The Times actually fact-checked that New Yorker cover

If you read the New York Times’ recent article titled “White House Rattled by a Military Aide’s Positive Coronavirus Test” online, you might have noticed a somewhat puzzling paragraph. It’s just two sentences long, and it starts promisingly enough — here’s sentence one of two:

Solving the New Yorker’s Costco shopping mystery

Helen Rosner, writing on March 5 about her recent visit to Costco, observes an interesting consumer preference and offers a potential explanation:

The irony of Trump’s “locker room talk”

As has been well-documented, our dearly beloved President-elect — the one with an ironic penchant for safe spaces — repeatedly took refuge during his election campaign in the proverbial locker room. Every time he did, I could not help but recall a semi-prescient New Yorker cover originally published back on June 1, 2015:

Tablet Magazine could use either a quick lesson in geometry, or free comments

Tablet Magazine’s article about Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, “The Singapore Story is the Israel Story“, was published on March 25. Here’s a thing that it says:

How impotent has media coverage of O’Reilly’s reporting been?

When Brian Williams was revealed as a fraud, I couldn’t help but wonder about one thing: https://twitter.com/mntreiger/status/563505842100908032 Now that Bill O’Reilly has been similarly exposed, I have precisely the same question — but even more so. Consider this extended excerpt from an article about Media Matters, the organization responsible for discovering several of O’Reilly’s fabrications:

Corrigendum for Above the Law: Endangered Eagles edition

[Yes, I am getting exceedingly lazy with these titles of late.]

About a month ago, Above the Law published an article about eagle feathers. More specifically, it discussed whether the Supreme Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby (which recognized the company’s claim for a  religious exception to secular laws) will be extended to Native American tribes who wish to use eagle feathers in religious ceremonies despite their protection under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. In the form of an aside, the article made a good point:

My plan to defeat JetBlue’s new baggage fees

Free checking is one of the best things JetBlue has going for it (after satellite TV; I have now spent two consecutive post-winter break flights watching Seahawks Championship Game highlights). But on November 19, JetBlue cut legroom and, for the first time, began charging passengers to check bags onto its flights.

I’m less interested in why the airline made that decision — the New Yorker has a great breakdown, “Why Airlines Want to Make You Suffer” — and more interested in whether it actually made that decision at all. You see, when I checked into my JetBlue flight a week and a half ago, here’s what I saw:

Complete guide to spelling the holiday

While some are looking to tomorrow’s special event as some sign of apocalypse, I’d be the first to admit that I’m pretty excited for the coincidence of Thanksgiving and Chanuka. What better way to celebrate Thanksgiving than by encroaching upon its native turf? (Zing.)

This post was prompted by a recent email that turned up in my inbox, with a deceptively-simple subject line — one word: “Thanksgivikah.” I didn’t think much of it as I got to typing my reply, but the moment I pressed send, I noticed something a little off. You see, I had concluded my email in kind, by wishing the recipient a “Happy Thanksgivvukah!” and couldn’t help but do a double-take at my own spelling of the word: Two v’s? That couldn’t possibly be right.

Or could it?

Two years ago, this blog thoroughly covered the debate over the proper spelling of Hanuka/Chanuka/Hanukah/Chanukah/Hanukkah/Chanukkah/Hanukka/Chanukka in a post titled Google’s War on ‘Chanuka’. One of the highlights of that post was Avidan Ackerson’s deterministic finite automaton that helped define all of the possibilities (for Google to declare war against).

This year, Avidan and I have again teamed up to compile all the possible spellings of the seemingly-simple but deceptively-diverse portmanteau of Thanksgiving and Chanuka. Behold, DFA v2.013:

The understatement of last year

My propensity for reading back-issues of just about everything is well-documented; this adventure in outdated print material takes us to the February 7, 2011 edition of The New Yorker, which included a 6500-word essay on crowd safety by John Seabrook.

In the course of exploring the human crush, it discussed specific incidents in which the failure to properly control crowds led to fatalities, including the Hillsborough Stadium incident of 1989 (pictured above), the Walmart Blitz Day incident of 2008, and the Love Parade incident of 2010:

Last July, twenty-one people were killed at the Love Parade, a free electronic-music festival Diusburg, Germany, when a crush developed in a disused rail tunnel that led to the festival grounds.

But Seabrook wasn’t done. Toward the end of the article, he revisited the Love Parade:

Last word on The Hunger Games

Finally. I’ve been promising this post for three weeks now, and sitting on it for even longer.

I read The Hunger Games in late March, and watched the corresponding movie a few days later. I’d been aware of the series for years, but what finally got me to read it was dread of a spoiler (a la Fight Club and Citizen Kane).

Now, this isn’t a review, but I will begin by sharing one brief opinion to help establish the facts of this post.

I thought The Hunger Games was enjoyable – if not exactly high literature – but when I walked out of the theater, I was struck by the sense that the series’ success had less to do with Suzanne Collins’ skill in crafting a story than her ability to establish a gripping premise. Or, as I put it at the time:

I know I'm like four years/two weeks too late, but the Hunger Games is about 90% premise & 10% execution. This is both true and a pun

— Mordechai Treiger (@mntreiger) April 4, 2012

Get it? Because a lot of people get executed lol

Little did I know that even these words of faint praise may have given Collins too much credit.