Boozing with Hillary

Go on, NY Times editors, why not just come right out and say that Hillary was drunk?

"And then there was Wednesday night’s airborne bourbon swig in front of reporters on her plane, with Mrs. Clinton holding court for the diminishing press pool accompanying her.
Fernando Suarez, a reporter for CBS News who has been traveling with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign since October, asked her if she had ever been to Mount Rushmore before her visit there earlier in the day. Mrs. Clinton said she in fact had.
'Before you were born,' she added, looking at Mr. Suarez, who is 29, and noting that 'I did a lot of things before you were born.'
She swirled the bourbon in her glass and nodded mischievously.
'And thank god you weren’t around,' Mrs. Clinton continued. 'Or I wouldn’t have enjoyed any of them.'"

This, from an article entitled "High Spirits for a Battler Who Is Low on Delegates"....

NY Times trending poorer?

Much has been made about the NY Times and their focus on the consumer preferences of exceedingly rich people, while ignoring real people and their concerns. Editors at the Times have denied any slant in their reporting.

Now, we have a Thursday Styles section that includes two articles about less expensive consumer options: "Dress for Less and Less" by Eric Wilson and "Penny Pinching Looks Great" by David Colman. This follows on the Sunday metro section cover story "Starting Salaries but New York Tastes", which included a young New Yorker who left her wardrobe back in Nebraska and received periodic boxes from her mother instead of shopping for new clothes in Manhattan.

Can we say that the NY Times is trending poorer?

Emily

Of all the thousands of webposts, NYTimes.com comments and gawker.com attempts to suck pageviews out of Emily Gould, this one was the most memorable to me:

David Williams Says: May 22nd, 2008 at 1:46
pm
I must tell you that I’m a 68-year-old man who has never read a blog before or posted a comment on one. But I just read your piece in the New York Times magazine, and it left me with such a storm of feelings I have been moved to seek you out.
First, the piece reminded me of much of the “new journalism” of the 1960’s. One of the principal sources of that kind of writing was Esquire magazine, which in those days was the most exciting and interesting
magazine in the world, unlike the superficial and irrelevant waste of paper it has since become. The modus operandi of the editor, Harold Hayes, as he himself described it, was to contract the best writers in the country and let them write about anything they wanted. The result was a vibrant voice that no publication has achieved since. For years I’ve yearned for some contemporary equivalent — a source of insightful, perceptive writing illuminating the times we live in. Your NYT piece is precisely that. And I love it.
At nearly 69, I’ve felt tremendously deprived not to be able to enter the world your generation lives in via the observations and insights of one of its members. (That was what the “new journalism” and especially the Esquire of the 1960s and very early ’70s provided for my generation. Your piece, for instance, reminds me a little of James Baldwin’s account of his relationship with Norman Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks At The White Boy.” Much of the best of that Esquire can be found in the wonderful, voluminous collection the magazine put out at the end of the ’60s, Smiling Through The Apocalypse.) I’m so grateful to have discovered a writer who again unlocks my mind and opens my eyes and takes me into the world she inhabits. As a minor example, it was so satisfying to get to know a young woman with tattoos; I’ve wondered for years who these people are, what do tattoos, which in my generation labelled the resentful and disaffected, mean to this generation, what would an attractive young woman with tattoos be like? And as someone who loves the art of writing, your hyper-insightful, wonderfully written piece gives me hope that that art has not been smothered to death by the embrace of the academy.
And, to get personal (as befits a blog, I guess), you also broke my heart. Three years ago I left New York after living for 37 years on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, spending several summers on Fire Island, and your voice spoke to me of that world, that life, in a way that so beautifully evoked not only the City but its best inhabitants — the young, curious, eager persons I knew when I was young there. It probably is not irrelevant that your photo reminds me very much of the love of my life, a very smart, very talented, funny and rambunctious young woman, a resident of the Village, in those days still the place for those with literary and other artistic ambitions. To be reminded of all that was painful, and sad, but, still, to have those feelings in relation to the world you live in makes the world I lived in come alive again in my mind.
Thanks for the memories.

From Emily's personal blog

Bill Simmons phoning it in

Fans of Bill Simmons ("The Sports Guy") have noticed that his columns on espn.com have become less and less frequent and that his podcasts have become more and more irrelevant and self-referential. His last column on Page 2 of espn.com is a collection of random thoughts without any attempt at a sustained thesis. His last few podcasts have been about reality television, his friend Jacko's song, written by the band Theocracy and Chuck Klosterman's stay in Germany at the University ofLeipzig. His last conversation with Klosterman barely touched on the sports world, with a discussion of the NBA playoffs and the (seemingly) inevitable Lakers v. Celtics final.

Deadspin has theorized that Simmons is disenchanted with the restrictions imposed on his work by his corporate employer, specifically on the cancelled podcast with Barack Obama (which, obviously, is a huge get for an internet writer/podcaster).