view of life in the big city. On Ja 2 07 the Times featured a small
roster of 15 weddings. No black people. No Hispanics. No South
Asians. One homosexual couple. Hispanics are the most invisible of
New Yorkers. They rarely appear in the Sunday Styles section despite
being the city's largest ethnic group. Otherwise this was a pretty
boring collection of couplings. As the Leonard Koppett of wedding news
the only statistic that emerges from this week's reports is that 7 of
the 30 people involved went to law school or were going to law school.
Was this part of the paper ever interesting? There's an unsurprising
piece about happy nerds at Google and two stories about those darn baby
boomers.
Two heirs to a cosmetic fortune are featured in a fashion piece that
threatens the Wall of Separation between editorial and advertising.
Maybe they're friends of someone who writes for the paper as a regular
reader might often suspect when reading this part of the Times. Is
there any other reason for the short feature about two astrologers from
Detroit? There is a scary picture of Suzanne Bartsch in an article
about losing expensive jewelry at an expensive beach. Maybe she did a
favor for someone?
The ThursdayStyles section is utterly hopeless, but what the
SundayStyles wants to do is not so bad: create a cast of characters
and types that suggest what the hip parts of the city are like, sort of
Lake Wobegon on the Hudson. British newspapers are very good at this.
The Times is not.
