From an article in the New York Times Magazine, about the Thomas Guide and driving in Los Angeles:

Out-of-town visitors to Los Angeles like to say things like "driving here is a sport." But really, it's an art. It's an art that requires intuition, patience and a sense of the topography of the region. It means knowing that no matter where you are, there are mountains to the north and an ocean to the west. It means being able to peer into the souls of other drivers and knowing, with almost supernatural certainty, which ones are Grade A jerks who are seconds away from cutting you off in traffic. (Put another way, that means being able to identify newer-model BMWs.)

So everyone who drives a newer-model BMW is a "Grade A jerk"?

Funny, no ads from BMW in this Sunday's Times Magazine.

Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. once spoke about buying a BMW motorcycle. Does that make him a "Grade A jerk"?

Seems like a cheap shot to me.

Contrarianism and counter-intuitiveness are great, but one can take them too far, too, and it sure looks like that is what the New York Times did in a front-page news article from Saudi Arabia about "avenues for mercy" in the Saudi legal system. The Times reports:

No aspect of Saudi justice draws more attention than punishments like beheading or amputation. But Saudi legal practitioners say that penalties are on the books to deter crime and that the system limits their use.

In Saudi jurisprudence adultery and apostasy merit death, but executions for either are rare because the law makes it hard to secure convictions. Adultery, for example, can be proved by the testimony of witnesses, but they must be four Muslim men who see the sex act itself — proof nearly impossible to obtain.

As part of its effort to show that Saudi justice isn't really as bad as we Westerners think, the Times offers up this statistic: "Saudi Arabia executed 88 people in 2014, while 35 people were executed in the United States." The Times doesn't mention that America's population is more than 10 times that of Saudi Arabia, so on a per capita basis, the Saudis are using capital punishment more than 20 times as much as the U.S. does. And the U.S. is considered bloodthirsty on this issue by a lot of Europe and Canada, where capital punishment is effectively nonexistent.

A Times news article on the naming of a new president of New York University ends this way:

N.Y.U. picked Dr. Hamilton from over 200 nominees. It did not disclose who the other candidates were. But at one point, Michael Lynton, the chief executive of Sony Entertainment, wanted the job, according to emails that were published online during the Sony hacking scandal last year.

According to the emails, Mr. Lynton discussed his desire for the job last fall with the New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell.

Mr. Gladwell told Mr. Lynton, based on a conversation with a New Yorker editor who is married to an N.Y.U. professor and member of the presidential search committee, that "the crucial thing is helping them see you as the nurturer and protector of creative types NOT the corporate empire builder, which they have all had enough of with sexton."

That entire passage is weird. How about this "a conversation with a New Yorker editor who is married to an N.Y.U. professor and member of the presidential search committee." Who was this New Yorker editor? I'm pretty sure the Times reporter who wrote the article used to work at the New Yorker (she also used to work for me at the New York Sun.) Who was the NYU professor? Which one of them was a member of the presidential search committee? Or is that a third person?

It looks to me like Kwame Anthony Appiah was a member of the search committee, and that his spouse, Henry Finder, is editorial director of the New Yorker. The two reportedly share "a university-owned apartment in Tribeca."

And why, in any case, would the Times be printing Malcolm Gladwell's private emails to Michael Lynton that were hacked or stolen, probably by North Korea? Is there enough of a genuine public interest here (rather than prurient gossip) to justify printing someone's private correspondence? There's no sign in the article that these issues were grappled with with any thought.

A front-page New York Times news article about Senator Rand Paul and his presidential campaign concludes with this passage:

keeping up with the South by Southwest set is not for everyone. On Saturday night, after he left a concert with the D.J. Mark Ronson, Mr. Paul headed straight for bed. He was asleep by 10:30.

For at least this literal-minded reader, this was an ending that raised more questions than it answered. For starters, how did the Times know when Dr. Paul fell asleep? It must have been hard for the senator to doze off with the Times reporter there staring at him watching for what time his eyes shut and listening to see if he started snoring. If that's not what happened, the Times is relying on someone's say-so without telling us who that person is, or how that person knows.

The New York Times has issued a correction of the Thomas Friedman column we wrote about here the other day. We wrote: "The passage about Mr. Adelson joking 'with another wealthy Israeli' is a strange one because neither Mr. Adelson nor the person he was joking with, Haim Saban, is an Israeli. They are Americans." The Times correction reads, "Thomas L. Friedman's column on Wednesday incorrectly suggested that the businessman Sheldon Adelson is Israeli. He is American."

Mr. Saban was born in Egypt and is an American citizen so in my view he is also owed a correction. The Times column as revised with the correction now reads, "The Washington Post said that last November at a conference of the Israel American Council, a lobbying group Adelson has funded, he joked in a public discussion with a wealthy Israeli: 'Why don't you and I go after The New York Times?'" That — "a wealthy Israeli" — is a weird way to refer to Mr. Saban, who may consider himself an Israeli-American, but is definitely an American, just as much as Mr. Adelson is.

In advance of the Israeli election, Thomas Friedman has a column up attacking Sheldon Adelson. One of Mr. Friedman's complaints is that Mr. Adelson invests in newspapers. From the column:

Israel has much stricter laws on individuals donating to political campaigns, so Adelson got around that in 2007 by founding a free, giveaway newspaper in Israel — Israel Hayom — whose sole purpose is to back Netanyahu, attack his enemies in politics and the media, and enforce a far-right political agenda to prevent any Israeli territorial compromise on the West Bank (which, in time, could undermine Israel as a Jewish democracy). Graphically attractive, Israel Hayom is now the biggest-circulation daily in Israel. Precisely because it is free, it is putting a heavy strain on competitors, like Yediot and Haaretz, which both charge and are not pro-Netanyahu.

Adelson then bought the most important newspaper of the religious-nationalist right in Israel, Makor Rishon, long considered the main backer of Netanyahu's biggest right-wing rival, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett. Last March, in an interview with Israel Army Radio after the Makor Rishon sale, Bennett said: "It saddens me. Israel Hayom is not a newspaper. It is Pravda. It's the mouthpiece of one person, the prime minister. At every junction point, every point of friction between the national interest and the interest of the prime minister, they chose the side of the prime minister."

The Washington Post said that last November at a conference of the Israel American Council, a lobbying group Adelson has funded, he joked in a public discussion with another wealthy Israeli: "Why don't you and I go after The New York Times?" Told it was family owned, Adelson quipped, "There is only one way to fight it: money."

The passage about Mr. Adelson joking "with another wealthy Israeli" is a strange one because neither Mr. Adelson nor the person he was joking with, Haim Saban, is an Israeli. They are Americans. Haim Saban doesn't get named by Mr. Friedman because his $15 million or so in disclosed federal political contributions have gone overwhelmingly to Democrats.

What's more, it's hypocritical of an employee of the New York Times, a newspaper controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, which uses it to promote all kinds of political and ideological agendas, both in the editorial columns and elsewhere, to fault Mr. Adelson for trying to do the same thing with his own newspapers in Israel. Does Mr. Friedman think that the Ochs-Sulzbergers are in it strictly as an economic business? If they were, they would have sold like the Graham, Bancroft, and Chandler families did at the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times. As an economic business, the New York Times company is failing — the stock price has gone from about $70 a share in 1998 to the current price of in the $13 range, and the dividend is insignificant. The reason Mr. Adelson can joke about buying it is that the New York Times company (Market capitalization, $2.3 billion) is worth a lot less than he is (Net worth, according to Forbes, $27.6 billion).

Mr. Friedman also doesn't mention that Haaretz, the competitor to Mr. Adelson's Israeli newspapers, is a business partner of the International New York Times.

A Times article about Aaron Kushner stepping down from his leadership role at Freedom Communications, publisher of the Orange County Register, reports:

John A. Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes supermarket chain, is considering making a bid for The Daily News in New York. There have been rumors that James L. Dolan, the billionaire owner of the New York Knicks, may also be interested.
They might look across the country for a cautionary tale. In 2012, Aaron Kushner paid about $50 million, plus the assumption of $110 million in pension obligations, for The Orange County Register, a venerable publication that was once among the most read newspapers in California.

First of all, "rumors" is a pretty low standard for the Times passing along news. Isn't the job of these reporters and editors to check out the rumors and find out if there is any factual basis for them before passing them along to the readers? Isn't that why we subscribers pay the money? If we just wanted rumors, we could read some other paper.

Second of all, the statement in the article that "Aaron Kushner paid about $50 million" for the Register is inaccurate. The buyer was a company called 2100 Trust, LLC, in which Mr. Kushner was only one of several owners.

A Style section article includes the following one-sentence paragraph:

The $22 corned beef Polo Bar sandwich may not be the towering meat cake familiar to lovers of New York deli but, true to its roots in a city that, as the 2014 documentary "Deli Man" points out, once had 1,550 registered kosher delicatessens, it is house-brined, served with melted Swiss cheese on marble rye and comes with a pickle and a side of coleslaw.

It is strange that "melted Swiss cheese" is cited as evidence that the Polo Bar corned beef sandwich is "true" to the roots of a city that "once had 1,550 registered kosher delicatessens." A true kosher deli wouldn't let swiss cheese anywhere near a corned beef sandwich — it would violate the provision of Jewish law that forbids mixing milk and meat.

Amid an otherwise pretty good column today, David Brooks writes, "reintroducing norms ... will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?"

This question, "are you living for yourself or for your children?" strikes me as a false dichotomy. The two aren't mutually exclusive, after all. What about people who don't have children? And for those who do have children, the idea of living exclusively for them, without doing anything for oneself, risks being a grim enough situation that it could turn one into a pretty grumpy parent. Anyway, maybe Mr. Brooks could explain what he means in a future column, because it wasn't entirely clear to this reader. No one is for parents who neglect their children entirely to focus solely on themselves, but that's a bit of a straw man — the real question for most parents is how to balance the children and other priorities.

An article in Sunday's Review section by two Times reporters, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, expresses skepticism about a nuclear deal with Iran, concluding, "If past is prologue, the West might once again find itself stonewalled." Flip a few pages, and a Times editorial, "Sabotaging a Deal With Iran," appears to have been written without taking into account the issues raised by the two reporters.

The lead front-page news article in today's Times begins:

WASHINGTON — In their first major test of governing this year, Republicans stumbled, faltered — and nearly shut down the Department of Homeland Security.
And that vote may have been the easy one.

So much for the idea that Republicans would get credit for not shutting down the Department of Homeland Security.

Imagine the coverage if the Republicans had shut down the Department of Homeland Security (which wouldn't have actually shut down anyway, because something like 85% of the workers are considered "essential.")

Or imagine if the Times covered Obama that way. The passage of ObamaCare would have been covered with an article that would have begun, "President Obama nearly lost the vote to pass his signature domestic initiative."

Or imagine if the Times covered sports that way. The Patriots Super Bowl victory would have been written up as "the Patriots nearly lost the Super Bowl."

It's actually a genuine innovation in news coverage — the idea of covering not what actually happened, but what "nearly" happened. The ability to choose between writing what actually happens and what "nearly" happened leaves the reporter free to pursue his or her chosen story line, regardless of reality.

The decision to crop George W. and Laura Bush out of a front-page New York Times photo of the Selma anniversary march is attracting some attention.

Update: The Times public editor tackles the issue and finds the photo wasn't cropped; rather, the Times staff photographer at the event didn't even bother to submit a photo that included President Bush, explaining, "Bush was in the bright sunlight. I did not even send this frame because it's very wide and super busy and Bush is super-overexposed because he was in the sun and Obama and the others are in the shade."

It was quite a day for anonymice.

The lead article in the Thursday Styles section, about the supposed news that Uber and Lyft have put a damper on the sex that used to take place in the backseats of New York City taxis, includes the following attributions:

a 28-year-old marketing manager in the tech industry named Suzanne, who asked that her surname not be used because, well, she's a marketing manager, not an adult-film star...

Stephanie, a 23-year-old publicist in Manhattan who asked that her last name not be published because of the damage it might do to her business

Chris, 31, an executive at a tech start-up who also requested that his last name not be used

Then the foreign section has an account of a stabbing attack on the American ambassador in South Korea:

"He sat at the head table and was exchanging name cards when a man approached the ambassador and toppled him and attacked him in the face with a knife," said one of the South Korean reporters at the scene, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his paper's regulations on giving information to other news organizations.

On this evidence, it does not look like public editor Margaret Sullivan's "AnonyWatch" campaign against the newspaper's over-use of anonymous sources is having much positive effect. If anything, her articles may be stiffening the newsroom's resolve to defend its license to grant anonymity.

It's actually hard to tell which is the New York Times staff editorial about Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech to Congress and which is the op-ed piece from the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, which may be one of the reasons that a new effort is under way to get Jewish groups to stop subsidizing this sort of thing by buying full-page advertisements in the Times.

The lead news article in Sunday's New York Times appeared under the headline, "G.O.P. Race Starts in Lavish Haunts of Rich Donors." It began:

PALM BEACH, Fla. — Instead of the corn dogs and pork chops on a stick ritually served up on the hustings of Iowa, the latest stop on the donor trail featured meals of diver scallops and chocolate mousse. The setting was the Breakers, a sprawling Italian Renaissance-inspired hotel here, where the cheapest available rooms fetched $800 a night. And for the half-dozen Republican presidential candidates invited to the annual winter meeting this weekend of the Club for Growth, an influential bloc of deep-pocketed conservatives, the prize was not votes. It was money.

There are at least two problems with this story.

The first is that one person I know who attended the meeting paid $532 for his room at the Breakers. There was a block rate for Club for Growth people that the Times doesn't mention.

The second is that the Times apparently only deems the room prices and cuisine at luxury hotels worthy of prominent mention when the hotels are hosting Republicans. Here's how the same Times reporter who wrote Sunday's story, Nicholas Confessore, handled a meeting in November 2014 of Democratic donors meeting at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, which is an expensive, fancy hotel. Headline: "Liberal Donors Looking Six Years Ahead." Beginning of article:

WASHINGTON — There was no ideological soul-searching, few recriminations aimed at political strategists, and little backbiting or assignment of blame.

Instead, the nation's leading club of liberal philanthropists and political donors, gathered in Washington for a four-day strategy session, appeared ready to shrug off the drubbing Democrats suffered in the midterm elections last week, instead laying plans for what they hoped would be a long-term resurgence of progressive ideas.

When it's the Democratic donors gathering, the hotel room prices and the fancy food aren't mentioned by the Times at all, let alone made the headline or the lead paragraph of a front-page Sunday story. It sure looks like a double standard.