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Bill Keller

off the record

jill-abramsonWEB

Puppy Love for Jill Abramson

The news of buyouts the Times was just one element of the perfect storm of press that descended upon Ms. Abramson last week, including a Ken Auletta New Yorker profile and a deluge of critical slobbering over her recently released “dogoir,” The Puppy Diaries. It was reviewed in the Thursday arts section and in The Read More

Our City Since

Refreshing the Paper of Record

Fiona Spruill was on the subway headed to work from her apartment on the Upper West Side when the first plane went in. Web production for The New York Times was her first job after graduating from Duke and she, then 24, had recently been promoted to digital news editor.

By the time she got to the web newsroom, then housed a few blocks from the paper’s historic home on West 43rd Street, it was evident that news was breaking. But the overnight editor and the business editor, the only others in the office, were in a state of confusion. They were seeing things on television, but the reports were unconfirmed, and they conflicted. Read More

writers

Waldman Amy (credit Pieter M. van Hattem)

Amy Waldman’s The Submission: Not a 9/11 Novel

Amy Waldman did not read most of the 9/11 novels before she started writing her own. DeLillo, Amis, Updike, Foer—she didn’t need to read them. Ms. Waldman was in New York on the day itself, in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and in South Asia as the United States dug in to combat in Iraq. Having watched the new world order evolve both here and abroad, the book that she eventually decided to write is more a synthesis of her firsthand experience as a reporter than an examination of collective memory. But what’s remarkable about her new counterfactual novel about the World Trade Center, The Submission, is that it will likely be remembered as one of the first satires of post-9/11 New York City: a place where tragedy is exploited by the ambitious and powerful to self-interested ends. Read More

Fitness & Health

mitt1

Mitt Romney’s Iowa Diet

While schmoozing around the Iowa State Fair today, Mitt Romney did more conspicuous eating-for-the-cameras than Calista Flockhart at a Yankees game. Food is a great prop, right? Hand-held fair food is basically the opposite of

A corn dog.

A hot dog.

He was, sadly, Read More

Opening Shot

Breivick.

How to Get a Better Reaction Than #AlloftheDiscussed

Two things tend to be givens in the modern-day 24-hour news cycle: One, that something sad and tragic will invariably happen; and two, that when something sad and tragic happens, someone with a large social media following will not hesitate to immediately crack an inappropriate joke about it. (Too soon? Never on Read More

Opener

Rapture Schmapture: This Week’s Real Storm

We can all breathe a sigh of relief, now that the judgment has come down and failed to derail the future of humanity. Yes, The Hangover II will open today, despite the best efforts of Mike Tyson's copyright-happy tattoo artist to stand between America and her traditional Memorial Day blockbuster featuring full-frontal male nudity.

While Read More

Opener

That’ll Do, Week, That’ll Do

"French warplanes" is a phrase you don't hear too often, so when we read it on the front page of The New York Times on Sunday, we knew it was time for another friendly invasion, or at least the punishing imposition of another no-fly zone, which given the deployment of the notoriously non-bellicose French pilots, Read More

Internal Memo

Internal Memo: Les Hinton

I have little recollection of my time as head of News International. I simply do not know or do not remember the circumstances relating to the hacking of various voice-mail accounts of sundry royals, officials and celebrities that occurred four years ago, which is quite a long time. At the same time, I do not Read More