The New York Times

Critics are falling all over themselves to laud Gus Van Sant's Milk. Some seem to love one scene in particular:

A.O. Scott, The New York Times:

One of the first scenes in 'Milk' is of a pick-up in a New York subway station. It’s 1970, and an insurance executive in a suit and tie catches sight of a beautiful, scruffy younger man — the phrase 'angel-headed hipster' comes to mind — and banters with him on the stairs. The mood of the moment, which ends up with the two men eating birthday cake in bed, is casual and sexy, and its flirtatious playfulness is somewhat disarming, given our expectation of a serious and important movie grounded in historical events.

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The New York Times Book Review released its 100 Notable Books of 2008.

Notably, there are a lot of New York Times writers on the list, among them:

- The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power by Jonathan Mahler.

- Condoleezza Rice: An American Life by Elisabeth Bumiller.

- The Forever War by Dexter Filkins.

- Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman.

- The House at Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper.

- The Night of the Gun by David Carr.

Mark Bittman, the New York Times food columnist and best-selling cookbook author, was ambling unnoticed through the tight aisles of the Fairway at 74th Street and Broadway on a mild Friday evening earlier this month, shopping for dinner. He nosed briefly around the fish counter before settling on a two-pound slab of monkfish. He had some Savoy cabbage at home, but he wasn’t sure what else. This seemed to fortify rather than trouble him. “If you can go get whatever you want,” he said, “there’s no challenge left at all.”

It was a quick cab ride 25 blocks north to his kitchen, which, as Times health blogger Tara Parker-Pope noted recently, is exceptionally small: 7 feet by 8 feet, Mr.  read more »

In today's New York Times 'Business' section, Douglas Quenqua offers a report about how people are using typos to find big savings on eBay.

Writes Mr. Quenqua:

A handful of new Web sites with names like Typo Bay and Typo Buddy are out to help shoppers save money by searching eBay for misspelled brand names.

Two paragraphs later, though, the writer reveals just how "new" these sites are: "Typo Buddy started about six months ago and already has up to 80,000 visitors on a good day, said its president, Jonathan Lieberman, an Internet entrepreneur in San Diego"; "Joseph Mantha, the 19-year-old co-creator of Typo Bay, which started in 2007, said October was the site’s busiest month yet."  read more »

In this weekend's 'Arts & Leisure' section of The New York Times, film critic A.O. Scott offers a treatise on Hollywood's continued interest in Holocaust films headlined Never Forget. You're Reminded.

Buried in Mr. Scott's take on what some people wryly call "Shoah Business" is an intriguing aside:

Why do opportunistic, clever young novelists — I won’t name any names — gravitate toward magic-realist depictions of the decidedly unmagical reality of the Shoah? For the same reason that actors shave their heads and starve themselves, or preen and leer in jackboots and epaulets. For the same reason that filmmakers commission concrete barracks and instruct their cinematographers and lab technicians to filter out bright, saturated colors.  read more »

- "If [Axl] Rose ever had a moment's doubt or repentance over what Chinese Democracy has cost him in time (13 years), money (14 studios are listed in the credits) and body count — including the exit of every other founding member of the band — he left no room for it in these 14 songs," David Fricke, Rolling Stone, November 10, 2008.

- "The album credits list 14 studios," Jon Pareles, The New York Times, November 20, 2008.

- "Chinese Democracy's album credits reflect the epic slog that brought it into existence, listing 14 recording studios, five guitarists, and multiple 'digital editors'," Jody Rosen Slate, November 21, 2008.  read more »

This Sunday, The New York Times' Sharon Otterman introduced readers to slow-blogging, an approach to Web writing "inspired by the slow food movement, which says that fast food is destroying local traditions and healthy eating habits... slow bloggers believe that news-driven blogs like TechCrunch and Gawker are the equivalent of fast food restaurants — great for occasional consumption, but not enough to guarantee human sustenance over the longer haul."

And while we're sure they don't like to be referred to as "slow bloggers," they probably have a fan in... Dana Perino?

Ms. Perino, still-President Bush's Press Secretary, was profiled by The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz this weekend as well. Mr. Kurtz writes:

From her vantage point, the rise of the blogging culture has damaged journalism. With mainstream reporters posting blog items throughout the day, 'it's snappy, sarcastic. It doesn't necessarily engender trust between the reporter and the press people.'

Today, The New York Times' Brooks Barnes offered a hard-hitting A1 investigative report on how Angelina Jolie manipulates the press, especially how she uses access to her family to further her own agenda.

Writes Mr. Barnes:

Shifting the focus is one of Ms. Jolie’s best maneuvers, magazine editors and publicity executives say. When she became romantically involved with Mr. Pitt, for instance, she faced a public relations crisis — being portrayed in the tabloid press as a predator who stole Mr. Pitt from his wife, Jennifer Aniston.

This time, it was Ms. Jolie’s charity work that helped turn the story. Long interested in international humanitarian work, Ms. Jolie appeared in Pakistan, where she visited camps housing Afghan refugees, and even met with President Pervez Musharraf. Ms. Jolie and Mr. Pitt made a subsequent trip to Kashmir to bring attention to earthquake victims.

In a conspiracy like this, you build from the outer edges and you go step by step...  read more »

Writing on Editor & Publisher's blog, 'The E&P Pub,' Greg Mitchell directs us to the trailer for Rod Lurie's Nothing But the Truth.

As you may already know, the movie offers a fictionalized retelling of the Judith Miller-Valerie Plame scandal, and stars Kate Beckinsale as a journalist sent to jail for protecting her source in the outing of a C.I.A. operative played by Vera Farmiga. The film features Matt Dillon, Alan Alda, Angela Bassett, and David Schwimmer.

Also appearing in the trailer: MSNBC anchor turned flack Dan Abrams in the role of a journalist.

The New York Times' William Grimes is reporting that dance critic Clive Barnes has died. He was 81-years-old.

Per Mr. Grimes:

Mr. Barnes, an energetic Londoner who once described himself as 'your typical working-class overachiever,' made his mark by waging a sustained assault on British dance criticism as it was then practiced just after World War II. It was, he argued, provincial and ill-informed scribbling usually written by music critics. Writing for several publications simultaneously, chief among them The Spectator and The Times of London, which hired him as its first full-time dance critic in 1961, he exposed his readers to foreign dance companies and choreographers, like George Balanchine and Martha Graham, that most British critics had dismissed.

Mr. Barnes also worked for The New York Times from 1965 to 1977 and wrote the books Inside the American Ballet Theatre, Nureyev, and co-authored, edited, or contributed to several others.

Andrea Mitchell started it.

It was she who told viewers of NBC’s The Nightly News With Brian Williams on Thursday, Nov. 13, that Hillary Clinton “is under consideration to be secretary of state.”

Since then, nobody seems to have known what to think. But that hasn’t ground the Madame Secretary boomlet to a halt—on the contrary, it only accelerated it! Over the past few days, we’ve heard: Hillary is under consideration for the job. She’s been offered the job! She hasn’t been offered the job (which was only news because someone else had said she had).

Last night, we read that she had been offered the job, and not only that, she was going to accept it! More recently, it’s been “unclear,” but her husband is being vetted—that’s the news of the day for Nov.  read more »

Earlier today, William Kristol was sitting alone by the entrance of Michael's checking his Blackberry. Mr. Kristol was there at the behest of the Independent Film Channel to participate in a panel discussion moderated by Arianna Huffington (and featuring Pete Hamill, Chrisopher Buckley, and Mr. Kristol) to help promote The IFC Media Project, a show which aims to take viewers "behind the news," hosted by former MTV Newsman Gideon Yago.

The room was quickly filling up with eager young journalists, spiral notepads blank and at the ready, digital recorders checked once, twice, and stomachs empty and open. (The invitation called for noon-2:30 p.  read more »

Last night, purple-pushing internet company Yahoo! announced that co-founder and C.E.O. Jerry Yang would be stepping down from his management role, which he's had since June 2007. Mr. Yang will continue to sit on the company's board and take back his old title (we kid you not): Chief Yahoo!.

Jessica E. Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal framed it as follows:

Yahoo Inc. co-founder and Chief Executive Jerry Yang will step down after the company finds a replacement, closing a tumultuous and short tenure during which Yahoo rejected an offer from Microsoft Corp.'s to buy it.  read more »

Stop us if you've heard this one before... According to Page Six The Magazine, some Manhattan parents are so desperate to give their children a leg-up on their peers, they're sending them to Mandarin classes! (And Hindi! And French! And German!)

Page Six's Jennifer Rose quotes a parent named Brett Hauser, who pays $395 for his 6-month-old son to take 10 sessions at The Language Workshop for Children saying, "Mandarin is the language of our future. With China poised to become the world's leading economy sometime this century, I'm doing the only responsible thing. It's like reading to your kid or making sure he gets all the right foods. I'm helping him prepare for his future. Thirty years from now these kids are going to be translating for all of us."

The magazine calls this phenomenon "NYC's New Baby Talkers."

Talkers, yes; new, no.  read more »

Martin Eisenstadt, principal of the Eisenstadt Group and Senior Fellow at The Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy is on a the mind of a lot of bloggers and cable news talent bookers lately. Apparently Mr. Eisenstadt, as an adviser to Senator John McCain, leaked the story that former G.O.P. Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin didn't know that Africa is a continent and not a single country. That bit of news was picked up by many, many media sources including Fox News, whose Carl Cameron's on-air telling of the anecdote Media Mob saw fit to include in a round-up of post-election bashing of Governor Palin. He also spread the rumor that Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher was spotted "canoodling" with Saturday Night Live's Kristen Wiig and that he might appear on The Bachelor. That little story made it to Politico's Shenanigans blog, written by Anne Schroeder Mullins, and then the New York Post on Nov. 4, in a "Campaign Morsels" sidebar that is not online, but was recounted in New York magazine's Daily Intel blog.

And who can forget back in August when Mr. Eisenstadt revealed that Paris Hilton's family was offended with the McCain campaign for an ad that compared Senator Obama to Ms. Hilton and Britney Spears.

This election year, Mr. Eisenstadt has been full of great scoops. He's also been completely full of it.  read more »

Paul Krugman, The New York Times columnist, Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Who fanatic and totally not dead person, is having some problems with his Times-sponsored blog, The Conscience of a Liberal. (Update, 2:54 p.m.: Thanks, Anonymous (not verified).)

Per Mr. Krugman's post this morning headlined Housekeeping note:

This blog is being shifted over to a new security system today. Since the elaborate software provided doesn’t seem to work — right now we're at the 'just click on that tab, and you'll get a menu' 'OK, I’ve clicked on it, and nothing happens' stage — it may be a while before I can post again.  read more »

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Finally, the morning paper brings some good news. The paper of record appears to be reporting that the war in Iraq has ended and that Troops to Return Immediately. Also, Labor Dept. Launches Job Creation Program. And Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge.

More locally, New York Bike Path System Expanded Dramatically.

As Gawker's Hamilton Nolan has pointed out, these headlines are not from The New York Times, but a parody issue distributed throughout New York City this morning. The close—but typographically errant—facsimile of The Times is apparently the work of The Yes Men, a Yippie!-ish collective of media and political pranksters featured in a 2003 documentary.

The fake Times, which is full of ads for Halliburton subsidiary KBR, ExxonMobil, and weirdly, subway staple Jonathan Zizmor, M.D., purports to be from July 4, 2009. When Media Mob was handed a copy on Broadway and 18th and asked the guy in a New York Times apron to explain its provenance, he said in a puckish French accent, "I don't know."

Of course, this isn't the first fake paper to hit the streets. See: Off The Wall Street Journal (and April's redux) and SPY's 1992 Democratic National Convention parody of The New York Times.

In this week’s giddily Obama-centric edition of The New Yorker—you had the illuminated O in “Yorker”; the “ELECTION SPECIAL” tab on the outside cover flap; and more than 35,000 words inside about the election—the longest story in the magazine was assigned to none other than the magazine’s editor, David Remnick. His 12,000-word opus on race and politics included dispatches from two different trips to Chicago and one to New Orleans.

It was filed in the magazine under: “A Reporter at Large.”

“As much as I love editing, reporting and writing is a way for me to get out of the house a little bit, metaphorically” said Mr.  read more »

Well, on the day the Times Company's stock took a nosedive and hit its 52-week low, the company's General Manager for the internet, Vivian Schiller, announced she's leaving the paper and heading to NPR.

Ms. Schiller one of the people responsible for making nytimes.com into something of a machine, and she leaves with lots of record breaking weeks in her wake.

She's also the co-author, with Jon Landman, of all those Friday internet emails that we've come to adore, and, in part, responsible for confusing our understanding of what "platform agnostic" actually means.

There's got to be a clever pun about crossovers here somewhere.

Will Shortz, The New York Times crosswords editor who recently promised to donate his 20,000 puzzle books to Indiana University, will be appearing in this week's episode of The Simpsons (along with prolific puzzle maker Merl Reagle, according to The Hartford Courant's Frank Rizzo) in an episode that focuses on Lisa Simpson entering a crossword tournament.

In real life, that same day, The New York Times and The Hartford Courant will feature Simpsons-themed puzzles. (This comes via TVTattle.)   read more »

More bad news for Times Company stock: Its stock has hit a new 52-week low today at $8.12, and stands at $8.28 as we write this.

The plunge comes a day after the Times announced that its New England newspapers had declined in value by $166 million, more than the $100 to $150 million that C.E.O. Janet Robinson had projected in a conference call last month.

That also greatly alters its third quarter numbers. The Associated Press' Anick Jesdanun (here via Forbes) reports: "With the new charge and related tax adjustments, the Times had a net loss of $106 million, or 74 cents a share, in the third quarter, compared with a profit of $13.  read more »

This past weekend, The New York Times' 'City' section featured a story by Caroline H. Dworin headlined Suddenly, Souvenirs, about promotional paperweights and newspaper boxes for the late New York Sun, which remain like memento mori throughout the city after the paper folded in September.

Writes Ms. Dworin:

Perhaps those who will notice the weights the longest and watch mournfully as they disappear are the paper’s former staff members. A few weeks ago, while walking in the Flatiron district, Jacob Gershman, The Sun’s Albany reporter, found himself standing on line at a newsstand, a worn weight in his hand.

'You see these around, and you want to pick something up before it all goes away,' he said.

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The Washington Post's Joe Stephens has a story today about the FBI's 15 year-long surveillance of Norman Mailer, which began in 1962 after Mr. Mailer wrote an article about Jacqueline Kennedy for Esquire.

According to Mr. Stephens:

FBI agents closely tracked the grand and mundane aspects of the acclaimed novelist's life, according to previously confidential government files. Agents questioned his friends, scoured his passport file, thumbed through his best-selling books and circulated his photo among informants. They kept records on his appearances at writers conferences, talk shows and peace rallies. They noted the volume of envelopes in his mailbox and jotted down who received his Christmas cards.  read more »

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The New York Times' Noam Cohen interviewed Shelby Steele, a race scholar currently at Stanford who authored last year's A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win. Mr. Steele is understandably regretful about that unfortunate subtitle now that Obama is our President-elect, telling The Times that it was "slapped on" at the last second and has had the effect of undermining what he feels is his otherwise sound analysis.

The best part of the story is when The Times reporter calls up Free Press, which published A Bound Man, and asks its editor-in-chief Dominick Anfuso whether there was financially-motivated pressure put on Mr. Steele to use the provocative subtitle.  read more »

Yes, yes, newspapers are alive and well for the week (they're cool!), but don't think the internet is lagging behind on this one. This was tucked inside Brian Stelter's story on the election's impact on the Web today:

The New York Times’s Web site, nytimes.com, saw a record 61.6 million page views on Wednesday, compared with 55.1 million on Election Day, according to internal data.

That represents another single-day record.

A source tells us that Alissa Rubin has been named the new Baghdad bureau chief of The New York Times.

Ms. Rubin has been with the Times since 2007, and before that worked in Iraq for The Los Angeles Times. In Seth Mnookin's stirring profile of the Baghdad bureau in the December 2008 Vanity Fair, he says that Ms. Rubin has been basically functioning as the bureau chief all year since Jim Glanz has been home after suffering a neck injury (and he has recently been reassigned to the investigations unit).  read more »

The Observer's Leon Neyfakh just called in to tell us that at a newsstand at the corner of 43rd and Lexington that there is still a mob of people buying yesterday's Times.

Right now, about 50 people are queued up to hand over a $1.50 to get a copy of yesterday's post-election OBAMA-bannered edition. When Leon walked by the vendor about an hour ago, he noticed that the there was a big stack of yesterday's edition that was tied up and untouched.

An hour later, word must have gotten out this is the place where you can still find one.

The New York Times has hired internally to replace Dwight Garner at The Book Review after he moved to the daily reviewing beat. The nod goes to Laura Marmor, a deputy editor for the Travel Section. In her new job as Senior Editor, she'll be making a "broad range of review assignments" and help put the section together each week while "collaborating with our editorial team to upgrade our enterprise projects," writes Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus in a memo.

In September, The Times replaced reviews editor and Rome-bound Rachel Donadio with a copy editor at the paper, Greg Cowles.

Memo after the jump:  read more »

And now the fun part begins.

The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller has an A1-promoted story headlined Internal Battles Divided McCain and Palin Camps, in which she reveals all about the Republican candidates' failed bid for the White House. This comes a day after Newsweek broke new ground on the Governor's campaign trail spending spree and Carl Cameron told FOX News (FOX News!) that the woman New York Times columnist Bill Kristol favorably compared to Andrew Jackson didn't know what countries were in NAFTA or that Africa is a continent. (This clip comes via Andrew Sullivan.)  read more »

New York real estate is so beleaguered that it can’t support a one-time commercial real estate section in The New York Times. According to sources, the Gray Lady has scrapped plans to publish a stand-alone commercial real estate section, dubbed the “Commercial Real Estate Annual Review,” on Nov. 18, due to a lack of ad revenue.

Charles Bagli, New York Times real estate reporter extraordinaire (and onetime Observer staffer), was tapped to write the section’s cover story, which was to focus on the industry elite and how the economic crisis would affect its makeup. Mr. Bagli, who was to be paid separately for the story, was even used as a marketing tool by The Times’ ad department.  read more »

Pat Healy, who covered Hillary Clinton throughout the Democratic primary, just told the crowd at the Times building that since June, Hillary has felt warmer toward Barack Obama, that he's grown as a candidate. "Her primary concern is that a Democrat takes the White House. There are no residual bitternesses."

"I'll start right now as if the outcome [the recent count] suggests is the outcome," Adam Nagourney told a crowd that gathered at the Times building. "I'll write other versions too. Four years ago, the legendary Johnny Apple had written an early edition Q-hed analysis on exit polls that turned out to be wrong. And Johnny reacted pretty badly to it. I started writing it, but I'm also writing the other version."

Last Thursday, at the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ annual conference, Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped by the Waldorf-Astoria to deliver brief remarks to a ballroom about two-thirds full. Having just finished with a press conference on the fiscal crisis, he targeted his opening joke at The New York Times with a quip that seemed to capture the newspaper industry’s woes.

“Now it costs a $1.50, and it’s about an inch-and-a-half narrower,” Mr. Bloomberg said of a daily copy of The Times. “I think you must have misunderstood—in this economy I’ve asked New Yorkers to do more with less, not charge more for less.  read more »

At the old Times building at 1 Times Square, there was an electric “zipper” running up the side of the building that New Yorkers used to consult to find results. This time, the first ever election night at the new 8th Avenue Times Tower, the building is opening itself up for two hours for a panel session with Times editors and writers.

The panel is taking place at the TimesCenter, the ground floor auditorium that fits 378. Tickets are available to Times readers (and lots of WQXR listeners who have been bombarded with ads for the event!) for $80 a pop and attendees are treated to a buffet afterwards that includes free beer, hot dogs and popcorn.  read more »

Writing for The Big Money, Chadwick Matlin, asks, "The election is over. What happens to the political press?" (This comes via Jim Romenesko.)

To find out, Mr. Matlin asked The New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller what happens after November 4th. Mr. Keller once again asserted that there will be no more job cuts at The Times. He also explained how the paper will save money starting November 5th:

[t]here will be some significant cost savings, mainly thanks to the fact that we are not traveling with a whole constellation of candidates, often sharing the pooled cost of pricey private campaign aircraft.  read more »

This week in The New Yorker, Ian Parker profiles Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times columnist and bestselling author Thomas L. Friedman. The story, which is not currently online, is the latest of Mr. Parker's killer profiles (cf., Baldwin, Alec; Clooney, George; bonobos, sexy), and is chockablock with the great scenes from the Arctic Circle to Washington, D.C., to backstage at Late Show with David Letterman.

Here's Mr. Parker on Mr. Friedman's working method for both his column and his book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded:

He works without a research assistant, and he writes at all times. 'Ann [Friedman, Mr. Friedman's wife] drives and I work in the car.  read more »