Is it just me or is the New York Times turning into a parody of itself in respect of its coverage of Israel primarily as a source of guilt/anxiety/embarrassment for liberal Jews who don't live there?

The Sunday New York Times featured a long article along these lines in the magazine section ("The entire year 5774, in fact, was a trying one for Zemel and other liberal Zionists, who increasingly find themselves torn between their liberalism and Zionism and stranded in the disappearing middle between the extremes of a polarized American Jewish community. Micah's liberal Zionists remained wedded to a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians and estranged from the policies of a right-wing Israeli government, along with the reflexive Israel-can-do-no-wrong sentiment on Capitol Hill....") along with a long article along these lines on the front of the Sunday Review section by Roger Cohen ("Tolerance is under attack as a wave of Israeli nationalism unfurls and settlements grow in the West Bank. This virulent, Jews-first thinking led recently to a bill known as the nationality law that would rescind Arabic's status as an official language — and proved a catalyst to the breakup of Netanyahu's government. It also finds expression in the abuse hurled at anyone, including the Israeli president, Reuven Rivlin, who speaks up for Arab rights...".

One of these articles would be enough, but perhaps as a consequence of a Times that is so large that the magazine editors and the Sunday Review editors don't know what each other is up to, Times readers are saddled with both stories in one Sunday newspaper. It's overkill.

This site spends a lot of time criticizing the Times, but we also try to notice when the newspaper performs well. Two recent examples of enterprising journalism that received front-page play in the Times despite running against the paper's ideological predilictions are: 1) A scathing and long profile of Norman Seabrook, the president of the union that represents New York City prison guards, and his influence with Mayor de Blasio, exposing public-sector unionism at its worse and 2) an article about how, as the Times put it, "The Obama administration overturned a ban preventing a wealthy, politically connected Ecuadorean woman from entering the United States after her family gave tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic campaigns, according to finance records and government officials."

For all the Times's many flaws that we often dwell on here, it says something impressive about the newspaper that it publishes some of the best investigative reporting on Democratic corruption. Now, one could argue that each of these articles also subtly advances a left-wing agenda — against abuse of prison inmates, in the case of the Norman Seabrook article, or in favor of campaign finance reform, in the case of the article about the Ecuadorean woman. But both articles seem to me to be not driven primarily by those ideologies but rather by a broader sense that government should be impartial and accountable to the public rather than captured by powerful private interests. Anyway, have a look at them, if you are so inclined, and let me know in the comments if I am being too charitable to the Times (always a risk) or if I am correct that these two stories are examples of Times excellence.

An article in today's Times by David Streitfeld is critical of Amazon.com for charging prices on books that Mr. Streitfeld says are too high.

This strikes me as a bizarre criticism. Mr. Streitfield describes Amazon's prices as "less than compelling." As an example, he writes that on Amazon, "The standard biography of Mr. Dick was discounted 15 percent." Absent from the article was a comparison of what the book was selling for on other sites. My check showed the Amazon price for that book was lower than the price at barnesandnoble.com (which had a 14% discount) and lower that the price at Powells.com, which had no discount at all.

Amazon seems to get criticized no matter what it charges for books. If it offers deep discounts, it is accused of eliminating the ability for authors and publishers to make money, or of predatory pricing to build market share and drive competitors out of business. If it offers discounts that are less deep (but still deeper than competing online booksellers), it gets criticized for charging consumers too much money.

I'm waiting for the long Times article describing the newspaper's new $925.60 annual home delivery rate as "less than compelling." But it seems like the paper would rather spend its space beating up on Amazon.

From a letter in my morning paper: "Effective January 5, 2015, there will be an increase in the price of home delivery of The New York Times. The new weekly rates are shown below, and represent just 40 cents to 90 cents more per week, depending on which days of the week you receive service." The seven-day rate goes up to $17.80, which, at 52 weeks a year, is $925.60.

"Bureaucrats are throttling businesses that are doing particularly well and forcing them to become joint ventures with the state. The underlying message seems to be: We want prosperity but not overly prosperous individuals." — From a Times editorial, "Cuba's Economy at a Crossroads," that appears to disapprove of this approach.

"I have spent a great deal of time talking about the food movement and its potential, because to truly change the food system you really have to change just about everything: good nutrition stems from access to good food; access to good food isn't going to happen without economic justice; that isn't going to happen without taxing the superrich; and so on....Increasingly, it seems, there's an appetite and even unity to take on the billionaire class. Let's recognize that if we are seeing positive change now, it's in part because elected officials respond to pressure, and let's remember that that pressure must be maintained no matter who is in office." — From a Sunday op-ed by Times "contributing op-ed writer" Mark Bittman.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it sure looks as if the economic approach that the Times editorial opposes in Cuba is the same one that its columnist Mr. Bittman is proposing here in America.

A front page New York Times article headlined "Israel Struggles With Its Identity" includes this passage:

Few would dispute that, say, France can be both a French homeland and a democracy with non-French citizens, but Israel is a different case, not least because its Arab and Druse minorities are indigenous, not immigrant.

There are so many false assumptions packed into that single sentence that it's hard to unpack, but for starters, recall that the Franks themselves, as one website puts it, "were actually a Germanic people who decided to conquer the Gallic territory from the East." Israel's Druze came from Syria and Lebanon, while there's a plausible story that says the Palestinian Arabs are related somehow to the Philistines who came from the Greek Islands at roughly the same time that the children of Israel made their Exodus from Egypt and return to Canaan. In other words, categorizing some people as "indigenous" and others as "immigrant" is a dangerous and selective game. It's not clear why the Times would label Arabs and Druze as "indigenous" to Israel and imply at the same time that the Jews, on the other hand, are immigrants.

Update: G.L. adds:

1) Mainland (aka "Metropolitan") France has indigenous minorities such as the Bretons and the Basques -- not to mention people in Alsace from German stock. France also still rules various territories it colonized, such as:

• Tahiti with its indigenous Polynesian population;
• The Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, populated mainly by descendents of African slaves;
• French Giuana in South America, with many indigenous Indians and descendents of African slaves;
• Mayotte and Réunion Islands in Africa, with a mainly indigenous population.

2) I think in illustrating the problems in defining indigenous vs immigrant in Israel, The Philistine-Palestinian connection is the least plausible example. Much more glaring is the Arabians conquering, occupying and the land and forcibly converting much of the population in the 7th century, and the well-documented waves of Arab immigration in the 20th century from Syria, Egypt and elsewhere, drawn in by the jobs created by the expanding Jewish population. That is why UNRWA has as its very unique definition of a "refugee" as "persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948," because so many Arabs were newcomers or migrants.

With its advertising and subscription revenue insufficient to support its news staff and still provide an acceptable return on capital to shareholders, the Times is turning to new areas of business, including organizing trips for tourists. A "Times Journey" to Iran guided by a Times journalist was the topic of a report here last month that attracted a lot of attention.

Now the Times has added Communist Cuba to the list of destinations of its "Times Journeys." For the sum of $6,495, you too can enjoy nine days and eight nights on a trip that the Times says is "permitted by a special People-to-People license for The New York Times from the Department of Treasury's Foreign Assets Control."

The itinerary includes a meeting with the U.S. government's interests section in Havana, but no visit to Cuban prisons such as the one in which the American Alan Gross is being held for the "crime" of bringing communications equipment into Cuba.

Readers of the extraordinary recent series of editorials about Cuba in the Times — including one calling on the United States government to make it harder for Cuban doctors to immigrate to America — are entitled to wonder whether the editorials had anything to do with the Cuban government's willingness to work with the Times on the trip. The trip raises revenue for both the Times and Cuba's Communist government: two aging, family-run socialist institutions trying with limited success to update their operations for modern times.

The author Matthew Goodman flags a Times travel article from Richmond. The Times reports:

For decades, the 18th-century Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond, Va., has been a don't-go-after-dark spot. One of the city's oldest residential enclaves, its historic townhouses, gas lamps and St. John's Church — where Patrick Henry proclaimed "Give me liberty" — have long been tended to by a small band of passionate preservationists in an area of encroaching crime and poverty. But undervalued real estate and unparalleled views of downtown and the James River have increasingly drawn a fiercely loyal, self-starter set of residents. These days, Church Hill has some of the city's most appealing shops and dining spots.

One wonders how it can be a "residential enclave" if it is also a "don't-go-after-dark spot." Mr. Goodman wonders who was being warned not to go there after dark. Times readers? People who don't live there or who aren't "passionate preservationists"? Is there an unspoken racial or class dimension to it? It's one thing to say that a neighborhood is poor or high-crime, another thing to say it's "a don't-go-after-dark-spot" when there are actual human beings — maybe not in the Times target demographic, but still — who live there.

Reviewing Harvard's new art museum, Times art critic Holland Carter writes, "enough 'classical' touches have been retained to suit a school that has always been conservative and tradition bound at its cultural core."

Mr. Carter may be right on some level in his assessment, but it depends on where you sit. Plenty of conservatives, looking at Harvard, probably see it not as "conservative and tradition bound" but rather as a liberal institution whose law school has recently given us Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama. With its description of Harvard, the Times lets us know where it sits.

Times journalist Lydia Polgreen announced on Twitter that she is "starting a new gig, leading a team that will explore publishing the New York Times in languages other than English."

Good luck with that. Dow Jones just announced it was discontinuing its local-language websites in Germany and Turkey and its Turkish-language newswire, though it does produce Spanish-language content. The Times did publish a Spanish-language version of its recent editorial calling on America to restrict the immigration of Cuban doctors, and it published a Chinese-language version of its recent editorial about the visa issues facing Times journalists in China.

More broadly, the announcement made me think of the joke, sometimes attributed to Molly Ivins, about Patrick Buchanan's speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention, that it probably sounded better in the original German. In what language, exactly, does the Times think there is a larger audience for its content? Arabic? Farsi? Russian? French? Yiddish? Anyway, it's an interesting development — you have a newspaper company funded by a Mexican billionaire (Carlos Slim) and led by an Oxford-educated British former BBC executive (CEO Mark Thompson) — trying to grow by appealing to non-American audiences, or at least non-English-speaking ones. At best the Times could bring American values of transparency (don't tell Jonathan Gruber) and freedom to the rest of the world; at worst the Times could further erode whatever residual pro-American patriotic values it has by changing its content to try to make it appeal to non-American audiences.

Back in August of 2013, a front-page Times article about Palestinian Arab children who throw rocks at Israelis explained: "They throw because there is little else to do in Beit Ommar — no pool or cinema, no music lessons after school, no part-time jobs other than peddling produce along the road."

Today's Times carries a fascinating dispatch from Paris about two Frenchmen, Michael Dos Santos and Maxime Hauchard, who converted to Islam, joined the Islamic State, and appeared as ISIS members in the latest beheading video:

On Monday, news reports quoted friends describing Mr. Hauchard as gentle, joyful and a regular mosquegoer. "He was never rebellious," Philippe Vanheule, the mayor of Bosc-Roger-en-Roumois, told Le Monde.

Mr. Vanheule denied that his town was fertile ground for would-be jihadists. "We have basketball, karaoke, judo, dance," Mr. Vanheule said. "I don't think that we have a lost youth here."

Call it the "midnight basketball" theory of terrorism — the idea that youths resort to violence as a result of a lack of government-subsidized organized youth activities. It was the assumption that underlay the 2013 Times dispatch from Beit Ommar, but it falls apart under the truth of the 2014 Times dispatch from Paris, unless one thinks that French youths are somehow inherently more bent on terrorism than Palestinian Arab ones are, and less susceptible to distraction by less harmful diversions. Today's dispatch from Paris is useful in part because it shows the 2013 dispatch from Beit Ommar for what it is — not a factual report on why Palestinian children throw rocks, but a reporter's theory, untested against a counterfactual alternative.

David Brooks uses the term "Gruberism" — defined as "the belief that everybody else is slightly dumber and less well-motivated than oneself and, therefore, politics is more about manipulation than conversation" — in his column today. I used the same term yesterday at FutureOfCapitalism.com. It's a pretty good column as Brooks columns go, but it is marred by a puzzling sentence toward the beginning: "President Obama has racked up some impressive foreign-policy accomplishments, but, domestically and politically, things are off the rails."

Max Boot flagged that sentence for me. Mr. Brooks doesn't enumerate any of these "impressive foreign-policy accomplishments," and I must say I follow foreign-policy news pretty closely and am hard pressed to come up with much of a list. The "reset" of relations with Russia? The ouster of President Assad? The defeat of the Islamic State? The peace between Israel and the Palestinians? The defense of democracy in Hong Kong? It would make a fine follow up column for Mr. Brooks.

You've got to see it to believe it, really, but while the rest of the left is, with perhaps some reason, cheering on President Obama's campaign to make America more immigrant-friendly (as is the Times in a couple of news articles), the Times devotes its lead editorial today to a group of immigrants it wants to keep out of America — doctors trying to flee Communist Cuba.To hear the Times tell it, America is too welcoming to these physician-refugees, and our government should make it more difficult for the Cuban doctors to come here.

The idea that the choice of whether to stay in Cuba or come to America should be left to the doctors, rather than than to the Times, seems hard for the newspaper to stomach. At one point the newspaper does allow that "Many medical professionals, like a growing number of Cubans, will continue to want to move to the United States in search of new opportunities, and they have every right to do so. But inviting them to defect while on overseas tours is going too far." How would they have a "right to do so" when the Times wants to shut down the American program that allows them to do so? Maybe the Times is afraid these Cuban-immigrant American doctors will become Republican voters?

For a lovely example of internal New York Times gotcha politics playing out in a way that puts a low priority on readers' interests, consider the following correction from today's New York Times:

A correction in this space on Wednesday for an article on Nov. 8 about efforts by Japan and China to step back from a longstanding dispute over islands in the East China Sea omitted the source of the error — that Japan had controlled the islands since World War II. (It has held them for most years since the 1880s.) The error was made during the editing process, not by the reporter, Jane Perlez.

Does the Times really think readers care whether an error was the fault of a reporter or an editor? What matters is that the newspaper and its staff, working as a team, get the facts right. If the Times is keeping track of the blame for internal quality control or bonus purposes, that's fine, but why burden the readers with the details? I'm all for transparency, usually, but this correction is a kind of pseudo-transparency. It names the reporter who is not to blame for the error, but it doesn't name the editor who was to blame, either for the original error or for the compounding second error of failing to mention in the initial correction that it wasn't the reporter's fault. Instead we are told when the error occurred — "during the editing process" — but not who the editor was who committed it. Why not just write, "the error was made by an editor," instead of "during the editing process"?

It's generally good practice to prevent these sorts of errors by requiring the reporters to see and sign off on any editing changes, which makes all errors the responsibility of both the editor and the reporter, regardless of who was "the source of the error." It may be that in some cases with overseas reporters time differences or communications difficulties make such consultation difficult or impossible. But in most cases it is possible, and sometimes the reporter will catch an error that an editor inserted. The point is, putting out a newspaper is a collaboration between editors and reporters, whereas this correction is phrased in such a way as to suggest that it is a blame game.

Toward the bottom of a front-page New York Times article about the New York Philharmonic Orchestra's plan to rename Avery Fisher Hall comes this:

An architect for the new hall has yet to be selected. Although the Philharmonic board voted in 2005 to proceed with a design by the British architect Norman Foster, the thinking has evolved since then, and the orchestra is starting over.

This Times article doesn't mention it, but some readers may remember a dispatch back in May about the New York Public Library's decision to abandon a plan for a major renovation of its flagship building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd St.:

This shift is something of a defeat for the library, which had already paid the British architect Norman Foster $9 million in private funds for his firm's work on the plan for the flagship, a 1911 Beaux-Arts landmark.

It'd be a fine moment for either the Times architecture critic or the reporter who wrote both the articles linked above, Robin Pogrebin, or maybe even some harder-hitting investigative types from the metro desk, to take a look at how The Right Honourable Lord Foster of Thames Bank and Chilmark manages to induce these New York nonprofit boards into paying him grand fees for work that they later determine is either impossible or undesirable actually to complete. It is an opportunity for some of the "accountability journalism" upon which the Times prides itself.