From a book review by Times book critic Dwight Garner that the Times issued this week: "Kinky details are allowed to crawl in. Mr. Christgau says he masturbated when young to the Song of Solomon (the Bible book, not the Toni Morrison novel)."

It seems a bit hypocritical of Mr. Garner to criticize the book author, Robert Christgau, for allowing such details to crawl in, when Mr. Garner himself specializes in including them in his own reviews.

A post here back in September enumerated at least five previous instances in the past four years in which Mr. Garner wrote about masturbation. Smartertimes observed then:

Editors used to keep these matters out of the newspaper, but Mr. Garner seems to be making a kind of game of seeing how far he can push the limits, or showing that those limits that used to exist no longer apply at all, at least to him. Meanwhile, readers lose out, because lots of good and serious books about public policy matters are ignored by the Times daily review column. But books that include a mention or description of masturbation somehow get laudatory coverage from the book critic.

This most recent example brings the total to six instances in four years in which this one Times book critic tackled the topic of masturbation.

The headline at the top of the New York Times home page was "When the best sex is extramarital."

It leads to an article by "Lawrence Josephs, a psychotherapist in private practice in New York," that says at the bottom, "Details have been altered to protect patient privacy."

Which details have "been altered" and which are true? And where is the line between what is a "detail" and what is more significant than a detail? The Times doesn't provide readers any guidance on either front, and it doesn't even let us in on the question of whether any Times editors are in on the question of what is real and what is altered details.

Nor is there any exploration by the Times of whether Dr. Josephs' patients were aware that their lives, or the psychotherapy for which they or their insurance companies paid, might be used as fodder for salacious New York Times headlines, even with their privacy supposedly protected by "altered details." Is writing about patients like this, even with altered details, compliant with the privacy provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996? Did the patients consent in advance to having their stories told?

It's all a fine topic for some exploration by the public editor. Maybe she already covered it and I missed it. If so it would be nice to have a hyperlink from the "details have been altered" line.

Reason's Matt Welch does a really nice job of catching the New York Times fretting that Cuba's opening to the U.S. will increase income inequality in Cuba. (Link via Walter Olson.)

And a Times column by Ginia Bellafante about climate change somehow manages to make that story, too, about inequality:

the luxury glass towers proliferating in Manhattan would also do terribly — reaching just slightly above freezing by the fourth day. During a summer blackout, glass towers, because of the intensity with which glass conducts heat, would be rough places to live; indoor temperature would get into the high 80s and beyond by Day 3. (Of course, it is the ultimate science fiction to imagine that anyone living in a $50 million apartment with wall-to-wall views would be in New York in August in the first place.)

In both cold and hot conditions, the study found, a rowhouse would be the best place to be. Being attached to other houses limits its exposure and keeps it better insulated. During a winter blackout, the temperature in a townhouse would still be in the low 40s after a week. As if the Brooklyn brownstone needed more to make it a precious commodity, this should be reason enough. And what this all implies is that the poor are right to resent the affluent, but might feel sorry for the exceedingly rich.

Got that? "The poor are right to resent the affluent."

"As Dynasty's Son, Jeb Bush Used His Connections Freely," is the headline on a front-page news article in Sunday's Times. Now there's a story so scandalous and important that maybe the Times should have assigned it to be written by its own publisher, a guy named Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.

"Such coalition building made Obama the first urban president in more than a century," David Gergen, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, writes in a Times review of David Axelrod's book Believer: My Forty Years In Politics.

I can't figure out what Professor Gergen means. John Kennedy, for whom the school at which Mr. Gergen teaches is named, voted from a Boston apartment address and lived in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood. George H.W. Bush's residence was within the city of Houston, Texas, and when he was Reagan's vice president he lived in Washington, D.C. Do Boston, Houston, and Washington not count as "urban' in Professor Gergen's definition? If so, it sure is an idiosyncratic definition.

Today's New York Times carries a correction on Paul Krugman's previous column: " Paul Krugman's column on Monday incorrectly described bookmakers' odds that Greece will exit the eurozone. The odds were worse than even, not better than even."

It looks like today's Krugman column will also require a correction. He writes, "Jeb Bush appears to be getting his economic agenda, such as it is, from the George W. Bush Institute's 4% Growth Project. And the head of that project, Amity Shlaes, is a prominent 'inflation truther,' someone who claims that the government is greatly understating the true rate of inflation."

In fact Miss Shlaes has not been employed by the Bush Institute, much less the "head" of any project there, for at least some months.

A Times news article from Boston reports:

Most glaringly, the storms have exposed the vulnerabilities of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which operates the region's decrepit, fitful subways, buses and commuter rail lines. The underfunded system, which carries 1.3 million people a day and is $5.5 billion in debt, has been plagued in the last 17 days by breakdowns, fires, power losses, delays of two and three hours, and scenes of commuters having to disembark and pick their way along snow-covered tracks.

The Times reporters may be of the view that the MBTA is "underfunded," but your editor, a Massachusetts taxpayer and transit rider, disagrees. Unlike the Times, your editor will provide some evidence to support his opinion. One survey (see table 1-10) of transit spending in the 50 states found the state of Massachusetts spending $180.75 a year per person on transit — more than four times the national average, and more than any other state. The District of Columbia spends more per capita, but it isn't a state. Some might argue that the issue with the MBTA isn't that it is underfunded, but that it has a unionized workforce with better pension and benefit deals than lots of private-sector employees.

The voters of the commonwealth had a chance to voice their opinions on this issue in the recent election, and they rejected a gas tax increase to pay for transportation improvements.

Just because something isn't working well, it doesn't automatically follow that it is "underfunded." That's a left-wing misconception, which one could summarize as, "if something in government is broken, give it more money." It's a shame to see the Times news reporters fall into that trap.

As for the MBTA's $5.5 billion in debt, which the Times interprets as a sign of weakness, one might just as easily see it as a sign of strength — the MBTA's monopoly and pricing power are so deeply entrenched that the capital markets believe the agency has the capacity to repay that debt with interest over time with fare revenue. Apple has $36 billion in debt, according to Yahoo! Finance. Does that mean it is in five or six times as deep a hole as the MBTA? No, it just means that the company has enough revenue-generating power that people are willing to lend it money cheaply, so it takes the money and uses it.

For an example of bad journalism, check out this passage from the page one article by Amy Chozick in Sunday's Times about Hillary Clinton's economic policy:

Many of the advocates who knew Mrs. Clinton as a champion for the poor and working-class women felt betrayed in 1996 when, as first lady, she supported Mr. Clinton's overhaul of the welfare system, which gave states more power to remove people from welfare rolls and pledged to cut federal spending on assistance for the poor by nearly $55 billion over six years. She was more skeptical about the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Mr. Clinton signed into law in 1993 and which has also been accused of hurting American workers.

This is bad journalism for at least two reasons. First, there are no specifics about how Mrs. Clinton was "more skeptical" of Nafta than she was of welfare reform. What evidence is there of her skepticism? Did she privately oppose it? Publicly oppose it? Let it be known publicly after it passed that she privately opposed it? In her time as a senator and as Secretary of State, did she ever call for amending it or abrogating it? The Times doesn't say. (For some background, this New York Sun editorial, this New York Sun news article, and this ABC News blog item may be helpful.)

The second reason it is bad journalism is that the claim that Nafta "has also been accused of hurting American workers" is passed along without any skepticism or fact-checking or balance or scrutiny by the Times. Does the accusation have any merit? The Times seems not to care. Plenty of people would say that on a net basis, Nafta helped American workers by saving them money as consumers, improving their access to products made at lower cost in Mexico and Canada and lowering the tariffs on those imported items. Others would point out that the trade deal helped some American manufacturing and agricultural workers by opening Canadian and Mexican markets to American exports.

The Times Home and Garden section has an interview with an architect who designed a fancy chicken coop for a residence in the Hamptons. The architect says:

This may be the only chicken coop that has radiant floor heating. Usually they're lit, or warmed, by a light bulb. That's what happens when you have a good contractor who does high-end Hamptons homes. When the contractor brought up radiant floor heating, I thought, 'That's ridiculous.' But then I thought, 'That's a really good idea.' If the heating fails, you'd have a bunch of dead chickens in winter.

The Times doesn't challenge that claim. But two chicken farmers I know say that while some heat may be necessary to make sure the chickens' drinking water doesn't freeze, the chickens themselves don't need heat. They are birds, after all. The Times suspends its usual concern with global climate change and excessive energy consumption when it's an architect-designed chicken coop in the Hamptons that is being heated.

A New York Times business section article by Rachel Abrams about Lands' End reports, "If you bought an item from Lands' End recently, you probably did so in Sears. At the beginning of last year, 274 Lands' End shops were inside the retail giant, while Lands' End operated just 16 of its own stores."

This is inaccurate. In fact, if you bought an item from Lands' End recently, you probably did so not in a Sears, but from your computer at your home or office. This is especially true of New York Times readers, who are probably more likely to be Internet users and less likely to be Sears shoppers than the overall population. But it's true overall; according to a recent Land's End SEC filing, "Online sales represented approximately 80% of our U.S. consumer revenue in 2013, up from approximately 20% in 2002."

Disclosure: I own shares of Sears Holdings, the parent company of Sears.

That is quite an editor's note that Joe Nocera's column about Sheldon Silver was saddled with, with the note asserting that the column "was premised on several factual errors." This comes less than a year after a Times public editor column took Mr. Nocera to task for another column about which Warren Buffett said "the whole column is based on an incorrect fact — one that could have been easily checked, but wasn't."

The New York Sun has a characteristically shrewd editorial pointing out further that the Times "editor's note" compounds the error by reporting inaccurately that Mr. Silver has been indicted, when in fact that has not happened.

"Just Kids" is the headline on a New York Times "T" magazine photo spread featuring a model on her back on a half-bare mattress on the floor. The text with the picture asserts that "virginal white lace paired with leather and suede evokes the sexy decadence..." The clothing on the model — a $7,900 Tom Ford jacket and $5,500 skirt, and a $1,725 Givenchy bodysuit — costs $15,125, which seems like a lot of money for "kids," even those attempting to evoke sexy decadence. The Times photo shoot seems to have involved not only a model, a photographer, and a stylist but also a hairdresser, a makeup artist, a manicurist, three photographer's assistants, a stylist's assistant, and a hair assistant, or a total of at least 11 people, all of whom are credited by name in the Times.

At a moment when the Times is trimming its news staff, the whole enterprise seems like an exercise in excess. And if, say, a Republican politician, a Wall Street bank, or a college fraternity were to devote these sorts of resources to producing elaborate photographs of "virginal," "sexy" "kids" splayed on half-bare mattresses, Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd, and a passel of New York Times investigative journalists would be all over them with condemnatory coverage faster than you could remove a $1,725 Givenchy bodysuit. I understand, I suppose, the imperative to produce editorial content friendly to luxury fashion advertising that pays for the news in the rest of the paper. But at a certain point — at this point — one begins to wonder if there is any adult supervision.

A screengrab from the New York Times web site: All the News Fit to Print?

You'd think that given Times CEO Mark Thompson's experience leading the British Broadcasting Corp. through a child sexual abuse scandal, he'd maybe want to be a little more sensitive to, and less cavalier about, this sort of thing.

The Times writes up an effort by some Stanford students to use a federal law to gain access to their college admissions files as if it's some kind of new thing, without mentioning that Harvard students figured this out back in the early 1990s.

"Scholars at Odds on Ukraine" is the headline over a New York Times article that begins:

Since the crisis in Ukraine began, the Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen has cast himself in the role of the unbowed dissenter, whose sharp criticisms of America's foreign policy in the region have earned him denunciations as "Putin's American toady," as The New Republic put it, and worse.

But Mr. Cohen is also a man of means, whose wife's charitable foundation has donated large amounts of money to support Russian studies, which have been hard hit by declining government funding.

The Times doesn't explain the source of Mr. Cohen's means. His wife is the editor and publisher of The Nation mgazine, Katrina vanden Heuvel. Wikipedia says she is the granddaughter of Jules C. Stein, the founder of the movie company MCA. She's also a big advocate of the estate tax. Probably one of the best arguments for the estate tax is that it would prevent people like Ms. Vanden Heuvel from using her grandfather's money to promote her husband's blame-America-first view of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But I am a big believer in private property rights and in the idea that, as a general matter and on a net basis, families are better allocators of capital than the politicians in Washington are. So notwithstanding the Stein-vanden Heuvel-Cohen clan's best efforts to make the case for the estate tax with their own actions, I'm going to stick with my view of it and chalk them up as exceptions that prove the rule.

One reader observed that the following news article, which appears under the headline, "Experts See Signs of Moderation Despite Houthis' Harsh Slogans," may be "the New York Timesiest thing ever written":

AMMAN, Jordan — At first glance the official slogan and emblem of the Houthis, who are now the dominant force in Yemen, does not offer much hope to American policy makers.

It includes the words "Death to America, death to Israel, damnation to the Jews." Houthis shout it when they march, wear it on arm patches, paint it on buildings and stick it onto their car windows. When pictured, those words are rendered in red, framed by "God is great" and "Victory to Islam" in green, on a white background.

Sometimes the red words are shown dripping blood.

But for all their harsh sloganeering, the Houthis may be a lot more moderate than it suggests, according to many diplomats and analysts...

It's also a great example of the way "experts" is New York Times code for "people Times journalists agree with."