Sunday Under the New York Times

I tried several times to read the Times on the web, and I can't.

Was it Frank Rich's absence? He was supposed to be there this week and next before he jumps ship to New York, but there's a terse note that says he's taken the week off. Maybe I should, too.

First off, the news is too depressing. Strictly speaking this isn't the Times's fault. I'm overwhelmed by the fighting in the Mideast. To me, that part of the newspaper is the best. These are current reports of what might (but might not) be a monumental turn in history. Sure, I'm annoyed by some excesses, but over all, the effort is awesome. The only trouble is that the wires are doing similar things. It's difficult to rate the offerings against each other.

After the Mideast, the stories go downhill fast. It's disconcerting to read the Times on the web because all the lightweight features keep moving around the front page. It's now you see it, now you don't. The stories remain on the websites, but they are hard to find unless you've saved the URL.

I read about Mitt Romney early, and wrote about it. I don't want to read about a campaign so far in the future, and I especially don't want to read a stenographic account of a candidate's speeches to prospective donors.

Here are some of my rejects:

• Maybe Woody Allen needs to hear that psychiatrists have turned away from Freudian therapy and the talking cure, but I've known that for years. I also know that shrinks long ago turned to drugs, heavy-duty anti-psychotics and mild, soothing tranquilizers. I could look up in two minutes how many billions of these drugs the big drug makers have sold. The Times Story
• Ten percent of the people are left handed. Not much is known about this asymmetry. It's a good thing medical science is pursuing this because you never know where curiosity will lead. But I don't really want to read an update that quotes a 2007 study that says, "This is really still mysterious." The Times Story
• I caught a glimpse of a sports story about weighing high school freshmen for their professional sports potential. I'm not a sports fan, and I couldn't get a fix on the story's point of view, other than the suggestion that something's rotten here. Though I saw a line that Yahoo reported this first, and so I guess this is old news. The Times Story
• How about what Al Sharpton eats for breakfast? Need I say more? The Times Is On It
• One of the most amusing stories was about shark fin soup. The Chinese like the soup, but the sharks are suffering in a big way, and California state laws may be passed to save them. The Times likes these culture clash stories, and so do I, but they have to be exotic. The only trouble with this is that it's a month late. By waiting for the Times to deliver this tidbit, we on the East Coast are missing the beauty of the web to deliver the news from anywhere, in particular the San Francisco Chronicle. The Times Story

You can see how quickly a read can be worn down, but it's Sunday. We have the prime columns.

Maureen Dowd is there, dishing on "tiger blood and Adonis DNA" though she denies it, in a profile contrasting the old Jerry Brown with the new, as governor of California. Both Tom Friedman and Nick Kristof drop in with tortured discussions of what may or may not be wrong with Arab culture. They are more polite and more reasonable than the right-wingers, but even their instant expertise isn't really more helpful.

Long ago, when I bought the Times on paper every Sunday as if it were a religious observance, the Magazine was the prize when we separated the paper into piles of what would be read and what could be thrown out immediately.

The Magazine is under new management, but it sure looked the same as it did during last two new managements. There are a mess of short, chatty features, just like the ones they replaced. There were two long stories. I started the one about Lori Berenson, who was caught up in the troubles in Peru during the days of the Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru movements.

Those groups fought a murderous ideological war against Peruvian society, and Berenson was arrested and jailed for 15 years as a colloborator of the latter. She is cast as a gentle soul, a vegetarian since the age of 8. I don't know if an injustice was done to her, and to what extent she helped friends in the Túpac Amaru, but if the story of one middle-class American woman is worth this 10-page article, what should be written for the 70,000 Peruvians killed during years of violence?