Zvi Mowshowitz's new policy is not to link to the New York Times, and he's willing to entertain the policy of not linking to NYT reporters' Twitters (though hasn't pulled the trigger yet). I understand where he's coming from -- Cade Metz's piece on Scott Alexander was really, really not good.

Scott Aaronson has a numbered list of 14 theses issues and won't talk with Cade Metz, even to explain quantum complexity, without a full explanation on how the piece on Slate Star Codex happened. Also understandable; the article really was quite bad.

Then there's social pressure going around not to read the Times. I think this is a mistake. It is important to understand what rhetoric the paper chooses to use, for the same reason that it's important to occasionally look at what's happening on the other side of a chessboard. I wouldn't claim it's in the top-5 most important things to read to understand the world (or even the top 10), but I believe it's part of a complete breakfast a useful exercise, at least sometimes. Certainly it's a good skill to train.

Today, I was holding a physical copy of the Times's international edition -- mostly by accident -- which was a surprisingly good opportunity to practice the technique of carefully separating substance from spin. The rest of this post is a worked example of this 'careful reading' technique on the front-page article that happened to catch my eye. Let's read the Times!

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Here's the article (NYT paywall, of course, and I don't know if the online edition matches the print international edition, sorry).

First, ignore the headline entirely.

Then, read each paragraph. Read slowly,

Ross Douthat (no relation) has a great piece in the New York Times yesterday, profiling (and stereotyping, yes) the three kinds of anti-vaxxers you meet (if, y'know, you're the sort of person who meets lots of anti-vaxxers):

So the philosophical issues are tangled: Just as the anti-vaxx idea cuts across the partisan divide, so do the reasons for its flourishing cut across ideological visions of how best to organize society, how people should relate to the local, the national, the corporate, what kinds of dissent are healthy and what forms we should prefer dissent to take. This is good news, in a way, because (to return to where I began) it makes the issue very unlikely to ever polarize along partisan lines. But it also makes it a hard phenomenon to wrestle into submission, because however misguided it’s