It’s the word “losses.”  What exactly makes that plural?  There has only been one Democratic loss lately, but the way it’s echoing across the continent it seems to have compounded.
Is it the gigantic Congressional majorities gained between 2006 and 2008?  Barack Obama’s sizeable margin of victory?  The string of Democratic pickups in special elections, culminating [...]

Sometimes the op-ed spread of the Sunday Times is like when you open a crypt and you get that chilly gust of stale air.  (And really, who hasn’t raided a mausoleum from time to time?)  Today is one of those days.
Three of the four columnists are off today.  I’m sure they’re all at the Vineyard.  [...]

This was fairly delicious, even if the self-examination is restricted to the most frivolous arena possible.
This was really good.  Normally, I hate these things.
Is there any doubt at all that Maureen Dowd is in it to get invited to stuff?  Expressing awe at the people you write about should kind of be beneath a Pulitzer [...]

ZOMG, ZOMG, ZOMG, WTF.  This is vomitorious and hilariawful and just plain embarrassing.
Although I want to restrain myself from making unprovable claims that subtly reinforce just how great I not-so-secretly think I am, in my as-yet unpublished book’s first chapter the characters lament how myopic the New York Times is and how they can’t write [...]

There’s nothing important going on in the world and, what the hell, Kristof’s got the Middle East and Asia covered, so Tom Friedman decided to write a column extolling Tom Watson for his good round of golf while being old.  My cliche count registers at a four (including the title, “59 Is the New 30,” [...]

Check it:
Others speculated that Ms. Palin, eying the White House in 2012, plans to complete and then hawk her memoir (for which she reportedly had been seeking a seven-figure advance) and also increase her visibility along with her war chest by accepting lucrative speaking engagements — activities not so easily managed by a chief executive [...]

It takes me several days to meander through the minefield that is the Sunday NYT, but there sure was a shitty article on Pakistan in the Week in Review this week.  It contains what may be my least favorite lacuna of modern journalism: describing x region or y country as living in some other, distant [...]

Ben Stein, whose economic crystal ball could use some ClearEyes, has written a column expressing skepticism that the stimulus will work.  His is not the reasoned, Krugman-esque anxiety that Tim Geither and Larry Summers are too incrementalist and enmeshed in Wall Street’s ways to execute real reform; it’s just caustic whispers grounded in the theory [...]

When I was in [all-boys, Catholic] high school, we read a book called Meeting the Living God by William O’Malley, a Jesuit priest and actor (he played Father Dyer in The Exorcist).  I remember that in a discussion of the importance of faith, atheism is basically treated as a flippant, insincere idea batted around at [...]