David Brooks has been writing some fine columns lately, but today he writes about something that I know quite a bit about — the American Revolution — and he stumbles. He writes:

This leadership crisis is eminently solvable. First, we need to get over the childish notion that we don't need a responsible leadership class, that power can be wielded directly by the people. America was governed best when it was governed by a porous, self-conscious and responsible elite — during the American revolution, for example, or during and after World War II. Karl Marx and Ted Cruz may believe that power can be wielded directly by the masses, but this has almost never happened historically.

I don't buy the idea that America "was governed best" by an "elite" "during the American revolution." First of all, the government, such as it was, during the Revolution was so weak — the Continental Congress and the Articles of Confederation — that the whole system had to be overhauled and replaced, after the Revolution, with the system set up by the Constitution. It is easy to idealize in retrospect, but at the time people were well aware of its faults. Second, the "elite" during the revolution were the loyalists and the colonial governors. John Hancock and George Washington were to some degree exceptions. There were plenty of instances during the Revolution and the lead-up to it of power being wielded directly by the people against the elite. Think of the Boston mob attacking Governor Hutchinson's house, for example. Third, this dichotomy between "the masses" and the "elite" or a "leadership class," even a "porous" one, is a false one. Into which category would Mr. Brooks place Paul Revere? Ben Franklin? Bill Clinton?

When the New York Times reported on the cancer surgery of its executive editor, Dean Baquet, the newspaper told readers that Mr. Baquet "had a malignant tumor removed from his kidney." It quoted Mr. Baquet describing the procedure as "minimally invasive."

Now Women's Wear Daily, in a feature article about Mr. Baquet, reports that the surgical procedure, at Lenox Hill Hospital (a detail the Times omitted) was to "remove the kidney altogether."

If the WWD account is correct, it suggests the Times gave readers an incorrect account of Mr. Baquet's operation. I suppose the malignant tumor could have been removed from the kidney once both the kidney and the tumor were outside of Mr. Baquet's body, but describing that procedure to Times readers simply as having a malignant tumor removed from the kidney would seem to me to be a little too clever. It would be nice, if the Times thought the procedure was newsworthy in the first place, to have this matter cleared up for readers in the columns of the Times itself. Maybe Mr. Baquet can post a first-person account of his medical care the same way that his predecessor Jill Abramson did.

The Times reports that Harvard University Press's Loeb Classical Library is going digital "on a fee basis."

What's the fee? The Times article doesn't say, though the HUP web site says pricing is "tiered by size of institution," and that the set is available to individuals for a fee of $195 for the first year and $65 "for subsequent consecutive years."

While the Times doesn't report the pricing, it does devote two sentences to the news that:

The 1914 edition of Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars, for example, declined to translate some of the bawdier passages, instead presenting the Latin text on both pages, in deference to the anti-obscenity laws of the time. Harvard University Press confirmed that the digital edition, like the current print edition, includes full translations of the dirty bits.

This may seem like a small point, but it's actually pretty telling. The Times coverage is directed not at people who might actually consider buying and reading the books, but at those who want to skim through it in search of "the dirty bits."

Joe Nocera has a column about the Home Depot customer data breach that is worth noticing for at least two reasons.

First, he engages in what Times public editor Margaret Sullivan has called, in other instances, "anonymous outsourcing," borrowing another news organization's anonymously sourced material and passing it along to Times readers without independently assessing the veracity of the sources. Mr. Nocera writes:

Bloomberg Businessweek found two unnamed former Home Depot managers who claimed that they were told to "settle for 'C-level security' because ambitious upgrades would be costly and might disrupt the operation of critical business systems."

There's no hyperlink to the Bloomberg Businessweek story from the Nocera column. For all we know, the former managers are disgruntled for some other reason. It's difficult to get Home Depot's response to their story without knowing who the former managers are or where they worked.

Second, the column's policy conclusion made me laugh. Mr. Nocera writes, in all apparent earnestness:

the federal government needs to get involved. With the banks and retailers at loggerheads, only the government has the ability to force a solution — or at least make it painful enough for companies with lax security to improve.

The federal government — the ones who gave us Edward Snowden and Bradley/Chelsea Manning and the Wikileaks cables published by Julian Assange and just about every other government confidential secret that shows up on in the New York Times — they're supposed to be the ones who can "force a solution" to the problem of private sector data security? Come on. The only way this might work is if the Federal Government brings Lois Lerner and the IRS into Home Depot to advise them on how to lose data so completely that not even hackers can recover it.

Reader-contributor-watchdog-content co-creator-participant-community member Arul Louis writes:

A New York Times Op-Talk published Sept. 14 claims to quote remarks "last week" by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a correspondent for the Indian newspaper, The Hindu," and the NYT uses it to criticize him over climate change.

However, the link from the NYT Op-Talk by Jack Flanagin to The Hindu article is in fact a report on Modi's meeting with Japanese students on Sept. 2 during a visit to Japan.

The Guardian made the same error calling it an "interview with The Hindu a few days earlier." Elsewhere in the Op-Talk Flanagin quotes The Guardian article, but not for this erroneous claim about Modi talking to The Hindu reporter.

Moreover, the full quote from The Hindu story hardly makes Modi an environmentl skeptic; in fact he mentioned Al Gore's book, "An Inconvenient Truth" and speaks out against "exploiting nature." Here are the relevant portions of Amit Barua's story in The Hindu (to which the NYT article linked):

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/committed-to-nonviolence-modi-on-nuclear-treaty/article6372140.ece

On climate change, the Prime Minister said exploitation of nature was a crime. "At best, you have the right to milk nature. You can milk a cow, but you can't kill the cow."

"Climate change? Is this terminology correct? The reality is this that in our family, some people are old... They say this time the weather is colder. And, people's ability to bear cold becomes less.

"We should also ask is this climate change or have we changed. We have battled against nature. That is why we should live with nature rather than battle it," he said.

The Prime Minister commended a book written by him on climate change called "Convenient Action" while pointing out that former US Vice-President Al Gore's book was entitled "An Inconvenient Truth". The Prime Minister said his book was available online.

Here is the relevant part of NYT OP TALK:

In a Season of Deadly Rains in India, Does the New Prime Minister Believe in Climate Change?

By Jack Flanagin

In a Season of Deadly Rains in India, Does the New Prime Minister Believe in Climate Change?

Excerpt:

... Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will reportedly skip the United Nations climate summit scheduled for later this month in New York City, causing many to speculate as to whether the newly elected leader harbors skepticism about the science behind climate change. Recent remarks, bafflingly self-contradictory and weirdly flippant, have not soothed these concerns.

"Climate change? Is this terminology correct?" Mr. Modi asked The Hindu's Amit Baruah last week. "The reality is that in our family, some people are old. They say this time the weather is colder. And people's ability to bear cold becomes less."

The relevant part of The Guardian article:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/09/narendra-modi-india-prime-minister-climate-change-sceptic

Modi was also vague on global warming and its causes in an interview with The Hindu a few days earlier.

"Climate change? Is this terminology correct? The reality is this that in our family, some people are old ... They say this time the weather is colder. And, people's ability to bear cold becomes less," he said.

A sports column by Richard Sandomir carries the following passage:

Last Thursday, when James Brown delivered an eloquent call to action on domestic violence before the debut of CBS's "Thursday Night Football," he was using his personal link to the issue. Through the Verizon Foundation, he has worked on domestic violence, sitting in on a crisis hotline in Austin, Tex.; talking to high school and college football coaches to help change their — and their players' — attitudes toward women; and interviewing domestic violence victims for public service announcements.

"I sat there in Austin, next to the counselors, listening to the calls," he said in a telephone interview on Monday. "It touched my heart, and it was so painful to listening to the panic in these ladies' voices that I had to take the headset off, go to a window, turn my back and shed tears."

He said that one victim he interviewed had been shot five times by her husband, a church deacon, and left for dead on the kitchen floor of their home.

Think about the layers that separate Times readers from the truth or facts of that last anecdote. The church deacon is not named. The victim is not named. The victim told James Brown about it, who told the Times reporter about it, who is now telling Times readers about it. If the husband had been an atheist or a secular humanist, do you think the Times would have mentioned it?

If a church deacon shot his wife five times and left her for dead, maybe it's the sort of crime so sensational and horrible that the Times should cover when it happens as a news story, with actual reporting on the criminal justice proceedings involved, rather than handling it with second-hand accounts passed along by football announcers.

An article in Sunday's Times explains helpfully, "Not all fashion designers are gay; however, a large proportion are, and a fair number of their customers are, too."

News you can use.

A dispatch from Gaza City about an apartment building destroyed in this summer's war could have used a more careful edit.

The article reports: "Atef Adwan, one of 28 Hamas lawmakers elected in 2006, bought a first-floor apartment five years ago for his second wife, and spent much of the summer there with her and their two young sons, fearing the Israelis would target his home in the border town of Beit Hanoun."

The phrase "his second wife" raises more questions than it answers. Does Mr. Adwan have two wives at the same time? Or is the apartment for his sole current wife, in which case, why does the Times feel the need to mention that he had a prior marriage?

Then there is a reference to "Owda J. Abu Mathkour, the wealthy mogul who runs the Zafer contracting company." Isn't "wealthy mogul" redundant? Call the squad squad, as William Safire used to say.

Finally, there is this passage: "Ahad and Rihad Ibrahim, a young couple with a 5-year-old son and an 8-month old daughter, paid $50,00 for a seventh-floor unit June 25." Does the Times mean "$5,000"? Or "$50,000"? Or "$50.00"? Either of those three notations would mean something clear in American English. But the way the Times has it, readers are left wondering how much money was involved.

A Times review of a movie, "The Green Prince," about a friendship between a Mossad officer and the son of a Hamas leader, reports, "It was released in Israel this spring, as the latest American effort to put together a regional peace plan was falling apart, and is coming out here after a summer-long conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza that left more than 2,000 dead and thousands more wounded or homeless."

Describing the summer-long conflict as "between Israel and Hamas in Gaza" inaccurately suggests that the conflict was confined to Gaza. In fact, it also affected parts of Israel, as reporting elsewhere in the Times has made clear. An editor should have deleted the words "in Gaza."

The lead news article on the front page of the Times is a dispatch from Youngstown, Ohio, about a statewide economic boom.

The article reports: "Ohio's unemployment rate in July was 5.7 percent, well below the national average of 6.1 percent." Reader-contributor-watchdog-participant-content co-creator-community member Colin points out that while 5.7 percent is below 6.1 percent, whether it is "well below" is a questionable judgment call. The Times could have avoided it by simply writing, "Ohio's employment rate in July was 5.7 percent; the rate for the nation as a whole was 6.1 percent." Or something like that. Times readers, most of them, are intelligent enough to know that 5.7 is less than 6.1 without the Times explaining it to them.

The article goes on: "Kravitz Delicatessen in the nearby suburb of Liberty has a Vallourec sandwich on the menu (corned beef and pastrami with Swiss cheese and coleslaw), a testament to how much business the 75-year-old Jewish-style deli draws from green-vested Vallourec workers, and from catering corporate events." The meat and cheese together is a combination that may make readers question whether the descriptor "Jewish-style" is accurate or necessary to apply to the deli.

Finally, the most glaring thing of all is that the Times manages to write a top-of-the-front page news article about the Ohio economic boom without mentioning, even once in the article, the governor who presided over the boom, John Kasich, who is a Republican. It's omissions like that that cause readers to wonder whether the Times has a partisan bias.

Times book critic Dwight Garner was last seen here back in April likening religion to masturbation. I noted then:

Mr. Garner manages to slip a masturbation reference into the Times about once a year. In November of 2013 he reported that the artist Lucian Freud "could imitate a whale masturbating." In 2011 he reported what he described as "the startling information that Marvin Gaye 'masturbated at length' before performing the vocal takes on his 'What's Going On' album."

It turns out I was wrong about the 'about once a year" part. It's closer to twice a year. The latest example is this passage, from Mr. Garner's recent Times review of the novel 10:04 by Ben Lerner:

A scene in which the protagonist masturbates into an in vitro fertilization vial at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is a small comic masterpiece of wayward post-"Portnoy's Complaint" onanism.

Then there is this from Mr. Garner's September 2013 Times review of a memoir by a professional football player: "you will learn more in this book about N.F.L. player's hotel-room masturbation practices than you will soon be able to forget."

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.

A Times news article about the sale "last December" of a Manhattan building that was the site of a murder in 1857 concludes as follows:

"I think if one could do an accurate history of every building in New York, it probably was the scene of a murder at some point or another," said Leonard Steinberg, the president of Urban Compass, a real estate brokerage firm. "For some there is a stigma to this and for many it is considered a point of interest and fascination."

"I bet we all live on land in New York where mass murders of Indians took place," he added.

It's not clear why the Times would choose to pass along such unfounded accusations. There are about 1 million buildings in New York City, according to the City's Department of Finance, which taxes them. The record high year for recorded homicides in the city was 1991, when there were 2,245. But that year was an exception — more recently the number has been in the range of 300 to 500 a year. At 1,000 homicides a year, the city would have to exist for 1,000 years, with homicides distributed equally geographically (which they are not) for there to be a homicide in "every building in New York."

As for "mass murders of Indians," in whose blood the city's soil is supposedly drenched from the Bronx to the Battery, as horrible as the story of the treatment of Native Americans is, there's no evidence of which I am aware that there were "mass murders" of them in New York City. For the Times to pass along the accusation doesn't help anyone understand history any better, and might well confuse the issue.

A Times dispatch from East Hampton about a surfing rabbi includes the following passage:

Marilyn Milanaik, a member of the Hampton Synagogue, the only Orthodox congregation in the area, looked to the Torah for guidance. "It says in the Torah that children must know how to swim. It's a paraphrase for knowing how to save your own life," she said.

The passage is inaccurate in at least two respects. First, there's another Orthodox synagogue out there, Chabad Lubavitch of the Hamptons. Second, it doesn't say in the Torah that children must know how to swim. The passage that Ms. Milanaik is reaching for is almost certainly not from the Torah, but from the Talmud, Kiddushin 29a, which says that a father much teach his son Torah, teach him a craft or a trade, "and there are some who say he must also teach him how to swim." It's the Talmud not the Torah, and it's not "children must know how to swim," but just reporting an additional opinion: "there are some who say he must also teach him how to swim."

Update: A reader-watchdog-community member-content co-creator-participant points out that the Talmud is also known as the oral Torah, so that may be why Ms. Milanaik used the word Torah. But it's still a leap over the distinction from "there are some who say" to "it says...that children must."

The Times Sunday metro section carries a left-wing column that goes unbalanced by any right-wing column. The latest column complains about helicopter noise in the Hamptons:

"Quality of life truly is being diminished for commercial greed and the convenience of the same people who burned the economy," a longtime Shelter Island summer resident said to me.

"When I look up at small planes and choppers I see a fleet of middle fingers across the sky."

If Shelter Island residents are as angry about the air traffic as the Times columnist claims they are, you'd think the Times columnist could have found one of them willing to speak with her on a non-anonymous basis. As it is, the anonymous quote is ridiculous. How does the complainer know that the helicopter passengers are "the same people who burned the economy"? Is the idea that anyone who in 2014 is rich enough to afford a helicopter ride to the Hamptons is morally culpable for the financial crisis of 2008? This is Times anonymous sourcing at its worst — the use of the veil of anonymity to smear an entire group of people, without evidence or justification.

The president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Richard Block, has an article explaining why he canceled his Times subscription after 40 years:

I am a lifelong Democrat, a political liberal, a Reform rabbi, and for four decades, until last week, a New York Times subscriber. What drove me away was the paper's incessant denigration of Israel, a torrent of articles, photographs, and op-ed columns that consistently present the Jewish State in the worst possible light.