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I can speak in absolutes about the quality of his work. No one reported the Middle East with greater clarity and nuance than Shadid. No one brought the humanity of the people of the region, people who live in a perpetual state of stress even when they are living in the comparative comfort of Beirut and Tel Aviv, to the wider world with a surer touch than Anthony.

He could have coasted on his one great advantage — fluency in Arabic — to beat other reporters to the story. He did not. He used it as a foundation to serve readers — and help colleagues. When I left Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam, a sizeable part of my heart was left behind with new friends who were struggling to make the country a better place. Amid the constant shifts in the chaotic post-war era, Anthony's dispatches were the ones I relied on to give me the complete picture of what was happening around the country.

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It’s not a hard task to figure out whom Brooks is really criticizing: Occupy Wall Street. But it's not alone. The democratization of ideology is vastly more tempting to the self-inventing liberal left than to the authoritarian right. Nobody does emotionally consistent talking points like the conservative right. Nobody does "whatever floats your boat" like the liberal left. The belief that every man is a philosopher makes progressives vastly more vulnerable to the destructive dynamic Brooks describes. It is an irony Brooks would appreciate that the left acts more like the right believes (and vice versa).

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These are the major unasked -- but resoundingly answered -- questions to emerge from two much-discussed articles about the future of American manufacturing. One is a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly about why jobs are being shipped overseas. It concludes that "to solve all the problems that keep people from acquiring skills would require tackling the toughest issues our country faces" -- the first of those being "a broken educational system." The second and even more talked about article comes from the New York Times. It looked at why Apple Computer has moved its production facilities overseas, concluding in sensationalistic fashion that "it isn't just that workers are cheaper abroad" but that America "has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need."

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Fact-check politicians? Here’s how H.L. Mencken saw things in 1924: “If any genuinely honest and altruistic politician had come to the surface in my time I’d have heard of him, for I have always frequented newspaper offices, and in a newspaper office the news of such a marvel would cause a dreadful tumult.”

Mencken could recall no such excitement. “The unanimous opinion of all the journalists that I know, excluding a few Liberals who are obviously somewhat balmy,” he added “… is that since the days of the national Thors and Wotans, no politician who was not out for himself, and himself alone, has ever drawn the breath of life in the United States.”

Alas, such attitudes went out of fashion with snap-brim fedoras, smoke-filled rooms and bottles of rye in desk drawers. Today’s national political reporters have attended fancy colleges, regard their professional affiliations as valuable status symbols, hence give every sign of identifying more with Washington courtiers and political professionals than the great unwashed.

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Wait, no, that's not quite right. Shockingly, on at least a superficial level, Krugman and Brooks agree: Mitt's business experience as a private equity wheeler and dealer tells us nothing about whether he'd be a good president.

Krugman's argument is simple: A country is not a corporation. What might make sense for the corporate bottom line -- for example, cutting costs by laying off employees and outsourcing production to foreign countries -- makes little sense for a nation. Krugman then moves into a familiar discussion of the downsides of austerity, a topic that, whether or not you agree with Keynesian economic policy, is at least relevant to the question at hand.

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For example: David Brooks, whose most annoying schtick is to write something that sounds reasonable until you realize what he's actually arguing (like, for example, "people often don't intervene when they see something horrible happening" is a very interesting point, unless your real point is that this is because of hippies and the terrible '60s), wrote earlier this month that American income equality is overstated, and that the real income gap worth examining is that between the college-educated upper middle class, who are doing well, and those with only a high school education, who have been left behind by our post-industrial economy. (In this case Brooks' "actual" point is that "Blue inequality" is merely the resentment of educated liberals who hate success while "Red states" have the real authentic American inequality.)

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As Modern Love’s creator, Dan Jones, writes in the show’s introduction:

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"The Morning After" -- the book that first rape-hysteria piece became -- has given way to "Groundhog Day."

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The narrative proceeded in a familiar fashion: There were villains, even some with military ties; then there is a rescue. Kristof tweeted, "Girls are rescued, but still very scared Youngest looks about 13, trafficked from Vietnam." And then, "Social workers comforting the girls, telling them they are free, won't be punished, rapes are over." He was accompanied by Cambodian anti-trafficking activist and forced-prostitution survivor Somaly Mam. Post-presidential niece Lauren Bush chimed in perkily, "Awesome reporting by @NickKristof as the (sic) raided a brothel in Cambodia with @SomalyMam this morning!"

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"Limn" returned in Tuesday's review of Amy Waldman's anticipated first novel "The Submission," in a comparison between Waldman and the work of Tom Wolfe. "Unlike Mr. Wolfe, Ms. Waldman tends to favor sympathy over satire when it comes to limning her characters’ feelings and motivations," Kakutani observed.

Limn-spotters had noticed that Kakutani's usage had trailed off -- this is just the second time we could find it in one of her reviews this year, and the first time since a March review of a book about the myths of George Washington.

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The accompanying story, written by Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, detailed a group of Somali insurgents accused both of blocking Western aid to the country, resulting in a severe famine, and of imprisoning refugees trying to flee to safety. Half a million Somali children are "on the verge of starvation," Gettleman reports. The photo itself -- by Times photographer Tyler Hicks and spread large across four columns on Page One -- was taken in Banadir Hospital, which Gettleman described as such:

Every morning, emaciated parents with emaciated children stagger into Banadir Hospital, a shell of a building with floors that stink of diesel fuel because that is all the nurses have to fight off the flies. Babies are dying because of the lack of equipment and medicine. Some get hooked up to adult-size intravenous drips -- pediatric versions are hard to find -- and their compromised bodies cannot handle the volume of fluid.

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Let's start with Blankfein: This week, he was the subject of a glowing New York magazine profile that reimagined the vampire-squid investment bank as an oppressed victim of undue criticism.

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Arkes saw opposing sex-selective abortion as a tactical maneuver, not a remotely feminist act, and 17 years later his strategy has taken hold. Antiabortion legislators are using the prevalence of sex selection in Asia to justify restrictions on abortion in the United States. Bans on sex-selective abortion have passed in four states -- Illinois, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Arizona -- and been proposed in five others this year -- Massachusetts, Rhode Island, West Virginia, New York and New Jersey. These bills are filled with language intended to set a precedent for declaring a fetus equivalent to a life.

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We're apt to believe Carr (who didn't respond to an email from us) and write the whole thing off as a jokey misfire and desperate Fox campaigning. But we were interested in where that wonderful, vividly demeaning expression -- "dance of the low, sloping foreheads" -- came from.

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I always wondered where that strange impulse came from, and now thanks to a new exhibit, "What's Cooking, Uncle Sam?" at the National Archives, I think I know. The New York Times ran a piece yesterday about the show, which focuses on posters, videos and other media from the Department of Agricultural, spanning all the way back to the revolutionary war.

The most fascinating of these photos is called "Pig Cafeteria":

The caption reads:

"The Pig Cafeteria" was an exhibit produced by the Department of Agriculture to educate farmers about new methods of farming and raising livestock — specifically, what to feed pigs so that they would be healthy and profitable.

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That said, the Times piece does include one important (if buried, decontextualized and unrecognized) piece of genuine news. It concerns a subtle-yet-insidious shift in the Pentagon's child-focused propaganda -- one that opens the military up to charges of rank hypocrisy.

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That's why he's created "Bloomsday Burst," an experiment in turning James Joyce's epic "Ulysses" into a handful of tweets representing each chapter of the 600-1,000 page book. Stephen's project has its own New York Times blurb, which is really a coup for a publication that just discovered Tumblr last year.  According to his rules:

All volunteers need to do is choose a section, or several, from the 18 episodes, structured loosely on Homer’s epic, "then thoughtfully, soulfully, fancifully compose a series of 4-6 tweets to represent that section."

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