New york times

What are newspapers for? The answer, of course, is not just to tell us what's going on and explain the implications, but also to select the most important items from the background noise. Over the last few years, though, we've started to get our news in a different way: through Google, where selections are made on the basis of a constantly evolving algorithm, and through social media sites where news stories are recommended by friends. Throughout this change, Google has argued vociferously that it is not a publisher. Particularly in Europe, issues such as privacy, copyright and the right to be forgotten have led it to claim that it's simply a platform, and no more involved in the content it hosts than is a newsagent.

If any of you sees Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, walking around with a begging bowl in his hand, it’s because he took me to dinner recently. I sort of went a bit nuts with the wine and the VF chief ended up with the bill. We went to a new Bagel restaurant, Chevalier, a futuristic marvel with great food and wine and even grander prices. New York is no longer elegant, and there are no longer society types dressed to the nines sitting on the banquettes and downing Manhattans. The Jewish ascendancy that downed the Wasps was as elegant as the one it replaced. William Paley, John Loeb and others like them dressed at Anderson & Sheppard, were shod by John Lobb, and had their shirts made by Sulka. They had exquisite manners and aped their predecessors.

What is it about a nuclear deal with Iran that induces hysteria in certain quarters of the West?  In recent weeks, editors at both the New York Times and the Washington Post have seen fit to run op-eds calling for preemptively bombing Iran, apparently under the impression that preventive war has not yet received a fair shake.  Sure, Iraq didn’t work out, but why quit now?  By ensuring that the American people and their leaders do not overlook the possibility of giving war one more chance in Iran, these newspapers are presumably performing a public service.    In the Times, John Bolton, Dr. Strangelove with an unkempt moustache, describes a situation on 'the brink of catastrophe,' entirely attributable to President Obama’s folly.

New York Brooklyn is the hipster heaven of New York, which is perhaps why it was there that a bust of Edward Snowden was unveiled yesterday.  Not that it stayed long.  The bust of the former National Security Agency contractor was put on a pedestal sometime on Monday with the word ‘Snowden’ glued on the base at the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument at Fort Greene Park.  It was taken down a few hours later by parks and recreation employees. I don’t want to read too much into this, but the brief deification and bringing down of Snowden’s image does seem apposite.

Have you noticed how often adults – particularly of the earnest, nagging variety who work in the public sector – are behaving like children? I don't mean acting childishly, but literally behaving like children. Last week delegates to the NUS women’s conference were using ‘jazz-hands’ instead of clapping – in case it should trigger an anxiety attack. I can think of five-year-olds who would squirm at that spectacle. Meanwhile, Brown University in America recently debated sexual assault on campus. A serious topic, but the authorities deemed it necessary to create a 'safe space' full of play-doh, bubbles, calming music and colouring books. Yes, colouring books. But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.

With Katharine Viner guaranteed a final round interview to be the next Guardian editor-in-chief after winning a staff ballot, rumours are circulating that her former colleague Ian Katz is the other horse left in the race. Hot goss: final two in race for Guardian editorship are now @iankatz1000 and @KathViner, insider tells me. — Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) March 13, 2015 Katz left his role as deputy editor of the Guardian to join the BBC as Newsnight editor in 2013. At the time, it was reported that he had grown tired of waiting for Alan Rusbridger to step down as editor. If it is the case that Katz is in the final two, his interview with the Scott Trust should be an interesting one.

The secret of eternal youth, according to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, is arrested development, and the penny dropped last week. The mountains were misty, snow was falling and I went to the dojo for some karate training. I was sparring with a tough, fifth-degree black-belt instructor, Roland, and kept nailing him, something I hadn’t been able to do previously. That’s when it dawned on me. Respecting my advanced age, he was taking a dive. ‘If you don’t stop this crap, I’ll beat the crap out of you,’ I threatened. He didn’t — and nor did I. We ended up laughing and doing kata instead. I felt great after 45 minutes of punching and kicking, but what a bore old age is.

Welcome to 2015, the year that speaking and writing freely had to stop. Anything that might cause trauma to anyone of any race except the white one will be expunged, and the perpetrators of politically incorrect speech or written word will be airbrushed for ever. The word trauma derives from the Greek and means wound. The literary canon will be the first to bite the dust as it’s one big trauma, especially for feminists. The Great Gatsby, for example, is bonfire material because of a variety of scenes ‘that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence’. And let’s not forget The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as racist a book as ever there was — worse than Gone with the Wind.

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 US, had a big fear of too much power put in the central government.

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 the rest of the fleet'.

‘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.