussion before the Republican health bill actually passed the House? Couldn't we have called our friends and passed on that information?

In all the excitement, that question went unasked. We scrambled now to call our friends, the ones who may hate cable news.

Along the way, we learned some exciting insider-y terms concerning the A and B blocks! Another curtain drawn back!

From there, the unnamed host launched a discussion of the Ceausescus, a pair of villains from the 1990s. Her "A block" would once again be dedicated to the embellished, repetitive Russkie tales with which she now packs us off to dreamland every night.

Last night, the host was back to telling us rubes that Michael Flynn received cash payments from "foreign governments" (plural). As far as we know, there is no evidence that this is true, but the host keeps toggling between two competing stories, failing to notice that her two tales don't quite seem to align.

(Flynn did receive funding from the Russian government. When this major cable star pluralizes this part of the tale, she's toggling back to her otherwise abandoned claim that Flynn was also "on the Turkish government payroll.")

So it goes when corporate stars are paid to pretend to deliver "the news." In Thursday's B block (extremely cool term!), this particular cable star even told us rubes that she holds a degree in public health, thus seeming to prove, once again, that much "education" is wasted.

At any rate, whatever! Let's move on from here:

On Thursday, the GOP's health bill squeaked through the House. That evening, Donald J. Trump made a weird remark about the wonders of Australian health care.

Concerning the way the Aussies work, have you seen anyone present the data we showed you in yesterday's award-winning post? Needless to say, you haven't!

That said, why does it cost only $4420 per person per year to provide health care Down Under, as compared to $9451 per person per year Up Here? If someone with a public health degree would actually ask and answer that question, we might even be on our way to an actual health care discussion!

That's unlikely to happen on this, our own planet of the chimps. Consider again the way we liberals talk about national health care.

Currently, we liberals say we want a "single payer" health care system, in the form of "Medicare for all." Does this formulation really make sense? Let's compare the way we provide public schooling to that recipe for health care.

In this country, we treat K-12 public schooling as a basic right. Every child receives such schooling for free. There is no charge for attendance, though some kids pay for lunch.

You might call that "single payer!" The money which runs our public schools comes from government on various levels. But no payment is required from the children and parents who utilize this service, beyond the requirement of paying regular taxes where such taxes may be owed.

We could set up public health that way. We could devise a national health care system in which people receive medical care without charge, as occurs when children go to public schools.

Typically, national health systems don't entirely work that way, in part because there's a desire to discourage "overuse" of medical services. You don't want people scheduling physicals twice a week so they'll have someone to talk to.

That said, our Medicare program doesn't exactly work that way at all. According to the leading authority, this is the way it works:

"On average, Medicare covers about half of the health care charges for those enrolled. The enrollees must then cover their remaining costs either with supplemental insurance, separate insurance, or out-of-pocket."

That may be the best we can do. But we've never understood why we liberals are so eager to call that "single payer."

That said, there's a much larger problem with our ardent calls for "Medicare for all." This takes us back to the basic data in yesterday's award-winning post:

Per person health care spending, 2015
United States: $9451
Australia: $4420

Those are very strange numbers. According to those numbers, more than $5000 per person disappears into the ether each year, given the way our health care arrangements currently work.

As compared to that country Down Under, this explains why it's so hard to finance universal health care Up Here. But you simply never see such numbers within our Potemkin health care "discussions." Presentation of those very strange numbers simply isn't allowed.

Those numbers represent health care spending for the whole population. Since we liberals want to institute Medicare for all, these numbers would also likely be instructive:

Per person health care spending, ages 65 and older, 2015
United States: $xxxx
Australia: $xxxx

As compared to our friends Down Under, how much money is spent Up Here on people 65 and over? How much money is disappearing per person per year?

This is the system we liberals say we want to expand. To what extent does current spending within that system actually seem to make sense?

We self-impressed liberals have no idea. Have you ever seen anyone ask?

For ourselves, we've never seen any data about per person health care spending on people 65 and over. We'll assume that the numbers for this cohort look as crazy as the overall numbers shown above. But given the way our "discourse" works, we have no real idea.

Neither does anyone else on this, our planet of the chimps. Just imagine how great it would be if we had a cable news host who held a degree in public health! Someone who could stop all the bullshit on cable news and produce a real discussion!

Her bosses wouldn't like that much. If only a person could land a cable news job!

Another way of putting it: With respect to Thursday night's promise of that special treat:

All too often, if we the liberals weren't talked down to, we wouldn't be talked to at all!

Take the Australian health care challenge!

FRIDAY, MAY 5, 2017

How often will you see this: Last evening, Donald J. Trump got to talking to Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian prime minister.

That never works out well. Last night, Trump began with praise for his own health bill, then drove off the road:

TRUMP (5/4/17): It’s a very good bill right now. The premiums are going to come down very substantially. The deductibles are going to come down. It’s going to be fantastic health care. Right now, Obamacare is failing. We have a failing health care.

I shouldn’t say this to our great gentleman and my friend from Australia, because you have better health care than we do.

Everyone in the liberal world will take a crack at that. Your challenge, if you're prepared to accept it—see if anyone offers you these tremendously basic data:

Per person health care spending, 2015
United States: $9451
Australia: $4420

In many ways, the whole ball game is on display right there.

Think of health care as a car. Which would be easier? Supplying everyone with a car if cars cost $4400? Or supplying everyone with a car if cars cost five thousand dollars more than that?

For reasons which persistently go unexplored, health care is much more expensive in this country than it is anywhere else. If it cost only $4420 per person to supply Americans with health care, it would be a piece of cake to provide universal health care here.

Why does health care cost so much more in this country? The question is never answered, largely because it's never asked. The question is never asked largely because data like these are never published or broadcast.

(On our own "corporate liberal" channel, we have much too much mugging and clowning to do. There's no time for data like them.)

Go ahead—take the Australian health care challenge! We liberals will be regaled all day with talk about what Donald Trump said. Ask yourself two basic questions:

1) Did I ever see those data presented? Also:

2) Why the heck not?

Where does all that money go, that extra five thousands dollars?

By law, the question never gets answered, in large part because 1) the data never get cited and 2) for that reason, the question never gets asked.

We do get plenty of mugging and clowning. Could corporate laughter actually be the best medicine after all?

BEHIND THE CURTAIN CONTINUED: Lifestyles of the best and brightest!

FRIDAY, MAY 5, 2017

Epilogue—The three faces of TV: Uh-oh! On this morning, the mental stylings of pages A2 and A3 spilled onto page A1.

On A3, the nonsense continued. These were two of the day's "noteworthy facts," though we could include more:

Of Interest
NOTEWORTHY FACTS FROM TODAY'S PAPER

"For his current exhibition, David Alrmejd sculpted disfigured heads, including one of Abraham Lincoln with giant golden ears and half his face missing."

"Most equine fatalities in 2016 were the result of euthanasia after a broken limb, according to The Jockey Club's Equine Injury Database."

In Spotlight, the "additional reportage and repartee from our journalists" concerned the retirement of Prince Philip, which had "journalists around the world on the edge of frenzy" yesterday, and no we aren't making that up.

These presentations result from strange editorial judgment. That said, let's remember the ad campaign which would fit these reimagined pages:

"You are the dumbest people on earth. We at the Times want to serve you."

So it continues on the the reimagined A2 and A3. This morning, though, the dumbnification also appears atop the fold on page A1, the New York Times' front page. We refer to the hard-copy headline which sits atop the paper's Upshot report, a report about the health care bill which has now passed the House.

(On the One True Corporate Channel, Lawrence O'Donnell has spent the past month assuring us that Trump-and-them were just "pretending" to be pursuing another health care bill. On the Friday before last November's election, Lawrence joined Professor Wang in assuring us that, barring some "major weather event," Candidate Clinton couldn't possibly lose. People, we're just saying!)

Back to page A1:

Upshot reports carry the luster of the Times' brainiest brand. But good God! Atop the fold, on page A1, the hard-copy headline says this:

THE UPSHOT
Wealthy People Benefit, the Poor Much Less So

Needless to say, that isn't what the front-page report actually says. The front-page report actually says that wealthy people win with this plan, while poor people actively lose.

Inside the addled New York Times, some editor failed to see that the headline says that everyone benefits under the GOP plan. And just in case a lazy reader failed to ingest that message on A1, this headline sits atop the report's continuation on page A19:

"Wealthy and Healthy Benefit, the Poor Not So Much"

That's isn't what the report really says. Inside our upper-class press corps' low-IQ zone, some editor didn't quite know that.

(The Times has changed those headlines on-line. To read the report, click here.)

Consider today's New York Times. What would make a Timesperson think that those were "noteworthy facts?" That the "frenzy" surrounding Prince Philip was a major event calling for more repartee?

What would make a Timesperson think that those headlines capture that Upshot report? That the paper should keep publishing Gail Collins' ten-minute quizzes?

Alas! Dowdism crept, then largely conquered, quite a long time ago. Some people still do real work at the Times. Quite a few others do not.

How did we reach this ridiculous place? Consider this possibility:

Our upper-end press corps is a guild which includes many high strivers. In the world of the modern upper-end press, rewards in cash and fame can be vast. This rarely produces good outcomes.

How did our elite press corps become a low-IQ guild devoted to earth tones, hairdos, Official Group Stories and gruesomely incompetent bombshell reports about scary uranium deals? Why was the Times trying to rehabilitate sex accusers who no one believed in the 1990s on its front page just last fall?

How did our liberal journalistic guild become infested with the Drums, the Chaits, the Dionnes, the Maddows—with people determined to avert their gaze, and yours, from the decades of Creeping Dementia, even when its persistent gong-shows were aimed directly at the nation's more liberal candidates?

Maddow took a pass on Benghazi in 2012, then took a pass on Comey last year. How did we reach the point where this had become the accepted norm within the "liberal" world?

We'll suggest you consider the following. We'll suggest you consider the possibility that those very large (corporate) rewards attract the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and then proceed to fry their brains once they've arrived on the scene. Just consider two of the best and the brightest among them:

When David Leonhardt arrived at the Times, he was sold to us as One of The Truly Bright Ones. (For the record, he's Yale 1994—in applied math! He prepped at Horace Mann.)

Dad was the PLP's Comrade Bob, but the acorn rolled down the hill from the tree. Leonhardt rose through the ranks at the Times. Today, he's a weekly columnist.

A few weeks back, he wrote a column which struck us as sadly instructive. It concerned the way the brightest and best deal with the inevitable stress as they fight their way to the top, raking in all those prizes.

Leonhardt seemed to be following David Brooks down the mid-life crisis trail. (We'd say that Brooks has recovered.) As he started his column, he recalled the way George Shultz insisted on a daily hour of solitude when he was secretary of state.

From there, Leonhardt seemed to head down the "I need a life coach" road. Needless to say, he gets his wisdom from Michael Lewis' best-selling books:

LEONHARDT (4/19/17): The psychologist Amos Tversky had his own version of this point. “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed,” Tversky said (as Michael Lewis describes in his latest book). “You waste years by not being able to waste hours."

Likewise, Richard Thaler, the great behavioral economist and a Tversky protégé, self-deprecatingly describes himself as lazy. But Thaler is not lazy, no matter how much he may insist otherwise. He is instead wise enough to know that constant activity isn’t an enjoyable or productive way to live.

These days, however, it is a very tempting way to live. It can be hard to live any other way, in fact. We carry supercomputers in our pockets and place them next to us as we sleep. They’re always there, with a new status update to be read, a new photograph to be taken, a new sports score or Trump outrage to be checked.

Even before smartphones, this country’s professional culture had come to venerate freneticism. How often do you hear somebody humble-brag about how busy they are? The saddest version, and I’ve heard it more than once, is the story of people who send work emails on their wedding day or from the hospital room where their child is born—and are proud of it.

"How often do you hear [people] humble-brag about how busy they are?" We don't think we've ever heard anybody do that.

Well, inside the business Leonhardt has chosen, it seems to happen a lot! The saddest version involves "the people who send work emails on their wedding day or from the hospital room where their child is born—and are proud of it."

Inside the business he has chosen, Leonhardt has heard that more than once! To his credit, it has occurred to him that this may not be healthy.

So far, Leonhardt's column would be a perfect fit for A3's Here to Help feature! The note of sadness came in when he offered his resolution.

How does Leonhardt plan to keep himself centered and sane? Believe it or not, one of the upper-end press corps' brightest and best actually wrote what follows:

LEONHARDT: My goal with this column is to persuade you to add a Shultz Hour, or something like it, to your week.

I’ve just begun to do so. I have committed to carving out an hour each week with no meetings, no phone calls, no email, no Twitter, no Facebook, no mobile alerts and no podcasts. Sometimes, I plan to spend the hour sitting down, as Shultz did, and other times taking a stroll. I keep a pen and paper with me and have set my phone to ring only if my wife calls. (My boss can’t start a war, so I’m willing to ignore him for an hour.)

The fact it felt hard to commit to a full hour was a sign of my need to do so. Like many people, I’m overly connected. I have confused the availability of new information with the importance of it. If you spend all your time collecting new information, you won’t leave enough time to make sense of it.

Good God! Leonhardt has vowed to spend one hour per week out of the reach of his owners. (Repeat: one hour per week.) We offer this as an obvious sign that the business Leonhardt has chosen has been turning his brain to mush.

Like Donald J. Trump in recent weeks, Leonhardt doesn't even seem to realize how weird his confession will sound. Because we assume that Leonhardt's a good decent person, this represents a loss to the world.

Unfortunately, Leonhardt has chosen a world of extremely high rewards. This is the brain of the brightest and best on those particular drugs:

LEONHARDT: Whether you decide a Shultz Hour makes sense for you, I’d encourage you not to fool yourself into thinking that you can easily change your habits in little ways here and there. The ubiquity of smartphones, together with our culture of celebrating busyness, makes ad hoc approaches difficult. You are much more likely to carve out time for strategic thinking by making concrete changes to your habits.

Wake up to an alarm clock rather than a phone, to collect your thoughts at the start of each day. While you’re driving, put your phone out of reach, mostly for safety, but also to let your mind wander at red lights.

Around the house, hide your phone—in a backpack, a drawer or another room—for set periods of time, as Sherry Turkle of M.I.T. recommends. Or carve out a few hours each week when no one in your house can check a phone. The filmmaker Tiffany Shlain and her family do so for an entire day—a “technology shabbat.”

If you remember my recent column on sugar, this advice may sound familiar. Like sugar, technology makes life more enjoyable. But it’s better in moderation, and modern life pushes us toward excess.

Good God. Leonhardt plans to get some time for himself when he's stopped at red lights. When he's home, he plans to hide his phone somewhere so he can't consult it.

He suggests that you hide your phone too. Even as she gives this advice, he can't stop name-dropping the insidery people from whom he's drawn his wisdom.

Also, stop eating that sugar! The Here to Help feature is low-IQ. This column was actually sad.

Leonhardt's column reads like a cry for help. We'd call it a record of the brain loss among the brightest and best at the top of the upper-end press corps.

In many ways, the New York Times has led the culture's drift toward dementia. As we peek behind the curtain, we're left with with one more of the brightest and best to go.

We want to revisit a comical tale-the most comical tale of the modern press era.

No, it isn't the summer homes of Nantucket. We refer to the three faces of Rachel Maddow's TV.

Coming: The three faces of TV

Who was funding Michael Flynn's work?

THURSDAY, MAY 4, 2017

A cable star's alternate stories: Who was paying Michael Flynn for the work for which he enrolled as a "foreign agent?"

We ask the question for an obvious reason—we watch the Maddow Show. The program's host has been alternating two different stories over the past two weeks.

Ever since last fall, Maddow has tended to say that Flynn was "on the payroll of the Turkish government" when he did the lobbying for which he belatedly registered as a "foreign agent." As far as we know, no other news org has made this claim—and as far as we know, there never was any actual evidence in support of the claim.

Such trivial matters rarely affect the claims you hear from Maddow. That said, Maddow almost seems to have abandoned this talking point by now. That seemed true in her broadcast last night, when she kept identifying Ekim Alptekin as "the guy who paid Mike Flynn more than half a million dollars, which Mike Flynn did not disclose on his security clearance application in Washington."

Just for the record, Alptekin is not the Turkish government, though he's said to be close to the Turkish president. He's a Turkish businessman who was the founder of a Dutch consulting firm called Inovo BK. In the literal sense, Inovo was the "foreign entity" whose payroll Flynn was on.

(And no. Under terms of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, you don't have to work for a foreign government to be required to register as a "foreign agent.")

Was Inovo really a front for the Turkish government? Was the Turkish government secretly providing the money used to pay Flynn?

Everything is possible! That said, no one has demonstrated that linkage. Needless to say, this never kept Maddow from making her dramatic claim. From last November right through last month, Michael Flynn was persistently said to have been "on the Turkish government's payroll."

Then, last Tuesday night, Maddow told a new story, which she sourced to this report from Politico. According to Maddow's new report, Flynn's lobbying work may have been funded by secret money from Russia!

This is completely possible, of course, especially since everything is. But as Maddow told this new exciting story, her previous exciting story seemed to disappear.

Was Flynn being paid with money from Moscow? Below, you see the heart of Maddow's exciting report from last Tuesday night.
As she starts, she is speaking about the Siberian Energy Group, a Russian entity run by an oligarch in the control of Putin. When she refers to "the guy who paid Flynn," she is referring to Alptekin, the head of the Dutch lobbying firm.

Suddenly, an exciting new possibility emerges. It may be that Flynn's work for Inovo was being funded from Moscow:

MADDOW (4/25/17): The Siberian Energy Group, I highlight that group because they play a starring role in a scoop today at Politico.com. Politico has done a deep dive into the finances of the Siberian Energy Group and concluded, quote, "The Siberian Energy Group's dealings were characteristic of the equity trades offshore financing schemes and consulting agreements that Putin's allies have used to protect and hide assets."

Politico is reporting on this particular trail of Putin money and Putin influence because it now appears to relate to the man you see on your screen here [shows photo of Flynn]. It now appears to relate to the Trump White House, specifically to the former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

You remember that after Mike Flynn got fired as national security adviser, allegedly for not disclosing and then lying about the content of his communications with the Russian government, a few weeks after he got fired, he retroactively registered as a foreign agent who had been working on behalf of the government of Turkey.

What Politico.com reports today is that, while it is clear that Mike Flynn took money to act as a foreign agent, it's not clear that the origin of those funds is definitely Turkey.

The head of that Siberian Energy Group is not a Turkish guy. He is, as Politico puts it, a Soviet-born former executive in Russian energy and mining companies, one who has ties to Vladimir Putin.

He's not Turkish. He's not a Turkish citizen. He doesn't live in Turkey. He's not of Turkish ethnicity. He's not Turkish.

He has nevertheless founded a couple of very Turkish-sounding organizations that operate in Washington, D.C.—the Turkish Heritage Organization and the Turkish Institute for Progress. Both of them set up by nobody Turkish. Both of them set up by a Russian energy and mining executive who has ties to Putin.

Through those organizations, Politico reports today that he has coordinated what appear to be Turkish lobbying efforts in D.C. He appears to have coordinated those efforts with the guy who paid Flynn, with the guy [Alptekin] whose shell company paid Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn over $600,000.

So, in addition to—we're talking about the guy who paid Flynn [Alptekin]. In addition to his partnerships with the not-at-all Turkish guy who is close to Putin, who is running these Turkish lobbying efforts, the guy who paid Flynn himself also, it turns out, has his own business ties to Russia and to Putin, including pretty significant-sized aviation deals run through a Russian state-run bank, a Russian state-run bank that's been implicated in Russian intelligence operations in the past, and he has been involved in deals through that bank that have been proven to be signed off on by Putin himself personally, according to court documents reviewed by Isaac Arnsdorf at Politico.

Politico reports that the multiple Putin connections to Flynn's foreign agent lobbying contract, quote, "raise questions about the agenda of the people who hired Flynn" and, quote, "the source of the funds used to pay him."

[...]

It is as yet unexplained and totally unprecedented that the national security adviser would then retroactively register as having been on the payroll of a foreign government during the time he was advising the president and sitting in on the President's Daily Brief and getting supposedly vetted to be national security adviser. I mean, the unprecedented and strange and still unexplained nature of all of that goes to another level if it now turns out that the money Mike Flynn was taking from foreign sources while Russia was attacking our country is, in fact, money that conceivably could have come from Russia, not from any other government.

To enjoy the whole segment, click here.

In that story, Maddow summarizes Politico's report thusly:

She says that Alptekin, the head of Inovo, paid Flynn some $600,000. She says the money may have come from Dmitri “David” Zaikin, the Russian head of the Siberian Energy Group.

She identifies Zaikin as a Putin-controlled Russian oligarch. She further notes that Alptekin "has his own business ties to Russia and to Putin, including pretty significant-sized aviation deals run through a Russian state-run bank...that's been implicated in Russian intelligence operations in the past, and he has been involved in deals through that bank that have been proven to be signed off on by Putin himself."

Are these claims true? We have no idea. That said, by last Friday night, Maddow seemed to have returned to the pleasing claim that Flynn had been "on the Turkish government's payroll." As far as we know, she has never tried to explain how these varying stories are supposed to hang together, if they're supposed to do so at all.

Was Flynn secretly being funded by Putin? Was he somehow "on the Turkish government payroll?" We don't know, and there's little obvious sign that Maddow actually cares.

She works a bit like Donald J. Trump. She likes to tell a good story every night, but seems to pay little attention to the way her stories hang together from one day to the next.

We aren't supposed to notice. Sometimes, she will still correct some tiny mistake to make us think she's honest.

Last night, she was back on the story in which the money seemed to have come from Russia. She made this exciting statement right at the start of her show:

MADDOW (5/3/17): OK. Siberian Energy Group. Part of what Politico reported last week, and what we told you about when we talked about this here on this show, is that there is a link between the CEO of that now-defunct Siberian Energy Group and the guy who paid Mike Flynn more than half a million dollars, which Mike Flynn did not disclose on his security clearance application in Washington.

This is the money that was paid to Flynn that later caused him to retroactively register as an agent of a foreign power after he was fired from the White House as national security adviser. The guy who paid Flynn that money [Alptekin] has his own business history in Russia as reported by Politico, including at least one financing deal that was personally approved by Vladimir Putin.

This is an interesting thing about the Flynn story, right? That link from the guy who paid Flynn to his Russian business dealings that personally involved Putin, does that mean that the money that was used to pay national security adviser Mike Flynn might have its origins in Russia, while Russia at that very time was also attacking the U.S. election to help Trump win?

That's the question. People who are trying to figure out the Trump-Russia story by following the money, that's what makes this whole question red hot. That's why this is so important.

The prospect that when Flynn was being paid during the campaign, there is—this possibility has been raised, that maybe who was paying Flynn, maybe the source of his foreign money were the same people who were attacking the election on Trump's behalf. I mean, it's a red hot question and it's an important question.

Starting last fall, Maddow told viewers, for many months, that Flynn had been "on the Turkish government's payroll." Now, she is increasingly suggesting that he may have been paid with money from Russia.

As far as we know, she has made no attempt to reconcile these shifting claims and suggestions. That said, she was always overstating the factual record when she made her pleasing claim about Flynn having been on the Turkish payroll.

In the literal sense, Flynn was on the Inovo payroll. Beyond that, the basic facts seem to be unknown. That said, Maddow likes to feed the beast of tribal pleasure each night. More and more and more and more, she's the multimillionaire Hannity figure for us on the gullible pseudo-left.

Final point: before she returned to her Russian story last night, Maddow played one of her favorite games. Right at the start of her TV show, she mugged and clowned and entertained and dissembled about a stupid trivial point. We'll spare you the moronic details. If you're an admirer of high-paid corporate dissembling, you can just click here.

Maddow was sold to us long ago as Our Own Rhodes Scholar. Starting last fall, she spent months making the apparently unsubstantiated claim about Flynn having been "on the Turkish payroll." Now we're on to the Russian thing with no apparent attempt to explain the apparent change in the story.

Are we the only ones who notice such ch-ch-ch-changes? Is the thrill of a good tribal tale so pleasing that no one else in our pitiful tribe even wants clear explanations from this Big Fish-inflected teller of good tribal tales?

One last basic point: Did Flynn know who might have been funding his work? Politico makes no claim on that score.

BEHIND THE CURTAIN CONTINUED: Pet groomers and Chanel's cruise show oh my!

THURSDAY, MAY 4, 2017

Part 4—Where does inanity come from: It's one of the day's "noteworthy facts" at today's New York Times. Readers acquire this noteworthy fact in today's Of Interest section:

Of Interest
NOTEWORTHY FACTS FROM TODAY'S PAPER
"Faster throws are less accurate, according to a new study by Harvard and Yale."

People, watch that space! You'll likely acquire that noteworthy fact nowhere else on the planet!

Faster throws are less accurate! These too are noteworthy facts, or so it says in today's hard-copy Times:

"The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the job category that includes pet groomers will grow 11 percent through the year 2023, faster than the average growth for the economy as a whole."

"For Chanel's 2018 cruise show, the fashion house built a set based on the Parthenon as well as the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion. It took 50 craftspeople three weeks of construction, and nine days of assembly, to complete."

According to the reimagined page A3 in today's New York Times, those are just some of the noteworthy facts found in this morning's paper!

Who has selected these noteworthy facts? The noteworthy fact about "faster throws" seems to have come from a Zen master playing 16-dimensional haiku.

Who selected the other facts? Has Forrest Gump signed on at the Times? Were they nurtured by Chance the gardener?

Presumably, we all can spot another noteworthy fact. The reinvention of pages A2 and A3 represents a deliberate dumbing down of the New York Times' hard-copy editions—part of a process which has been underway for a large number of years.

You might see it as part of a process which started with the paper's surrender to "Creeping Dowdism." An historian could track it to that.

On this morning's page A3, the inanity is general. In the daily Spotlight feature, the "additional reportage and repartee" concerns a highly important topic—"the art and culture of the disco movement." Meanwhile, today's Here to Help feature is headlined exactly like this:

Here to Help
IS YOUR DESK ORGANIZED EFFICIENTLY?

An unnamed author tries to help us answer that seminal question. "There is no one right way to organize a desk," we're helpfully told in the body of the report. But soon, we're offered this subsection, courtesy of Julie Morgenstern, "a time management expert:"

Turnover
Are the piles on your desk the same ones that were there three weeks ago, or are they moving? As long as they're not stagnant, you're probably doing O.K. with your clutter, Ms. Morgenstern says.

It's amazing the way a problem dissolves when an expert is brought in to help!

In the past few days, a number of major journalists have explicitly asked if President Trump is suffering from dementia. We'd say that's a clear possibility.

That said: to the extent that dementia may be part of our current Trumpism, it must be said that the syndrome surfaced in the culture of the mainstream press corps long before Trump came along.

On its new pages A2 and A3, the New York Times is making a fairly clear statement. Rather clearly, the paper believes that a substantial chunk of its readers are in the grip of this syndrome too.

On these reimagined pages, we're being dumbed down to the ground. But the sheer inanity put on display has been part of upper-end press culture for a large number of years.

Yesterday, to cite one example, we saw the Washington Post's Philip Rucker return to the vexing matter of Al Gore's revealing beard. Gore grew the beard in 2001; sixteen years later, it still haunts press corps sleep. At the time, it led the multimillionaire Chris Matthews to tell his pal, the brilliant Don Imus, that Gore "doesn't even seem American" because of the troubling beard.

For the record, it wasn't just the troubling beard that haunted Matthews back then. Two years earlier, he was counting the buttons on Gore's troubling suit jackets (three) and explaining that they stamped Candidate Gore as "today's man-woman."

Then too, there was Mary McGrory.

A few weeks before Matthews began counting buttons, Candidate Gore and Candidate Bradley staged their first Democratic debate. They spoke at length about health care, a topic the mainstream and liberal press corps still refuse to discuss. (You may not know what we mean.)

Gore and Bradley spoke at length about their ideas for health care. On CNN's Capital Gang, the National Review's Kate O'Beirne, (recently deceased) praised them for the breadth of their knowledge.

At the Washington Post, things were different. Pulitzer prize-winning Mary McGrory discussed the debate in her column a few days later. She had nothing to say about health care at all. Instead, she insulted Post readers like this:

MCGRORY (10/31/99): Vice President Albert Gore came to his fateful encounter with newly menacing challenger Bill Bradley carrying heavy baggage. He was wearing an outfit that added to his problems when he stepped onstage at Dartmouth College: a brown suit, a gunmetal blue shirt, a red tie—and black boots.

Was it part of his reinvention strategy? Perhaps it was meant to be a ground-leveling statement—"I am not a well-dressed man." It is hard to imagine that he thought to ingratiate himself with the nation's earliest primary voters by trying to look like someone seeking employment at a country music radio station. Maybe it was the first step in shedding his Prince Albert image.

McGrory had nothing to say about the discussion of health care. (She herself had excellent health care, of course.) Instead, she insulted Gore, and her readers' intelligence, by offering bullshit like that. That very same day, it was reported that Naomi Wolf was advising the Gore campaign. There followed a solid month of ugly press corps dementia, an ugly jihad heavily laced with misogynistic appeals.

Is it possible that Donald J. Trump is suffering from dementia? Unfortunately, it is.

That said, a form of dementia has been on display within our upper-end press corps for years. Unfortunately the Drums and Chaits have never told us rubes about it, presumably for the obvious reasons. For that reason, our liberal rank and file has failed to stage a resistance.

The New York Times' reimagined A2 and A3 are part of this growing inanity. At the upper end of the press corps guild, this aspect of Trumpism had acquired wide purchase long before Trump came along.

What explains the sheer inanity to which our upper-class "journalists" are drawn? We'll suggest you think of Bob Woodward's most famous saying, and of his subsequent conduct:

"Follow the money," we'd say.

Alas, failed Woodward! He stands as an object lesson in the culture of the modern press, where massive wealth and massive fame may come to those who suitably perform.

Let's assume that Woodward's work was beyond reproach at the start. By 1996, he had descended to the point where he was willing to peddle an otherwise unsellable book on the thoroughly enjoyable premise that first lady Hillary Clinton had been conducting "seances" in the White House.

Don't get us wrong! Woodward didn't explicitly say in his book that Clinton had ginned up a seance. He just let the publisher float this idea as the catchy "hook" for his otherwise unsellable book, and the bullshit exploded from there.

This was a scam, a con, a play designed to shovel in money. As it later turned out, the original "source" for Woodward's claim had been a young woman named Barbara Feinman, now Barbara Feinman Todd. She wrote her own book just this year, bringing this story back around.

Who is Barbara Feinman Todd? To see the soul of your upper-end press, we'll suggest that you spend an hour watching her interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-Span's Q-and-A program at the start of the year. You'll see her describe the various types of unseemly behavior in which she engaged at Woodward's direction. You'll see her tell her overwrought, ridiculous story about Bob Kerrey and the dead birds.

(Just a guess: Lamb thought the story was utterly weird when he encountered it in Feinman's book. He decided to draw her out.)

Uh-oh! When money and fame are there for the taking, the wrong sorts of people may find themselves drawn to the flame. With that obvious thought in mind, just how much money and fame are mixed up in modern press culture?

Did you read about the way Sally Quinn just put her summer home on the market for a cool $20 million? Not that there's anything wrong with it! But because Quinn was married to the late Ben Bradlee, that too is a Watergate wage.

The possibility of massive wealth and fame are sloshing around in our modern "press corps." This attracts the wrong people to the game. It also tends to fry the brains of those who are involved.

As Hemingway noted: when "the rich" arrive on the scene, inanity is likely to follow. Inanity has lay at the soul of the upper-end "press" ever since Kathrine Boo issued her quickly disappeared warning about that advance of Dowdism.

The Dionnes and the Alters failed to speak up. The Riches were at the heart of the fail. Our own liberal rank and file has shown no sign of being able to spot the growing reliance on The Dumb.

We pride ourselves on being bright. In truth, we're nothing like that at all.

Marie Antoinette had wealth and fame. "Let them eat cake," she's famously said to have said.

The upper-end press has found wealth and fame too. As the start of the inanity's spread, the late Michael Kelly decided to go to the ball.

Kelly was a childhood friend of the aforementioned Dowd. In a recent Editorial Observer, the New York Times' Elizabeth Williamson recalled the first of his gifts to upper-end press corps culture:

WILLIAMSON (4/28/17): The first {White House Correspondents' Dinner] was in 1921, when all 50 attendees were journalists—all white men. They ate at the Arlington Hotel near the White House, enjoyed a satirical piano singalong and ''such fun as the Prohibition era afforded,'' as one participant said then. The first president to attend this Rotary Club-style knees-up was Calvin Coolidge, in 1924...In 1962, John F. Kennedy, nudged by Helen Thomas, alpha female of the press corps, refused to attend unless women were at last admitted.

The dinner took its star turn in 1987, when Michael Kelly, then a Baltimore Sun reporter, ''pulled off the social coup of the year,'' according to The Los Angeles Times, by escorting Fawn Hall, ''the mysterious and beautiful secretary [who] has barely uttered two words to reporters since she was granted immunity in the investigation of the Iran-contra arms scandal.'' In 1988 his date was Donna Rice, whose relationship with Gary Hart wrecked his presidential bid.

Today the event lasts a televised five hours, its red carpet worn bare by a Star Wars bar of celebrities and politicos, media brass, corporate advertisers and lobbyists who foot the $3,000 per-table bill. Inviting a topical, incongruous or offensive guest scores more bragging rights than winning one of the journalism awards.

If you click, you can catch a photo of Greta Van Susteren, Rachel's great pal, posing with Kim Kardashian!

At any rate, so cool! First he escorted Fawn Hall, and after that Donna Rice! By the late 1900s, he was one of the leading Clinton-Gore haters and dissemblers. When he got himself killed in Iraq, one young journalist recalled the great parties at the big giant house he had scored.

Quinn's summer home may score $20 million. If we "follow money" like that, history says that sheer inanity is almost certain to follow.

And so today, the New York Times is working to dumb our world down. It's been working this angle, rather successfully, for the past number of years. People are dead all over the world because our press corps had gamboled and played. Donald Trump seems slightly crazy today. Our journalists beat him to it.

Along the way, someone must pay the bills! Did you see the recent full-page ads for this great offer from the New York Times travel auxiliary?

People, listen up! You can jet around the world for a mere $135,000! You won't see the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion. But Nicholas Kristof will be on hand to tell you about Easter Island!

Go ahead—click that link! The advertisement says the trip will take you "behind the headlines." We would say that the ad itself takes you behind a curtain.

The contemporary upper-end "press corps" is steeped in this big-money culture. Conservatives are actually told about this silly ridiculous nonsense. Over Here, within our own tents, we just flounder along.

Watergate built a bunch of large homes. It also led to the gross inanity which has long typified upper-end press culture.

We liberals have never staged a resistance. Tomorrow, the final insult.

Tomorrow: David Leonhardt's magic hour. The three faces of Rachel's TV

All clowning, pretty much all the time!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 3, 2017

Maddow sets new world record: Last night, we heard a familiar cry. It came from the Analyst Viewing Facility here on our sprawling campus.

"I I I I I I I," the analysts derisively shouted. And sure enough! Rachel Maddow was on the air, talking about herself:

MADDOW (5/2/17): Quick programming note. Tonight, I'll be on an excellent television show called Late Night with Seth Meyers. Two fair warnings:

One, I will still be wearing this same $20 blazer. If you think it looks frumpy from the front, you should see it from the patented 34-degree side angle that happens on late-night shows. Hoo!

[off-camera: standard sycophantic laughter]

In the annals of news, no one talks about him- or herself more than Maddow does. Making matters worse, the sycophants are always there, laughing and urging her on.

As she continued, Maddow stated her second warning, then engaged in her favorite activity—playing videotape of herself. On this particular videotape, she was speaking to Meyers while making no obvious sense:

MADDOW (continuing directly): Number two, there will be a belabored analogy involving The Silence of the Lambs.

MADDOW (videotape): There's never been a presidency, an administration that was this overtly hostile to the press. But at the same time, there's never been a president who was more addicted to the news about himself and who is more responsive to the news that he supposedly thinks is so worthless. So it is a weird tension.

We're skipping the "belabored analogy." If you want to watch this short segment in full, you can just click here.

As you've noted, that brief analysis by Maddow doesn't exactly make sense. If a president thinks the news about himself is "worthless" (in Trumpian language, "fake"), why wouldn't he be inclined to pay attention to it?

Presumably, a president could ignore "the news" if he thought the reporting and analysis were competent and fair. As a pol, you pretty much have to pay attention if you think the news is fake.

Trump is crazy, but Maddow rarely makes much sense at this point. Have you seen her wandering account of the source of the money for the lobbying by Michael Flynn in the summer and fall of 2016?

Increasingly, Maddow's work is designed to please and entertain the tribe, not to make clear sense. That said, last night's opening segment seemed to establish a new world record for ludicrous on-air behavior.

Background: OMB director Mick Mulvaney had tried to conduct a conference call earlier in the day. It seems the conference call broke down due to technical problems.

We say "seems" because Maddow made no particular attempt to explain anything much of substance. Her opening segment ended with five minutes of mugging and clowning about the technical problem involved in the failed conference call, as illuminated by her own masterful comic performance.

Her program aired at 9 PM. It was billed as a news show.

With that in mind, we'll suggest that you click here for the tape of that opening segment. The full tape runs 14 minutes. You should move ahead to the nine-minute mark and watch the segment from there.

On other news programs last night, we saw people try to explain what Mulvaney actually said about the budget. On the Maddow Show, we saw a multimillionaire corporate stooge as she mugged and clowned and played the fool, setting a new world record for pointless self-indulgence.

We'll suggest that you click to the nine-minute mark and watch the next five minutes. We think what you'll see is truly remarkable. Massive wealth and massive fame tend to be bad for many folk. In our view, the devolution of Maddow's performance has tended to prove this point.

Seriously! Click that link, then advance to the nine-minute mark. Remember: The program you're watching is advertised as a news program.

Warning: Over Here, many people in our tribe can't see the problem with this. The same problem tends to obtain when Hannity comes on Over There.

Coming soon: Who paid for Flynn's lobbying last summer? We don't know the answer to that, but we'll show you what Maddow said on one program last week.

BEHIND THE CURTAIN CONTINUED: Rucker's return to Al Gore's beard!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 3, 2017

Part 3—Kelly's date for the ball: "When the musician Alice Coltrane changed her name to Turiyasangitananda, she announced it to her children by having them practice spelling it out with fridge magnets."

And that's not all! Also this:

"King Edward II of England banned a forerunner of modern soccer in a 1314 decree, which warned that 'there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise.' "

We're going to list these presentations as noteworthy facts. Indeed, they're listed as such on page A3 of today's hard-copy New York Times, in the daily "Of Interest" feature.

(Also Of Interest: "In 1935, the average broiler chicken reached the slaughter-ready weight of 2.86 pounds in 98 days." Truly, the wizard behind this newspaper's curtain can go on and on.)

Rather plainly, this paper's "reimagined" pages A2 and A3 represent a marketing plan, Also, they constitute a skillful attempt to dumb the newspaper down.

The marketing plan is transparent. Over on today's A2, the Times presents a lightly edited version of this cheerful (and linkable) "Inside The Times" feature. It hands us readers a cheerful account of the way Timesfolk of the not-too-distant past worked to maintain the noble Times Index, maintaining a record of all the reports which had appeared in the paper.

Inevitably, the report contains an admiring quote from Nicholas Kristof. Along the way, reporter Davis Dunlap offered this good-natured overview:

DUNLAP (5/3/17): A journey through the Times Index is like a journey through any great encyclopedia. On your way to finding whatever it was you’re looking for, you will be diverted by a lot else besides.

Today, that diversion-from-task is provided each day by the crazy quilt of "noteworthy facts" found atop page A3. At least on pages A2 and A3, the Times has become Frost's famous guide, "who only has at heart your getting lost."

Dunlap's text is designed to remind us of the New York Times' long-standing greatness. From a marketing perspective, the "memorable headline" we get each day on page A2 serves the same obvious purpose.

Today, the daily feature to which we refer looks like this:

On This Day in History
A MEMORABLE HEADLINE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
MAY 3, 1933

NAZIS SEIZE UNIONS AND ARREST CHIEFS; STORM TROOPERS SWOOP DOWN ON OFFICES THROUGHOUT THE REICH IN SURPRISE MOVE

By 1933, May Day had already been celebrated by international labor movements for more than four decades. But this year, Nazis followed the holiday up by shutting down German trade unions, arresting their leaders, seizing their assets and replacing their periodicals with propaganda. "All union leaders who could be reached were taken into custody," The Times reported, "pending investigation of their political activities and business transactions."

From a marketing standpoint, this daily "memorable headline" is meant to make us feel that the Times has always been there, behaving in the way outstandingly moral people like Us would have wanted the Times to behave.

From a marketing standpoint, this is much better than reminding us of the way the famous newspaper has routinely behaved over, let's say, the past twenty-five years. For example, the way it behaved in 2015, when it formed an axis with Peter Schweizer, a Breitbart-funded propagandist, leading it to publish a 4400-word "bombshell report" about Hillary Clinton's scary uranium deal, which she did for the money.

In truth, the Times has been a major, highly disordered gong-show for quite a few years, but many liberals have no idea of this. People like Drum, Tomasky, Maddow and them have refused to tell Us this, presumably for the perfectly obvious reasons.

In the past two months, the dumbing-down of the New York Times has proceeded on its reimagined A2 and A3. That said, the dumbness has been there for all to see, at the Times and elsewhere within the guild, for a great many years.

Here at this award-winning site, we've been trying to pull the curtain back on this fact since 1998. We've established one fact in that time:

At least within our own pitiful tribe, pulling the curtain back doesn't work. You can pull the curtain back all you like. Tribal leaders won't mention what's been revealed, and the rank-and-file still won't see it.

Alas! Over Here, in our own vastly self-impressed tribe, We liberals are aware of "bias" as a category of thought. The concept of "dumbness" flies over our heads. How else is it possible that the high lady Collins could still be posting columns like, after all these destructive years?

We link to the column the high lady wrote for Saturday morning's editions. The column appeared in our hard-copy Times. For some reason, it wasn't listed that way at the famous newspaper's "Today's Paper" site.

Last Saturday morning, the high lady produced one of her trademark ten-minute columns. We refer to the ten-minute specials which appear in the form of a "quiz."

Donald J. Trump had completed his first hundred days in office! Rather than offer something of value, this ridiculous figure sold us this piddle, hard-copy headline included:

COLLINS (4/29/17): The 100-Day Quiz, Part 2

Happy hundredth day of the Trump administration! Hey, only one thousand, three hundred and—no, wait. Don’t count down the days. It’ll make you crazy. Let’s just see how closely you’ve kept an eye on our commander in chief so far:

1. Early in his first round of calls to foreign leaders, Donald Trump told British Prime Minister Theresa May...

A. “The relationship between our two nations is a special one, and always will be.”
B. “If you travel to the U.S., you should let me know.”
C. “I’ve just finished reading a very long book about all the kings.”

Ha ha ha—but wait, you're right! There isn't the slightest hint of wit anywhere in this column. If this crap took ten minutes to write, "early onset" may be dogging the Times' high lady too.

Meanwhile, the key words there were "Part 2." Good God! This was the second ten-minute column Collins had burned in this fashion.

In this morning's Times, a letter writer from Pennsylvania inquires about Donald J. Trump's mental acuity. Can anyone tell us why the same questions haven't long been swirling around ridiculous slackers like Collins?

We say "figures" because the Seamus-obsessed Cupcake Wars-watcher displays a type of institutional mental disorder which infests the New York Times and the entire guild of which it is the leader.

This institutional devotion to dumbness has infested the mainstream guild for a large number of years. Consider Philip Rucker's "news report" in today's Washington Post.

Good God! Rucker, Yale 2006, was reporting on Hillary Clinton's latest public statements. Why is she casting such a wide net as she lists the reasons for last November's defeat?

Within the upper-end guild, inquiring minds want to know. Incredibly but inevitably, Rucker was soon typing this:

RUCKER (5/3/17): Robert Shrum, a Democratic strategist who advised two losing presidential nominees, Al Gore and John F. Kerry, said Clinton is not applying enough weight to her own failures, especially her economic message, in analyzing her loss.

“I have a measure of real sympathy, but it is also true that you can’t just blame the things that happened to you,” Shrum said. “Part of credibility here begins with saying, ‘These were things that happened to me that really hurt and could’ve cost me the election, but there were decisions I wish I made differently as well.’ ”

Losing a close presidential race can be devastating, and even traumatic, for a politician who long aspired to the office. After his 2000 defeat, Gore grew a beard and gained weight. Following his 2012 drubbing, Republican Mitt Romney retreated into seclusion in La Jolla, Calif., where he was spotted pumping his own gas, with his hair preternaturally flopping over his forehead.

You're right! After reading those highlighted passage, a sensible person might wonder if Rucker, like Donald J. Trump, may perhaps not be OK—if his troubling mental condition might even be getting worse?

In fact, Rucker is simply channeling the cultural craziness which has infested our mainstream "press corps" since at least the early 1990s. The press corps' frisking of Gore's coiffure and clothing started in earnest in 1999, eventually setting a new record for journalistic craziness. A certain Pulitzer prize-winner at the Times built seven columns around Gore's highly revealing hair during Campaign 2000 alone.

Concerning Romney, Collins arranged more than fifty (50) columns around his alleged treatment of Seamus the dog. Even as our culture devolved, we massively self-impressed pseudoliberals were dumbly cheering her on.

Yesterday morning, Joe and Mika were making a set of good observations and asking a very good question. They cited the president's weirdly truncated attention span and his inability to focus or remember. They wondered if these traits suggested the onset of dementia.

People, might we talk? These same traits have been on display within the upper-end press corps for years. On its reimagined pages A2 and A3, the Times is moving to make it official.

Meanwhile, Rucker returns to Gore's revealing beard, to Romney's fly-away hair.

In his new column, Thomas Friedman asks if Donald J. Trump is unwell. An obvious lack of intellectual health has marked the mainstream press corps for years.

But so what? Over Here in our own liberal tribe, our leaders have chosen not to alert us, presumably for the obvious reasons. And as with the rank and file Over There, our own rank and file is plainly unable to see that We're getting played.

Might we offer brief words of praise? When Dorothy peeked behind the curtain, she was able to see what was happening there.
In another famous tale, the people weren't able to do so.

Long ago, in a mythical empire, an emperor discarded the curtain of his clothing. He proceeded to parade about in the altogether. The screen of his clothing was gone.

Alas! Even with that curtain gone, that emperor's subjects weren't able to see what was right there before them! So it has been for the past three decades Over Here.

Long ago and far away, Michael Kelly invited Fawn Hall to the annual ball. Should that have been the first clear sign that something was going very wrong inside these strange people's heads? That it might even get worse?

Tomorrow: Fawn Hall and Donna Rice at the dance; David Leonhardt's hour

On Morning Joe, Trump "isn't OK"—and "it's getting worse!"

TUESDAY, MAY 2, 2017

They stage the right discussion: This weekend, we googled the topic.

Yesterday morning, we discussed the topic with a friend at the coffee joint.

This morning, Joe and Mika staged that same discussion in the first half hour or so of Morning Joe. They were asking a very good question:

Is Donald J. Trump showing signs of dementia?

At the start of the program, Scarborough keyed the discussion to Trump's recent strings of weird interviews, including but not limited to his comments about the Civil War. Early on, he said this:

SCARBOROUGH (5/2/17): My mother's had dementia for ten years. That sounds like the sort of thing my mother would say today. She would say, "People don't ask that question. Why did we have a civil war?"...That's something that a 5-year-old might ask. But that is not anything that any grown-up that I've ever been around in my entire life would ever let pass from their lips. Because that has been the central question of how did America begin, with slavery as our original sin, and how did we move past that original sin in part through the Civil War.

Mika added this:

"I'm not sure he's OK. I'm not sure he's OK, and you have that feeling with people who are not OK, where it starts to dawn on you that they're not OK."

"And it's getting worse, worse than it has been," Scarborough said. He played tape of Trump from earlier years, showing him at a time when he seemed much more lucid.

Over the weekend, we had the same general reaction to Trump's recent string of weird remarks. For the leading authority's report on dementia, you can just click here.

To watch the first twenty minutes of this morning's show, you can just click this. Some of the program's pundits wanted to engage this discussion. Others avoided the topic.

We'll only add this:

Our national discourse has been demented for much of the past twenty-five years. Very major national figures made crazy remarks about Candidate Gore in 1999 and 2000. All others agreed not to notice this crazy downward spiral.

Now we seem to have the real thing. This is a very dangerous situation.

We built this culture of lunacy over time. Very major "liberal" figures were very deeply involved.

BEHIND THE CURTAIN CONTINUED: A useful and fun new approach!

TUESDAY, MAY 2, 2017

Part 2—And a peek at a low-IQ culture: On March 2, the New York Times described a fun new approach the paper would be taking.

(For fuller background, see yesterday's report.)

The paper said it was introducing "a reimagined presentation of its A2 and A3 print pages." Starting that day, those pages would be "a place where readers will find interesting, useful and fun information about what The Times is doing not only with its core news report, but throughout the entire organization."

The Times' description was fuzzy but intriguing! The reimagined pages wouldn't just be interesting. They'd also be useful and fun!

In our view, the reimagined hard-copy pages have given readers a bit of a look behind a curtain. Such transactions have been described in the literature of old.

When Toto let Dorothy take a peek behind a very famous curtain, she discovered an underwhelming fellow positioned at the controls. So it has been with these reimagined pages. In our view, they give us a look at the soul of the Times—at a deficient intellectual culture which, after decades of operation, has left us with Donald J. Trump in the White House as we await his war.

What awaits us when we peek behind the New York Times' cultural curtain? Let's travel to pages A2 and A3 as they appear in today's hard-copy Times.

Just to be completely unfair, let's start with the "Quote of the Day" on A3. For unknown reasons, this feature doesn't exist on-line. But in the paper's hard-copy A3, the "Quote of the Day" is this:

Quote of the Day
HONORING A DECEASED FELLOW FAN, ONE BALLPARK BATHROOM AT A TIME, A25

"I took care of Roy, and I had to use the facilities myself. So I figure, you know, kill two birds."

TOM MCDONALD, a Mets fan who who is dispensing with the ashes of his childhood friend Roy Riegel by flushing them away in ballparks across the country.

The Times says that's the "quote of the day." No, we aren't making this up.

This time, let's try to be fair. The Mets' home ballpark, CitiField, is located in Flushing Meadow. That may be a factor.

Also, the New York Times told us, right up front, that these reimagined pages would be loads of fun.

Still! Of all the things that were said yesterday, the Times picked that as its "Quote of the Day!" Forget the peculiar things that Donald J. Trump may have said. Tom McDonald's "two birds" remark was the day's top quote!

We'd have to rate today's top quote as perhaps a bit underwhelming. But so it very much tends to go on these fun new pages.

It isn't just the quote of the day! When we looked to the top of today's A3, we thought we saw a theme developing. Let us describe what we saw:

At the top of page A3, the Times now presents this feature:

Of Interest
NOTEWORTHY FACTS FROM TODAY'S PAPER

Today, the Times presents eight "noteworthy facts." Just for fun, we'll transcribe our favorite three:

The breath of diabetics sometimes smells of rotten apples, experts report; the skin of typhoid patients, like baking bread.

Before natural gas is exported, it is cooled to minus 260 degrees, condensing it to a liquid known as liquified natural gas.

There are about 100,000 species of fungi, but only about 80 of them biluminesce, or glow in the dark.

If we're able to follow that second fact, when natural gas is turned into a liquid, it's known as liquified natural gas!

Whatever! We're omitting the "noteworthy fact" about how many volunteer musical performances occur each day in the Portland, Oregon International Airport. We're omitting the fact about the ages of the wolves inside Yellowstone Park.

Briefly, might we talk? Each day, there are actually quite a few "noteworthy facts" in the New York Times. Whoever is running page A3 seems to have a peculiar idea of what the word "noteworthy" means.

Yesterday, one of the noteworthy facts concerned the material in the prosthetic nose worn by a tenor in the Metropolitan Opera. On Saturday, we were clued to this noteworthy fact, among other clunkers:

"Wags Lending is a company that offers high-interest loans so people can lease new pets."

So people can lease new pets? We don't understand that either. Noteworthy facts can be like that!

Occasionally, some of this page's "Noteworthy Facts" almost do seem noteworthy. On a daily basis, the collection seems more like a grab bag, like entertaining trivia items pulled from a very large hat.

What the heck is taking place on these reimagined pages? Weirdly, these pages don't exist if you read the Times on-line.

Strange but true! If you go to the Times' "Today's Paper" site, each item in the paper is listed in order—except those found on pages A2 and A3.

Those items have been disappeared from the "Today's Paper" site. The site jumps straight from the front page all the way to page A4. Pages A2 and A3 look like North Korea as seen from space at night.

What's happening on these pages? What type of insight are we getting from this peek behind the curtain?

These pages are almost wholly inane; essentially, they seem to be devoted to a type of low-IQ marketing. If Madison Avenue designed an ad for these helpful, fun new pages, that ad would go something like this:

You are the dumbest people on earth.
We at the Times want to serve you.

That's what these new pages say.

Surely, you think we're being unfair. Let's discuss that addictive new feature, "The Mini Crossword," along with the "Here to Help" feature.

As we noted yesterday, "addictive" is the word the Times used to describe the Mini Crossword. (Apparently, it already existed on-line.) Here's the way the Times introduced this new hard-copy feature:

"The redesign of these pages has also made room for a small and addictive puzzle. The Mini Crossword, which until now has only existed in digital form, will now run in print on page A3 each weekday."

Truth to tell, this addictive new puzzle is just extremely small. For eons, the Times has been known for its extremely challenging crossword puzzles. This puzzle appears in the form of a square, with just five meager spaces across and just five spaces down.

Given the nature of the clues, the daily puzzle may take as long as a minute to solve. One clue today was this:

"Go down the bunny slope"

Let's see. Could the three-letter word the puzzle seeks possibly be the word "ski?"

Yesterday, the puzzle sought "Senator Orrin Hatch's state." Could the four-letter answer be "Utah?" So it goes, on a daily basis, on this addictive feature.

Next to the Mini Crossword, we find the "Here to Help" feature. This morning, the feature helps us with this:

Here to Help
HOW TO BE MINDFUL WHILE GARDENING

Yesterday's heading looked like this:

Here to Help
WANT TO START RUNNING? HERE'S WHAT AND WHEN TO EAT

On Saturday, we were helped in the following way: "How to make a champagne cocktail." On the new A3, the help dispensed to readers pretty much never stops.

We haven't mentioned the daily feature on A3 which is headed like this:

Spotlight
ADDITIONAL REPORTAGE AND REPARTEE FROM OUR JOURNALISTS

Today's "reportage and repartee" is drawn from a Facebook exchange between a Times reporter and one of the actors on Veep. Often, the repartee involves intemperate tweets the reporter probably shouldn't have made.

Next to the daily Spotlight feature we get this daily feature:

The Conversation
FOUR OF THE MOST READ, SHARED AND DISCUSSED POSTS FROM ACROSS NYTIMES.COM

In fairness, there are many posts to share and discuss across the vast sweep of the Times. As often happens with this new feature, we get an embarrassing suggestion today about the nature of this newspaper's readers.

According to the Times' selection, the number two shared-and-discussed post has been this week-old report about Zuri, a fashion line by two New Yorkers "that makes only one dress." Again and again, this daily selection suggests that Times readers may not be obsessively focused on the day's most important topics, human survival-wise.

We haven't discussed the reimagined page A2. We'd say the page has been reimagined in a way designed to make you think well of Times reporters and columnists.

Today's submission is unusually relevant; it involves the debut column by Bret Stephens, a topic we expect to discuss by the end of the week. Yesterday, the page's main feature concerned the recent retirement of a Time obit writer.

On the whole, we'd have to say that these redesigned pages may give us a glimpse of a world. As with Dorothy, so too here! A curtain has been drawn away, and we're able to view an unimpressive substructure.

According to the leading authority, The Wizard admitted to Dorothy that he was "a humbug." Each morning, when we scan these pages, we think of that exchange.

These pages suggest the possibility that a bunch of humbugs at the Times are looking for ways to talk way down to the paper's subscribers—to a bunch of people from whom they don't expect very much.

Is a culture being revealed in this way? Does our glimpse behind this curtain help us see how we got to our current dangerous place?

Tomorrow: He brought Fawn Hall to the dance

Our team is gigantically less than sharp!

MONDAY, MAY 1, 2017

Sean McElwee edition: As it has finally turned out, we the people just aren't sharp enough to conduct our own affairs.

It isn't just Them, the ones Over There. It's also Us, the ones Over Here! As it turns out, we the fiery liberals tend to be tremendously hapless too.

The examples have come thick and fast in the past several days. For today, let's pile on Sean McElwee.

Over at the new Salon, McElwee was fighting mad yesterday morning. Because our team knows only one play, his piece ran beneath these long, fiery headlines:

MCELWEE (4/30/17): Donald Trump’s first 100 days have been a big success—at least when it comes to vicious racist policies

Amid all the failures, Trump can claim a big win: He has pursued overtly racist policies that will shape our future

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! Trump wasn't just succeeding with racist policies. His policies were viciously racist. They were overtly racist!

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! We love hearing talk like that!

Just for the record, to what policies did young McElwee refer? After naming some topics Trump has abandoned, the fireman cut to the chase:

MCELWEE: Infrastructure seems to have fallen off Trump’s agenda for now, and contrary to his promise to provide health insurance for all, Trump pushed for Paul Ryan’s health care bill, which would have left millions uninsured. He backed cuts to Medicaid (despite his promise not to touch it) and has proposed massive tax cuts for the Republican donor class. Far from pursuing a non-interventionist foreign policy, Trump has been sucked into the Blob and embraced interventionism. The only area where he has distinguished himself from the GOP establishment is his aggressive pursuit of deeply racist policies.

Trump has freed ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to deport undocumented immigrants aggressively—even those with no criminal record—and has proposed a massive expansion of the agency. According to the Washington Post, “Arrests of immigrants with no criminal records more than doubled to 5,441.”

Under the headline "Trump's Key Success," McElwee said that Trump has aggressively pushed deeply racist policies. Specifically, “arrests of immigrants with no criminal records more than doubled to 5,441,” McElwee said, providing a link.

Before we clicked, we wondered. We wondered if McElwee could possibly be linking to the Washington Post report we had in mind.

We clicked, and sure enough! He linked to this April 17 report by the Post's Maria Sacchetti—a report which clearly shows the following:

In 2014, when Barack Obama was president, substantially more "immigrants with no criminal record" were arrested from January 20 through March 13, as compared to the number of such people arrested this year. The numbers look like this:

Immigrants with no criminal record arrested,
January 20 through March 13
Under Obama, 2014: 7,483
Under Trump, 2017: 5,441

We're going by what Sacchetti reported. That said, it's the report to which McElwee linked.

Don't get out wrong! The number of arrests this year is higher than in either of the past two years. But in 2014, three years ago, the number of arrests was much higher. On that basis:

If Trump's policies are deeply, viciously, overtly racist, what does that say about Obama? For the record, we're just asking.

Given the numbers she was reporting, we were struck by the weakness of Sacchetti's report when it first appeared. McElwee came along and excitingly ginned up the language.

At the present time, for good or for ill, this is the only way our pitiful team knows how to play the game. It helps explain the remarkable fact that Donald J. Trump is sitting in the White House.

McElwee's young; he knows one play. Over Here, among us rubes, that play is overtly exciting.

Also reported by Sacchetti: "Overall, deportations are down by 1.2 percent, to 54,741 in January, February and March, compared to the same period last year."

"Last year," Obama was president. Once again, we're just saying. We have no idea.

BEHIND THE CURTAIN CONTINUED: Behind the screen at the New York Times!

MONDAY, MAY 1, 2017

Part 1—Useful, addictive, fun: In December 2012, the New York Times chose Jim Holt's ridiculous book, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story, as one of the year's ten best.

(Half the selected books were novels. Holt's book was one of the five best non-fiction books of the year.)

Four years later, it happened again! The Times chose Sarah Bakewell's wonderfully hapless book, At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, as one of the year's ten (or five) best.

Apricot cocktails and detective stories, mixed with the thrill of "existentialism" and "existential" concerns! This seems to be a heady mix for the souls who sit behind the curtain at the New York Times, the allegedly brainiest newspaper within our dying cultural realm.

Long ago, Dorothy was quite surprised when she peered behind a certain well-known curtain. According to the leading authority, this is what she found:

Back at the Emerald City, the Wizard delays granting their requests. Then Toto pulls back a curtain and exposes the "Wizard" as a normal middle-aged man who has been projecting the fearsome image; he denies Dorothy's accusation that he is a bad man, but admits to being a humbug. He then gives the Scarecrow a diploma, the Lion a medal, and the Tin Man a ticking heart-shaped watch, granting their wishes and convincing them that they have received what they sought. He then prepares to launch his hot air balloon to take Dorothy home...

And so on. That's what Dorothy is said to have seen when she finally got the chance to peek behind the curtain.

Next week, we'll return to Holt's ridiculous book. On our way to this quintessential post by Professor Horwich, we'll show you more of the ridiculous work the New York Times inevitably judged to be among the year's best.

First though, a question arises. What the heck might a person find behind the curtain at the Times? How in the world did our brainiest paper heap piles of praise on those two books?

Long ago, "a normal middle-aged man" was sitting behind the curtain when Toto drew back that screen. Who can be found behind the curtain at today's New York Times, and within the wider guild of which it forms the key part?

"Fearsome imagery" to the side, who sits behind that curtain? We'll suggest a hint was offered on March 2, in an official statement from behind the screen.

As best we can tell, the important report from behind the screen never appeared in the hard-copy Times. The author (or authors) of the report went unnamed. The unnamed author's important report only appeared on-line.

That said, the important report from behind the screen announced an exciting new reimagining of one part of the New York Times' news product. Headline included, this is the way the important report began:

The New York Times Reimagines A2 and A3 Pages

Published: March 2, 2017

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 2, 2017-- The New York Times today introduced a reimagined presentation of its A2 and A3 print pages, featuring a richness of Times content and a new look under the direction of Tom Jolly, associate masthead editor, and Jake Silverstein, editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine.

The redesign, aimed to give readers an overview of what The Times is doing both in print and digitally, is modeled after the “front of the book” concept of a magazine. Pages A2 and A3 will become a place where readers will find interesting, useful and fun information about what The Times is doing not only with its core news report, but throughout the entire organization. The pages will offer stories and content that has not been part of the print paper before.

“The Times has a universe that extends well beyond the print newspaper, and we’re excited to transform pages A2 and A3 into a must-read destination that gives readers a sense of that,” said Dean Baquet, executive editor, The New York Times.

According to the important report, the people behind the screen had "reimagined" pages A2 and A3 of the print edition of our brainiest newspaper. For unknown reasons, they announced these exciting changes on-line, not in the print edition itself.

In a set of semi-coherent statements, the people behind the curtain tried to explain what these reimagined pages were going to do:

According to the unnamed authors of the report, readers of pages A2 and A3 would now "find interesting, useful and fun information about what The Times is doing not only with its core news report, but throughout the entire organization."

In case that wasn't fuzzy enough, Dean Baquet was called in to perform further fogging. According to Baquet, pages A2 and A3 had been transformed to give readers a sense of the fact that "the Times has a universe that extends well beyond the print newspaper." Inevitably, folk who produce such statements will think that books like Bakewell's and Holt's are among the year's ten best.

Whatever! We'd already learned that the two reimagined pages would be "useful" and "fun." As the authors continued their report, they listed the featured which would appear on the reimagined pages.

Among other features, readers could expect to find a daily "behind-the-scenes look at [the New York Times' own] journalism." They could expect to find "a memorable headline from [the New York Times'] archives."

Readers could expect to find "reportage and repartee from Times journalists." There would even be a "Here To Help" feature, including "tips for daily life, movie and tech recommendations, recipes, and more." Finally, the Times would give us tips for daily life!

The reimagined pages would be "useful" and "fun." We'd get to listen to repartee! Addiction might even occur:

"The new A2 and A3 pages are meant to give a reader a sense of the scope of what’s happening in the world of The New York Times each day, from the contents of the print paper to the stories that are trending on our site to what our journalists are posting on social media,” said Jake Silverstein. “We hope these changes transform this valuable newspaper real estate into a delightful part of the daily newspaper reading routine.”

The redesign of these pages has also made room for a small and addictive puzzle. The Mini Crossword, which until now has only existed in digital form, will now run in print on page A3 each weekday.

As things have turned out, that new puzzle hasn't just been "addictive." It has been amazingly "small."

This important report emerged from behind a journalistic curtain. As with Dorothy, so too here:

We will submit that the reimagining of pages A2 and A3 helps us learn an important fact. It isn't true of the Wizard alone! The figures behind this second screen are remarkably unprepossessing.

Tomorrow, we'll look at some of the useful, addictive, fun material which has appeared on these reimagined pages. As the week continues, we'll takes a few more looks behind the screen, both at the Times itself and around the wider guild, which is often addicted to humbug.

We'll suggest that the figures behind the curtain at the Times have produced some pathetically gongy features on those reimagined pages. We'll suggest that this helps explain a key fact:

It helps explain why we're all sitting around waiting for Donald J. Trump's future war. When so little heft lies behind our screens, are such meltdowns certain to come?

Tomorrow: Useful, embarrassing, fun