Scooper & Scooped

One of the things we miss most about TMFTML was his Monday-morning quarterbacking of the Sunday New York Times. (The critic became the critiqued, and that’s a helluva promotion! We like to believe we beat the Times to the punch bowl, though.)

TMFTML
somehow managed to scan and summarize the whole paper—usually in the
yellow haze of the “worst hangover ever”—from the Magazine to the
darkest recesses of Travel. He was a sort of pissy, Gen-X ombudsman
with a rapier wit.

We are much more piecemeal about the way we
pick through the Times. This is undoubdtedly a character flaw, but we
read the Sunday Times for pleasure, not for business. We often notice,
though, how the Gray Lady’s left hand and right don’t seem to be aware
of one another. We noted yesterday how the Magazine’s cover story on
“the overdesigned” life of American children was almost precisely the
same territory covered by Week In Review’s below-the-fold feature.

These
are great articles, of course, but they also have the strong smack of
trend stories, and speaking as an editor here, we say the fact that
they crop up in more than one place on one particular Sunday sort of
confirms this view. I wonder if there are uber-editors somewhere in the
Times who have steam coming out of their ears—just the way they do when
the New Yorker, or the Washington Post scoops them. (For the record, we
preferred the short and snappy Week in Review piece, which got straight
to the point with solid science and an impressionistic analysis. The
Magazine’s coverage was multi-faceted, practically the entire issue
turned over to a relatively simple conceit: Kids are not spending
enough time being kids anymore, and as a result, neither are they
growing up to be the adults they ought to be. We begin to understand
why one of TMFTML’s perennial complaints was just how trailing-edge the
Times can seem on stories like this.)

Some
other high points came in the Book Review—newly redesigned, with a more
humane display face, the anachronistic return to launching the cover
story right there on the cover, and the notable shift of contributors’
notes away from the column footers to the front of the book, much like
a modern magazine.

In these spiffy environs, we enjoyed Slate editor Jacob Weisberg’s angle on “Charlotte Simons,” and Tom Frank’s overview

of four new titles attempting to dismantle the “red-blue” cultural
divide, although it purported to survey four books, but really only
focused on the internecine squabble Frank wishes to pick with the
writers of “The Great Divide” (the “Metro Vs. Retro” folks).

More
important, we swelled with pride when we noticed the Times recommended
David Lebedof’s “The Uncivil War”— and several pages later, a solidly
positive review of Michael Dregni’s “Django.” Both are local heroes of
Twin Cities publishing, Lebedof a winner of a 1998 Minnesota Book
Award, and Dregni the editorial director of Voyageur Books over in
Stillwater. Nice work, gentlemen.

It’s not like we need to scan the Times in order to feel good about ourselves—well, maybe it is like that. —The Editor in Cheese


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