From a front of the business-section news article in Friday's Times:

We obsess far too much on the Labor Department's monthly jobs report....But what if all the worries were based on nothing more than random statistical noise? What if the apparent decline in job growth came from the inherent volatility of surveys that rely on samples, like the survey that produces the Labor Department's monthly employment estimate?...When traders put too much weight on data that can mislead, the stock market can soar or swoon for no good reason. Business executives may make decisions based on economic trends that don't exist. And journalists risk giving their readers or viewers a misleading view of where things stand in the American economy.

Human beings, unfortunately, are bad at perceiving randomness. If you go to a baseball game and watch a commanding performance by your team, it tells you very nearly nothing about how the team will perform over the course of a season. Similarly, one month of jobs numbers doesn't tell you much of anything about how the economy is actually doing....it's worth remembering that no one report can neatly summarize the health of a $17 trillion economy of 300 million people, certainly not in something close to real time.

At 8:30 a.m. on the first Friday of any given month, we all actually know a lot less than you might think. The closest thing to an accurate description of the economy's condition is a description that comes with a lot of humility.

From an above-the-fold, front-page news article in Saturday's Times, headlined "Jump in Payrolls Is Seen as a Sign of a New Optimism":

American businesses appear to be increasingly confident about hiring new workers.

In the best monthly showing in more than two years, employers added 288,000 jobs in April, the Labor Department said on Friday, representing three consecutive months in which payrolls grew by more than 200,000. The report, combined with other recent data, suggests the economy is poised to expand at a faster pace in the coming months, after a slow start in the depths of winter.

The "humility" that the Times suggested on Friday was called for was difficult to detect in the Saturday article, which skated awfully close to the "journalists risk giving their readers or viewers a misleading view" territory that the Times warned about in the Friday article. The Friday article was a product of "Upshot," the new David Leonhardt-led Times attempt to do what Nate Silver and Ezra Klein are doing elsewhere, but the juxtaposition of it with the Saturday article shows the dangers of trying to make thoughtful journalism into a separate standalone unit rather than an integral and integrated part of the entire news report.

An article in the Times business section tells the interesting story of how Drew Greenblatt changed a business, Marlin Steel, that made wire baskets for bagel stores, into one with ten times the revenues that makes custom-designed, precisely engineered baskets for high-end manufacturers.

The Times article makes no acknowledgment that the same story was told by Charles Fishman in the July/August 2013 Fast Company magazine. The Fast Company article was promptly picked up by FutureOfCapitalism and The Browser with hyperlinks and credit, which is more than the Times could be bothered with in this display of classlessness.

Today's Times offers a less-than-glowing assessment of Times reporter Jo Becker's book Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality. Reviewer Adam Goodheart (who was a colleague of mine at the Harvard Crimson) writes, scathingly:

Ms. Becker paid too high a price for access. "Forcing the Spring" is riddled with the telltale signs of a reporter becoming too close to her sources. She does herself (and her subjects) no favors with fawning descriptions of Mr. Griffin's inner circle: one has "a face Botticelli might have painted"; another is "the kind of girl who might have once graced a 1950s pinup calendar."

More troubling, she suggests that earlier advocates of marriage equality had toiled in fruitless obscurity until this glamorous dream team swept in. It's a bizarre premise, since by the time the Perry case went to court, same-sex marriage had been fought for successfully in six states and the District of Columbia.

Now they tell us. If this book is so fawning and based on such a bizarre premise, why did the Times run an excerpt of it as the cover story of the New York Times magazine back on April 20? At least the Times could have done its readers the service of running the review before the magazine article came out, so as to save the readers the time and trouble of wading through the fawning, bizarre prose.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The newspaper pulled precisely the same stunt last year with staff reporter Michael Moss's book Salt Sugar Fat. The Times reviewer called the book "a bit wearying," and "a little like a plate of processed cheese: fresh, in its way, but behind the culinary curve." A few weeks earlier, the Times had run an excerpt as the magazine cover story.

From a book review in today's Times by staff critic Dwight Garner:

This memoir has its small joys, for sure. The author confronts Keith Richards over his infamous allegation that Mick Jagger has a small penis. Ms. Robinson once lent Mr. Jagger a pair of sheer bikini underpants, in which he was photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Ms. Robinson tells Mr. Richards that Mr. Jagger "actually has quite a big one." He replies, "Mine's bigger."

Mr. Garner doesn't explain why he would find joy, large or small, in this anecdote, but it certainly is a fine example of the Times's ever-shifting definition of what constitutes news "fit to print."

Mr. Garner is the same book critic who has put references to masturbation in his Times writing three times in the past four years, so one starts to wonder if he's just playing some kind of game, testing the limits to see what his editors will allow into the paper.

In a column about the French economist Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the 21st Century, David Brooks writes, "Piketty wouldn't raise taxes on income, which thriving professionals have a lot of; he would tax investment capital, which they don't have enough of."

That's simply inaccurate. On pages 512 to 513 of his book, Professor Piketty writes, "Levying confiscatory rates on top income is not only possible but als to the only way to stem the observed increase in very high salaries. According to our estimates, the optimal top tax rate in the developed countries is probably above 80 percent....The evidence suggests that a rate on the order of 80 percent on incomes over $500,000 or $1 million a year not only would not reduce the growth of the US economy but would in fact distribute the fruits of growth more widely while imposing reasonable limits on economically useless (or even harmful) behavior."

An article in the food section of the New York Times contains the assertion, "At influential bakeries like Clear Flour Bread in Brookline, Mass., or Tartine in San Francisco, it is often easier to find a flaxseed levain or a chestnut fougasse than a Pullman loaf of white bread."

In fact Clear Flour points out on its Facebook page that though it appreciated the mention in the Times, the Times claim needs to be corrected: "Actually we bake a lovely Pain de Mie twice daily." That's more often than they do anything with chestnuts.

If you are in Brookline or anywhere close to it, the bakery is well worth a visit if you don't mind a line and if you like bread or pastry.

From a front-page New York Times news article about regulation of electronic cigarettes:

F.D.A. officials gave journalists an outline of the new rules on Wednesday, but required that they not talk to industry or public health groups until after Thursday's formal release of the document.

The "required" is an odd formulation. Who gave the FDA the authority to stop journalists from asking questions? Why would any journalist agree to abide by such a requirement? Did the Times agree to it, and if it did agree to it, did it abide by the agreement? What is the FDA's rationale for such restrictions? Some more explanation would be useful, and one shouldn't have to pay extra for "Times Premier" to get it.

It's a poorly done article for other reasons as well, primarily the underlying bias toward regulation. The Times says, with what seems like a note of disapproval, that the electronic cigarettes "have grown into a multibillion-dollar business with virtually no federal oversight or protections for American consumers." It also reports, "Once finalized, the regulations will establish oversight of what has been a market free-for-all of products, including vials of liquid nicotine of varying quality and unknown provenance."

My goodness, "a market free-for-all of products" "of varying quality"? Sounds like many other industries, including news, fashion, footwear, food, automobiles, furniture, sporting goods, books, software, and movies. Plenty of other businesses — Internet search advertising, social media networks — have grown into multibillion dollar businesses without "federal oversight." One might even argue that the lack of federal oversight is what makes the business growth possible, because the business owners can focus on product growth and development instead of compliance and lobbying. As for consumer protections, there are a raft of federal and local civil and criminal statutes that outlaw fraud and false advertising and that hold manufacturers liable for products that they know are harmful or defective.

Not even Democratic senators agree with the Times claim that there are no protections for electronic cigarette consumers under current law. Senators Boxer, Blumenthal, Durbin, Harkin, Markey, and Brown wrote to the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission earlier this month that "Unsubstantiated claims that e-cigarettes help people to quit smoking are false and deceptive advertising and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) currently has the authority to investigate and take punitive actions against these companies." The letter itself is proof that the Times claim of "virtually no federal oversight" is wrong. The senators are federal officials and they are exercising oversight.

The New York Sun has a fine and fun editorial taking issue with a Times "room for debate" contribution by Ali Wyne that describes a congressional recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel as "partisan sabotage." The Sun editorial points out that the measure passed the Senate unanimously and the House nearly unanimously:

Suppose one wanted to give Mr. Wyne and the Times the benefit of the doubt as to whether it's partisan. Which party is for it? The Republicans who voted for it? Or the Democrats who voted for it? Or would it be the Republican president (George W. Bush) who first refused to enforce the provision or the Democratic president (Barack Obama) who subsequently refused to enforce the measure?

Let us just say it is a mystery of the Times. Maybe the Gray Lady has reached a point where anything with which it disagrees is partisan. Perhaps it has concluded that Israel is automatically partisan.

An additional point, not mentioned in the Sun editorial, has to do with the way the Times identifies Mr. Wyne. The Times identifies him as "Ali Wyne, Harvard University." Mr. Wyne is a 2008 graduate of MIT; his Harvard affiliation is "former research assistant, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs" at Harvard's Kennedy School. What is it about the anti-Israel crowd that so attracts them to the Belfer banner, and what is it about the New York Times that causes a former research assistant's institutional affiliation to be listed as "Harvard University"?

A correction in the New York Times about the possibility of a Clinton-Gillibrand Democratic ticket declares, "Aside from the debate over a two-woman ticket, Ms. Gillibrand and Mrs. Clinton are both from New York, and the Constitution prohibits the election of a president and a vice president who are from the same state."

This is inaccurate on two counts. Mrs. Clinton isn't "from New York." One of her two residences is in New York; the other is in Washington, D.C. She's "from" Illinois, and/or Arkansas, and could try to get around the "same state" issue by establishing a residence in one of those two states. (Dick Cheney "moved" from Texas back to Wyoming in 2000.)

Secondly, there is no Constitutional prohibition on the election of a president and vice president from the same state. Snopes has an excellent summary and debunking of the situation here. The bottom line is that the prohibition isn't on the candidates but on the electors from the single state from which both candidates hail; the electors would have to vote for another party's vice presidential candidate, which would only be a problem in a very close election and might argue against the wisdom of a single-state ticket, but does not flatly prohibit it.

Update: The Times does correct its correction: "A correction in this space...overstated the limitations the Constitution places on two candidates from the same state running on the same presidential ticket."

Update: An earlier version of this post, since corrected, erroneously referred to a "Schumer-Gillibrand ticket." In other words, the correction to the correction itself required a correction.

A Times dispatch from Europe about NATO reports: "Two new members, Spain and Hungary, along with two apparently vulnerable Baltic countries, Latvia and Lithuania, spent less than 1 percent [of GDP on defense]."

Spain has been a member since 1982 (here is the New York Times article published May 31, 1982 headlined "Spain Enters NATO as First Country to Join Since 1955"), so the accuracy of the term "new" here is highly questionable.

Thanks to reader-contributor-participant-community member-content co-creator Colin for the tip.

Smartertimes community member-participant-watchdog-content co-creator-reader Colin G. writes about this Times article:

"After a surge of last-minute sign-ups, eight million people bought private coverage through the federal and state marketplaces during the initial six-month enrollment period, exceeding the Obama administration's target."

Am I mistaken, or is the number of purchased plans, as defined by people mailing in checks, actually unknown as indicated here?

He's not mistaken. The announced 8 million figure is the number of people who signed up. Plenty of them may have already had other coverage that they were dropped from or that was expiring, so they weren't necessarily previously uninsured. But signing up isn't the same as actually having "bought" the coverage. To buy it, you have to pay for it, and, as the Reason article linked above shows, some significant percentage of the people who signed up are not paying.

An anonymous source the New York Times used for coverage of the company Herbalife had a financial agreement with a hedge fund manager who was selling Herbalife short, ABC News reports. Under the agreement, which was not disclosed in the Times article, the "whistleblower" was paid $20,000 a month, and could earn as much as $3.61 million, ABC News says.

A Times dispatch from Jerusalem reports:

Over the last decade, scores of cheap apartment buildings, many a dozen stories high, have sprung up in several Palestinian neighborhoods like Ras Khamis, lying just within the Jerusalem city limits but isolated by the barrier that Israel has built along or through parts of the West Bank with the stated purpose of keeping out suicide bombers. The buildings went up without planning permission, safety regulations or proper infrastructure.

The use of the language that the buildings "sprung up" or "went up" oddly omits the question of who built them. Arabs? Jews? The article doesn't say who the unscrupulous slumlords are, and it's almost as if the reporter is bending over backwards not to find out.

Thanks to reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creator D.K. for sending the tip.

Reviewing Barbara Ehrenreich's book Living With A Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search For The Truth About Everything, Times book critic Dwight Garner writes:

Kingsley Amis once said that religion and masturbation were alike in one regard. Feel free to practice them, that is, but no one really wants to hear you go on about it.

I don't necessarily feel that way about mystical experiences of the sort Ms. Ehrenreich describes. Like her, I am a nonbeliever, and like her, I do not doubt there are many things we don't understand about our universe. But right here and right now, I wish I could say "Living With a Wild God" didn't feel like such a meandering trip.

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."

Perhaps Mr. Garner himself is the one who should take Kingsley Amis's admonition to heart.

A Times op-ed today appears under the headline "Global Warming Scare Tactics" and says, "claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global warming simply can't be supported by the science."

Someone might want to alert the Times news department to that. A 2012 article about Hurricane Sandy reported:

in interviews on Tuesday, several climate scientists made some initial points. A likely contributor to the intensity of Sandy, they said, was that surface temperatures in the western Atlantic Ocean were remarkably high just ahead of the storm — in places, about five degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal for this time of year. In fact, part of the ocean was warmer than it would normally be in September, when accumulated summer heat tends to peak.

Kevin E. Trenberth, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. ...added, human-induced global warming has been raising the overall temperature of the surface ocean, by about one degree Fahrenheit since the 1970s. So global warming very likely contributed a notable fraction of the energy on which the storm thrived — perhaps as much as 10 percent, he said.

Other scientists are looking at this year's historic loss of sea ice in the Arctic as a potential contributor to the track of Sandy, and possibly to the severity of the storm.

Summer sea ice in the Arctic has fallen by roughly half since the late 1970s, a change most climate scientists believe has been caused largely by human-induced warming. A large camp of experts, Dr. Trenberth among them, believe the weather effects have mostly been confined to the Arctic Ocean and surrounding land areas.

But some published research suggests the consequences extend much farther. The idea is that the loss of sea ice is altering the flow of the atmosphere enough to heighten the risk of severe weather in midlatitude regions like the United States.

In articles like this one, I have cited the work of Jennifer A. Francis, a Rutgers University climate scientist who is a leading proponent of this view. My colleague on the opinion side of The Times, Andrew Revkin, posted an analysis from Dr. Francis this week in which she noted that an atmospheric blocking pattern over Greenland — possibly linked, in her view, to the loss of sea ice in the nearby Arctic Ocean — had helped force the storm to make a left turn into the United States mainland.

And a Times news article from earlier this year about the California drought reported:

a trend of increasing drought that may be linked to global warming has been documented in some regions, including parts of the Mediterranean and in the Southwestern United States...What may be different about this drought is that, whatever the cause, the effects appear to have been made worse by climatic warming. And in making that case last week, scientists said, the administration was on solid ground.

The Times news articles were careful not to overstep and to report on disagreements between scientists and on limits of knowledge, but they also don't go nearly as far as the op-ed does in sweepingly dismissing links between climate change and extreme weather events.