Scooper & Scooped

One of the things we miss most about TMFTML was his Monday-morning quarterbacking of the Sunday New York Times. (The critic became the critiqued, and that's a helluva promotion! We like to believe we beat the Times to the punch bowl, though.)

TMFTML somehow managed to scan and summarize the whole paper—usually in the yellow haze of the "worst hangover ever"—from the Magazine to the darkest recesses of Travel. He was a sort of pissy, Gen-X ombudsman with a rapier wit.

We are much more piecemeal about the way we pick through the Times. This is undoubdtedly a character flaw, but we read the Sunday Times for pleasure, not for business. We often notice, though, how the Gray Lady's left hand and right don't seem to be aware of one another. We noted yesterday how the Magazine's cover story on "the overdesigned" life of American children was almost precisely the same territory covered by Week In Review's below-the-fold feature.

These are great articles, of course, but they also have the strong smack of trend stories, and speaking as an editor here, we say the fact that they crop up in more than one place on one particular Sunday sort of confirms this view. I wonder if there are uber-editors somewhere in the Times who have steam coming out of their ears—just the way they do when the New Yorker, or the Washington Post scoops them. (For the record, we preferred the short and snappy Week in Review piece, which got straight to the point with solid science and an impressionistic analysis. The Magazine's coverage was multi-faceted, practically the entire issue turned over to a relatively simple conceit: Kids are not spending enough time being kids anymore, and as a result, neither are they growing up to be the adults they ought to be. We begin to understand why one of TMFTML's perennial complaints was just how trailing-edge the Times can seem on stories like this.)

Some other high points came in the Book Review—newly redesigned, with a more humane display face, the anachronistic return to launching the cover story right there on the cover, and the notable shift of contributors' notes away from the column footers to the front of the book, much like a modern magazine.

In these spiffy environs, we enjoyed Slate editor Jacob Weisberg's angle on "Charlotte Simons," and Tom Frank's overview of four new titles attempting to dismantle the "red-blue" cultural divide, although it purported to survey four books, but really only focused on the internecine squabble Frank wishes to pick with the writers of "The Great Divide" (the "Metro Vs. Retro" folks).

More important, we swelled with pride when we noticed the Times recommended David Lebedof's "The Uncivil War"— and several pages later, a solidly positive review of Michael Dregni's "Django." Both are local heroes of Twin Cities publishing, Lebedof a winner of a 1998 Minnesota Book Award, and Dregni the editorial director of Voyageur Books over in Stillwater. Nice work, gentlemen.

It's not like we need to scan the Times in order to feel good about ourselves—well, maybe it is like that. —The Editor in Cheese