A Times Company press release carries a memo from the executive editor, Dean Baquet:

After a dozen remarkable years as chief television critic, Alessandra Stanley has decided to return to reporting. As part of The Times's deepening focus on economic inequality in America, she will be creating a new beat: an interdisciplinary look at the way the richest of the rich — the top 1 percent of the 1 percent — are influencing, indeed rewiring, the nation's institutions, including universities, philanthropies, museums, sports franchises and, of course, political parties and government.

This is a subject both intensely timely and well suited to Alessandra's skills as an observer, reporter and writer — one that has fascinated her, she says, since she wrote about the first generation of Russian oligarchs as a foreign correspondent in the mid-1990s. Now, she'll be reporting on what she describes as the "psychology, rituals, costs and contradictions" of a new generation of American titans. Her work will add to The Times's ongoing reporting on inequality in all its forms. More announcements will come on that front.

This is the same Alessandra Stanley whose tendency to make factual errors requiring correction has attracted extensive press coverage.

The Times business section carries a news article about a data analysis business called Enigma. The article includes this passage:

Enigma is embarking on a sizable expansion, planning to nearly double its staff to 60 people by the end of the year. The growth will be fueled by a $28.2 million round of venture funding, led by New Enterprise Associates, that will be announced on Tuesday. (The New York Times Company is among the investors.)

The article doesn't include any quotes from anyone skeptical about the business. It's nice that the Times Company's investment was disclosed to readers. Even so, on the basis of this article, at least, readers might wonder how much investing in these startup ventures the New York Times Company does, and if a Times Company investment includes a promise or guarantee of favorable press coverage for the venture in the Times newspaper. The more such investing the Times does, the more it poses a potential conflict of interest for Times reporters who cover the businesses that the Times invests in, as well as competing companies that the Times has chosen not to invest in. For example, Tableau Software, Inc., an $8 billion market capitalization public company specializing in big data, has received less coverage in the Times than Enigma, which is tiny by comparison.

Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal gives an interview to the Forward with his different view of the phone conversation he had with Michael Oren, who was then Israel's ambassador to the United States.

Over at Commentary, John Podhoretz does a good job of noticing a section in Michael Oren's new book, Ally, reporting on a phone call between Mr. Oren, then Israel's ambassador in Washington, and Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor of the New York Times. Mr. Rosenthal doesn't come out looking too good. Update: Mr. Rosenthal has responded here.

The Times public editor, Margaret Sullivan, devoted her Sunday print column to the overkill coverage in the Times of the Primates of Park Avenue book by Wednesday Martin. Ms. Sullivan included a nice mention (though no hyperlink, alas) of "Ira Stoll on the Smartertimes website."

The science section of the Times features a long and admiring profile of Naomi Oreskes, a professor at Harvard. My former colleague Blake Eskin points out on Twitter that her brother, Michael Oreskes, did a long stint as an editor at the Times. The newspaper had plenty of room to disclose that to readers, but apparently chose not to.

Under the headline, "Republicans Tie Their Favorite Causes to the Trade Agreement," the Times reports on the front of its business section:

With a final House showdown coming on Friday on President Obama's push for accelerated power to pursue a sweeping trade agreement, the vote brokering has begun — and it is all tilting to the right.

For Representative F. James Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, there is language promising that no trade deals can compel the United States to address climate change. For anti-immigrant firebrand Steve King, Republican of Iowa, another provision would prohibit future trade deals from loosening immigration laws or expanding visa access.

Representative Peter Roskam, Republican of Illinois, demanded a measure prioritizing trade relations with Israel and discouraging United States trading partners from boycotting, divesting from or sanctioning the Jewish state.

It's not entirely clear to me why the Times describes "discouraging United States trading partners from boycotting, divesting from or sanctioning the Jewish state" as a cause demonstrating a "tilt to the right." Opposition to such sanctions and boycotts is certainly not limited to the right; it is also present widely on the left.

Add an eighth article to the seven that the Times has already published touting Wednesday Martin's book Primates of Park Avenue.

Reviewing the movie "Jurassic World," Times critic Manohla Dargis complains, "There are so many plugs for Mercedes that you may wonder if the targeted viewers are studio executives." It's an oddly un-self-aware criticism, coming from the same newspaper that in just the past ten days has featured an interview with the head of research and technology at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development in Sunnyvale, Calif., a review of the Mercedes GLA250, which, as tested by the Times, had a sticker price of $45,505, and a third article that began:

One sunny morning a few weeks ago, I slipped into the inviting cockpit of a Mercedes-Benz S550 sedan, a ride equipped with massaging front seats, reclining back seats, a heads-up display worthy of a fighter jet and more speakers than a political convention. At $136,000, this was a car fit for a rap star or a European Union functionary, of which I am neither (yet).

Instead, I write about the future, and embedded in the S550 are a host of technologies that roughly approximate the future of automobile transportation — already available, for a high price, on the road today.

The Times look at Marco Rubio's personal family finances — the presidential candidate cashed in his retirement account and mistakenly used a Republican Party credit card to pay for personal expenses — was, to my mind, newsworthy, but marred by a couple of flaws that have been well marked already by other outlets. The Washington Free Beacon reports that a financial adviser that the Times had review Senator Rubio's financial disclosure documents turns out to be an Obama campaign donor, a fact the Times doesn't disclose as it quotes the adviser disparaging Mr. Rubio's practices. And Politico reports that the $80,000 vessel the Times describes as a "luxury speedboat" is in fact a not-so-glamorous fishing boat.

As if the extensive coverage the Times has already given to Wednesday Martin's book Primates of Park Avenue weren't enough, the newspaper is back today with more:

•A friendly paragraph-long mention in a front-of-the-arts-section piece about an unrelated television program, and,

*A brief article inside the business section disclosing that, after the New York Post found factual problems with the book, the publisher "said it would append a note to future editions of the book, written by the social researcher Wednesday Martin, clarifying that some of the memoir's details and chronologies were changed." Now they tell us!

These two latest articles bring to seven the total number of Times pieces about the book, so far as I can tell.

By comparison, Times advance coverage of the election in Turkey, a NATO ally of America with a population of more than 80 million, appears to have consisted, so far as I can tell, of a single article asserting, "Opinion polls suggest that Mr. Erdogan's party will easily win the most seats in Parliament on Sunday."

Smartertimes reader Bob Hill of Coral Gables, Fla. writes in about a Times article about Marco Rubio's traffic tickets (and Mrs. Rubio's):

Dear Editor-

Since I am a New York transplant to South Florida, this article caught my attention. The fact that Marco Rubio, or anyone else, has 2 actual tickets over a 17 year period is a non-story, I think everyone can agree- particularly considering that one of them was in Duval County, near Tallahassee, up where the police have nothing better to do than write revenue-raising speeding tickets, as this article suggests:http://www.news4jax.com/news/lawmakers-aim-to-end-speed-traps/31642710. New Yorkers know that getting a moving violation in the city might indicate unsafe driving- getting a speeding ticket in Ulster County, not so much. Same thing here.

The fact that a red-light camera in Miami may have tagged him as an offender is also a non-story, as anyone who lives down here can attest- those red light cameras have been roundly condemned as unreliable, particularly going back to 2011, as this article illustrates: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article3423438.html

The fact that Mr. Rubio successfully hired a traffic attorney to fight a fourth ticket, for failing to obey a stop sign, is also a non-story; as those of us who actually drive can attest, tickets for 'rolling stops' can also be a sign of merely revenue-generating/quota-meeting behavior on the part of the police, rather than unsafe driving- particularly when they are successfully dismissed.

As for the fact that his wife appears merely to be as equally bad as all the other drivers here in Miami, this is a pretty rich critique, considering that Madame Secretary Clinton's spouse has probably not had to consistently drive himself since his days as Arkansas AG, going all the way back to 1978 (to say nothing of the fact that his encounters with the state police were rather more in the mode of David Brock's 'Troopergate'). And leave aside the fact that the candidate herself has been ferried around by the Secret Service since 1992...

The only real news story here is that a presidential candidate drives a Buick, himself.

Keep up the great work! I grew up in one of those families that studied every page in the Times like a daf of gemara, so I fully appreciate the work you do.

best,

Bob

A New York Times dispatch about the Four Seasons restaurant and its co-owner includes this sentence: "On Thursday, Mr. Niccolini, dressed, as always, in a dark suit, appeared subdued and businesslike as he greeted lunchtime customers and chatted with dining room captains and other employees."

It's just demonstrably false that Mr. Niccolini is "always" dressed in a dark suit. I've seen him at the restaurant in a light gray suit, maybe with a bit of a stripe (maybe the one he is wearing in this New York Post photo). The Wall Street Journal has pictures of him at home in a turtleneck, khakis, and a red vest. There's a web site with a photo of him in the Hamptons in a blazer and light-colored trousers.

Unless the Times reporter follows Mr. Niccolini around all the time, how would the reporter know what the restaurateur "always" wears, anyway?

Just how much has the Times been obsessed with Wednesday Martin's book Primates of Park Avenue?

Let us count the ways:

May 16, 2015: 1372-word essay by the author on the front of the Sunday Review section.

May 31, 2015: 1130-word column about the book on the front of the metro section.

May 31, 2015: 888-word Sunday book review.

June 3, 2015: 1150-word review on the front of the arts section.

June 3, 2015: 622-word Times Insider article explaining "the fact that educated, affluent mothers in their 40s drive so much traffic on the Internet and they rarely let stories about educated, affluent mothers in their 40s go ignored."

The comment about "traffic on the Internet" driving the Times' editorial decision-making process would tend to undercut the claim by the paper's editor, Dean Baquet, that:

It's out of the question here that the metrics would drive the kind of work we do. If I ever let the numbers start to dictate our journalism, reporters would open a window in the newsroom and throw me out. It's just not in the Times DNA to let that happen.

Mr Baquet's claim seems like wishful thinking in light of the Times' overkill coverage of this book.

A dispatch from Boston about developments in the case of an Islamist shot dead by an FBI agent and a Boston police officer puts the New York Times' obsession with class categories on full and unattractive display. From the story:

An F.B.I. agent and a police officer approached Mr. Rahim around 7 a.m. on Tuesday outside a CVS Pharmacy in Roslindale, a middle-class Boston neighborhood....

Mr. Wright was taken into custody in Everett, a working-class Boston suburb, on Tuesday after the shooting...

In Mr. Wright's working-class neighborhood in Everett, a suburb just north of Boston, neighbors said they saw police officers and F.B.I. agents around 7 a.m. Tuesday at City Hall, around the corner from Mr. Wright's second-floor apartment on Linden Street.

There's no indication or evidence that these alleged jihadist plotters were driven by class animus. So why is it necessary for the Times to dwell on how classy the neighborhoods are or are not? If anything, it's a sign of sloppy editing that the description of Everett as "working-class" was left in twice. I'm not even sure what it means. Most neighborhoods other than some retirement communities in Florida or Arizona have people who work. It's as if the newspaper is edited by a bunch of Marxists waging class warfare through the editing process. To a reader who doesn't share the obsession with class, it's distracting and frustrating.