Personal Dork Assistant

East Coast Bias

The New York Times Sunday Magazine played up the matriarchal Gray Lady to the hilt this week. The cover boy was Gavin Newsom, the dyslexic wunderkind. He's the kooky-mayor of kooky-town San Francisco, symbolic of the kooky cast of characters vying to replace the Arnold-The-Governator in kooky California. A place far, far away from New York in every way. To emphasize the off-the-cliff nature of the Golden State, Jerry Brown is resurrected as a governor candidate, but now Governor Moonbeam plays the role as the voice-of-reason.

Inside the cover (or down the webpage, nowadays), we have another stereotype: the plucky Midwestern farmer. But for the post-modern twist, it's an African-American farmer promoting urban gardens and sustainable food in the inner-city. In a more commercial vein, an oh-so-British World War 2 poster urging Keep Calm is exploited by modern hipsters to form an oh-so-relevant message in line with our times. (It helps that the poster design is in the public domain.)

In a nod to Independence Day, there's a personal story of a grandmother experiencing her grandson's graduation from Marine Corps Officer School. But just to put the New York spin on it:

This is the true story of a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist Jewish woman who recently spent two days at the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Va., and survived, almost intact.

All the stories were interesting and well-written (well, better than anything I've ever come up with, anyway), but there's just that whiff of holier-than-thou condescension that really annoys some folks. The haters can revel in the death of newspapers, but hopefully there will still be a place for thoughtful, investigative, long-form articles available somewhere where I can read them. I might even be convinced to pitch in a few bucks, maybe.