Major Problems In American Journalism

Hugo Lindgren is leaving the New York Times Magazine.

While it’s only of symbolic importance, the way I’ll get an initial take on the replacement is whether she or he immediately replaces “the one page magazine,” which constitutes the biggest insult to readers that doesn’t involve signing Richard Cohen’s paychecks in American journalism today.  While pretty much none of it (with a partial exception of Batali’s drink recommendations) is good, I’d in particular like to single out the thing where they do a point-by-point comparison of people with vaguely similar names.  In theory, it’s less funny than Tim Allen reading obituaries, and in practice it’s somehow worse.  I’ve never understood why they didn’t skip the middleman and just replace it with a picture of Lindgren flipping the bird at his readers rather than forcing some staffer to waste a perfectly good 45 seconds coming up with a new one every week.