New york times

Tuesday

Steerpike

Tony Blair reaches out to Gove

Tony Blair has taken some time out from posing awkwardly with his wife in order to pen a piece for the New York Times. While he tries to avoid getting drawn on talking about UK domestic politics explicitly, his feeling are poorly hidden: ‘…there have grown up powerful interest groups that can stand in the way of substantial and necessary reform. Anyone who has ever tried to reform an education system, for example, knows how tough and bitter a struggle it is. The bureaucracy fights change. The teachers’ unions fight change. The public gets whipped up to defeat change even when it is in the public’s own interest. The nearest

Steerpike Steerpike

Time ticking away for Mark Thompson?

Is the net beginning to tighten on Mark Thompson? The Sunday Times have run a story on either the ex-BBC chief, Savile or Newsnight every week since 28 October, and a picture is emerging that Thompson may have known more than we had previously thought about Newsnight’s now infamous axed investigation of Savile. I hear that Thompson, now the $4 million chief executive of the New York Times, has been forced to postpone two long-standing open meetings with his new colleagues. He was originally going to chair the ‘Town Hall’ meetings on December 17 and 18. These were supposed to have been ‘a chance for as many people as possible to see me

Thursday

Taki

Why don’t any of the sisterhood take up the banner of poor Noor Hussain’s wife?

 New York Here’s a question for you loyal readers: if a hubby asks his wife to cook him a hearty meal of goat meat and she serves him lentils instead, is he within his rights to beat her to death with a stick, as a New Yorker who is on trial this week did? Mind you, Noor Hussain is not a native Noo Yawker, he comes from Pakistan. But he’s as American as, I guess, not apple pie but lentils, which got him in a spot of bother to begin with. Once upon a time immigrants had names that ended in vowels, like Cuomo or LaGuardia; now they’re called Hussain,

Thursday

Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma’s notebook: Teenagers discover Montaigne the blogger

Bard College in upstate New York, where I teach in the spring semester, is an interesting institution, once better known for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll than academic rigour. This has changed, thanks to Bard’s president, Leon Botstein, who conducts orchestras when he is not presiding. This semester, I am teaching a class in literary journalism. I asked my students to write a short essay about their favourite writer of non-fiction. This proved to be difficult for some, since they had no favourite writers of non-fiction; indeed they had never read any literary non-fiction at all for pleasure, certainly not at book length. But several did come up with

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Why does the Guardian only get worked up about the press’s freedom to leak?

Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, has been busy tweeting comments from Jill Abramson, the new executive editor of the New York Times, basically in support of his newspaper’s Snowden disclosures. For some reason, he does not seem as interested in her comments about press freedom given on Newsnight last night. Perhaps this is became New York Times has given the reaction that the Guardian should have: that any involvement of politicians in the regulation of the press is appalling and should be rejected. As Abramson put i:- ‘I think that the press in Britain has more restrictions on it than we do. The framers of our country, in the

Monday

Peter Robins

Foresworn: Jonathan Lethem, Kenneth Tynan, and the unpredictable progress of swearing

For a few days last week, it seemed that Jonathan Lethem had achieved something unique: he had become the first person to use a particular four-letter word – the one beginning with F – in the New York Times. (Sensitive readers should be warned that I will stop using euphemisms after this sentence.) ‘I’m delighted,’ he told Salon’s Laura Miller, who spotted the transgression in an editor’s note to the paper’s glossy style magazine. ‘If I’d had the foresight to make it one of my life’s aspirations, I’d have done so. Instead it lands as dumb luck. My UK friend Dan Fox pointed out that it puts me with John

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Taps for The Washington Post

So it has come to this. The Washington Post, paper of Bradlee and Woodward and Bernstein and all the rest, has been sold to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. For $250m. That, apparently, is roughly the daily fluctuation in the value of Bezos’s Amazon shares. For a man worth more than $20bn, buying the Post is a bit like the rest of us buying a new bicycle. That’s how far – and how fast – the once mighty Post has fallen. Even so, it’s startling that the Grahams, who have owned the paper for 80 years, have decided to sell. As I write at Think Scotland today, the Graham family has ‘sunk their own flagship the better to save

Thursday

Taki

Paul Tudor Jones is the nicest man on Wall Street — so of course the feminists are after him

‘Sexist mores of super-rich hurt us all,’ sobs an American female columnist in the New York Times. I don’t usually follow this kind of drivel — the sexist stuff, I mean — but a familiar name caught my bloodshot eye, so I read further. Apparently the sexist mores of the super-rich were exposed by the hedge-fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, a man who once approached me in the GreenGo nightclub in Gstaad and said to me that I could do worse than invest with him. Paul was polite, a southern gentleman, and was as different from the average fund manager soliciting funds than I am from, say, Anthony Weiner. (He