It’s been many years since I’ve read The New York Times. Like most readers, I got discouraged by the shrinking page size, the self-confident erroneousness that becomes apparent whenever America's newspaper of record covers a topic I’m familiar with, and the lack of a comics page. Sure there are occasions when you can’t avoid it—usually when enough people are complaining about an article or when somebody I know is in the paper—but on a daily basis I follow the golden rule that life is just too short for The New York Times.
So imagine my surprise the other day when, challenged by a third-world Internet connection and enticed by an old-school six-column page width, I picked up a $2.65 copy of the International Herald Tribune, which partially reprints The New York Times, only to discover that the paper a) no longer bundles that day’s edition of the Beirut Daily Star (my actual purpose in buying it), b) has jettisoned the last memory of its fabled Big Apple namesake by calling itself “The Global Edition of The New York Times” and c) features the kind of groupthink rarely seen outside a French parochial school.
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