NYT March 4-5

Wednesday, March 4
A modern brief of Gogol’s “Dead Souls” highlights this one. “So You’re Dead? …” describes debt collectors that sound like teenage girls rather than Sly Stallone, and their cautious, manipulative touches on heavy social cues—like being responsible for the peaceful rest of a deceased relative whose debts need to be payed off—to get you to pay. And they won’t break your fingers if you don’t. Often there is no requirement anyway, though that may be on an “if you don’t ask, we won’t tell” basis. “If you plant a seed and leave on a good note, they’ll call back and pay it,” says a top collector, Brenda Edwards. I guess it’s a good, legitimate idea, but it still makes me think of Tchitchikov riding around the Russian countryside on his dead peasant buyout.

Thursday, March 5
Despite the looser, more narrative structure of the Home, Arts, Technology sections, the stories still try to incorporate the economic angle, even though today’s “Tenants of a Vanishing World” seems like it would have been written almost the same way if there were no recession. It’s basically just a story about the curious apartment world of NYC. The O’Neals have been renting a house-size apartment in a Florentine style building on Broadway since the 70s and renting laws have kept their rate at about 2,500 a month when it would cost 28,000 a month to start a new rent in the building. The recession angle is slipped in here because now the owners, long considering selling to someone who would convert the place to condos, may be even more pressed to do so now. But the O’Neals have faith in NYC rent laws, and so the rest of the story is mostly a colorful depiction of their mildly bohemian lifestyle.
The front page has an interesting bit on Obama’s hair—is it going gray or is there some underhanded, theatrical dying tainting the president’s claim to transparency? I noticed as far back as a year ago that his hair was partially gray, but not noticeably so when the cut was fresh. This story has to be some kind of way of respectfully laughing at Obama. The president’s barber says “we do not tease about the gray hair at all,” but the NYT does as a way of saying something else.