No matter how many reasons there might be for doing so, I cannot give up my New York Times habit. I must have it every morning, and if for some reason I don't get I feel like the world is going on without me. The habit started when I moved back from Canada in 2000 and started adjuncting at Michigan State. In Canada I had gotten into the habit of reading the Toronto Globe & Mail every morning at Tim Horton's, and when I came back it seemed like the best equivalent in the States was the NYT. Though people from around here, evangelically-oriented Grand Rapids, tend to look down their noses at it, I have gained an invaluable education from my daily perusal of its pages. Its supposed liberal bias is much exaggerated by the Fox News folks, and though it has declined in some areas, and has had problems with journalistic malfeasance in recent years, I think that I could make a pretty good argument that it still at least tries to hold to the highest standards in of journalistic ethics and comprehensive coverage. In other words, it is far from perfect, but it is still the best we've got (admittedly I do not look at such papers at the LA Times on a regular basis). The San Francisco Chronicle is good in certain ways, but not as consistently readable as NYT.

Anyway, today's paper is just one example of what I am talking about. Fridays are my favorite NYT days, but this morning was just superb: A "Listening With Ornette Coleman" piece in the Weekend Arts section (I didn't know he was still alive!); a very balanced review (more balanced than I would have been) of the new movie "Jesus Camp"; an essay by William Grimes on the latest books about reading, e.g., Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer"; and continuation of a series on the relationship between political campaigns and churches in America. The op-ed page is always a mish-mash of points of view, with David Brooks taking the bourgeois-conservative angle, John Tierney representing Libertarians, Thomas Friedman covering international issues in his sometimes off-putting but always thought-provoking way, Paul Krugman smashing the Bush administration for one thing or another, and Maureen Dowd being alternately too-cute and piercingly acute. What more can one ask for in a daily newspaper that is always available by 6:30 in the heart of the heartland?