I wonder, are “security breeches” similar to chastity belts? I may want security breeches myself if I’m asked to go through a backscatter X-ray next time I’m traveling by plane…
Thursday, October 14, 2010
This is the first sentence of the Boston Globe’s Friday article about the latest developments in the Red Sox owner’s efforts to purchase Liverpool FC: The Liverpool Football Club will host Blackburn Sunday; that much is certain. The only problem is that Liverpool is playing their Liverpudlian neighbors Everton on Sunday. (They’ll host Blackburn on […]
Also filed in
|
|
It’s nice to see the Oakland Tribune covering the wonderful improvements that are about to be made to the southern end of Lake Merritt, where a dreadful ten-lane thoroughfare is going to be turned into a pedestrian-friendly, bike-friendly area with expanded lakeside parkland. It would have been nice, too, if they hadn’t flubbed the name […]
Since when is it okay for the Oakland Tribune refer to Oakland as “crime central” in huge font in the lead front page headline? A lot of people complain that the media are biased against Oakland—that they focus too much on Oakland’s crime and not enough on the good aspects of Oakland, that they depict […]
Phil Bronstein has a silly post on his SFGate.com blog in which he points out that the New York Times article on Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts uses the same anecdote in the lede that a San Francisco Chronicle article used two months ago, about Batts initially declining to apply for the Oakland job, then […]
Thursday, October 15, 2009
I cancelled my home delivery of the New York Times about 3 years ago, after they raised the subscription rate for the second time in a single calendar year. Having read a hard copy of the Times nearly every day for more than 15 years (not to mention having worked there for about 5), I […]
Also filed in
|
|
Friday, September 4, 2009
The New York Times had a brief write-up last night about James K. Glassman being appointed as the founding executive director of the George W. Bush Institute, an “action-oriented think tank” which will be part of the GWB Center at Southern Methodist University. Glassman is a former journalist and pundit who also served in the […]
Here is the beginning of the New York Times stylebook’s entry for “puns.” puns have a place in the newspaper, but as a trace element rather than a staple. A pun should be a surprise encounter, evoking a sly smile rather than a groan and flattering the intelligence of a reader who gets the joke. […]
I was surprised to see an editorial at the very end of the local NBC affiliate’s 11 o’clock newscast last night. I’m not saying that they did a story that was so opinionated that it should be considered an editorial rather than a news story (that wouldn’t have been so surprising). It wasn’t even a […]
Also filed in
|
|
My friend Sasha Abramsky has just come out with a book about hunger in the United States, called Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It. I picked up a copy yesterday, and while I’m only about 50 pages into it so far, I can already highly recommend it to […]
Every so often, newspapers print articles about the struggles of some of the wealthiest people in our country, who are barely scraping by on several hundred thousand dollars a year. The New York Times’s 2007 story on “working class millionaires” in the Bay Area was a classic of the genre. And last year, when the […]
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Andy Rosenthal, the New York Times Editorial Editor, had this to say in response to an online question about why the Times has no “serious” female columnists: I would be the last person alive to suggest that Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins are not serious columnists. They are indeed, very serious. The last time I […]