Two Notes on the Times

The New York Times deals with the threat to traditional print media from the ever-growing digital age by having a search engine that seems to work, but which is no good at finding anything specific or recent. Thus -- I assume this is their hope -- readers will give up in disgust at trying to find anything useful on the Times's website, and go back to reading the paper the way they're supposed to.

Today's example: I want to note two pieces I read in this morning's print Times -- to send traffic to the paper; to increase, if only very slightly, its visibility. But finding those articles is never easy. Searching by author or by date is nearly always useless; if you want to find something, you need to dig through the recycling bag and get the exact title.

But these minor problems couldn't stop me long, and so:

1) It's been longer than I can remember since I read something by a self-identified Republican and actually agreed with it. But David Frum's "The Vanishing Republican Voter" is smart about economics -- and how economics is actually affecting real people -- in a way that I haven't seen recently. If there was a presidential candidate talking like Frum, I wouldn't be leaning towards a Democrat for the first time in my adult life.

2) But I generally can't manage to finish reading an edition of the Times without wanting to bop someone on the head, and today was no exception. The culprit this time was Gregory Cowles's always-arch "Inside the List" column, which led off with wide-eyed wonder at the #1 placement of a mere tie-in novel, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, along with some snarky comments about the various Star Wars books on other lists. It's no surprise that the Times is once again dismissive of the books that people actually read and like -- they continually gerrymander their lists in fruitless attempts to root out any books like that -- but Cowles also manages to completely misunderstand what gaming has become over the last two decades. It's an impressive bit of complete cultural illiteracy in a few paragraphs, and I recommend it to any fans of mandarin stupidity.

(And, on the other side, congratulations to Sean Williams and the Del Rey/Lucasbooks team for getting a #1 Times bestseller. I know the first Timothy Zahn book hit #1 -- way back when from Bantam -- and I think one or two of the movie novels did as well, but it's an uncommon, impressive feat.)