Hello Friend

So, the New York Times. The Times is a junk-rated company with an op-ed page read by certain brands of mean liberals. Rich teenagers are the first group. They get free hard-copy delivery at their boarding schools and are required to read the whole thing, every day, by their liberal professor, Allah. At first they only like the Bono column, but then they think, hey, Tom Friedman is a pretty cool dude with his rich people columns about “green” BlackBerrys he saw while jet-setting in Java and Fiji, and that Maureen Dowd sure is a stitch, and how cool is it that Nicholas Kristof gets to fly to Africa all the time.

In college, however, they start to hate Tom Friedman and throw pies at him. They think Kristof still does an able job but eh, so boring after a while.

As for Maureen Dowd, well, this is the key to everything. Those who go through college and *still* think that Maureen Dowd is funny or witty or worth reading at all, they become the die-hard Times opinion page readers for life. You may know some of these people. They hold mid-size dinner parties with white wine and bruschetta. All of their favorite albums are soundtracks. They complain non-stop about the quality of the produce at their grocery store. And so on.

As for the other group of mean liberals — the ones who discover in college that alliteration isn’t really the best vehicle for humor, and that it’s actually sort of offensive for this Maureen Dowd person to have 800 words in the Paper of Record twice-weekly — they just stop reading the Times op-ed page entirely, and then the other sections, one-by-one, until they’re only checking out NYTimes.com for ~3 minutes each week to study the latest revelations about John Yoo’s torture memos.