Of course, colleges and universities are not the only institutions in our culture that seem to be in a race to render themselves ever more trivial and superficial. There are also various dispensers of news and comment—The New York Times, to take one prominent example. Like many others, we have often had occasion to reflect on what has happened to the Times in recent years: the blurring of the traditional distinction between news reporting and blatant editorializing, the shocking poverty of its cultural coverage, the subjection of nearly every aspect of the paper to an obsession with “lifestyle” and so-called human interest stories. We believed—foolishly, as it turned out—that we had inured ourselves to the worst that the Times could deliver. But as the old adage has it, if you can say “This is the worst,” then worse is yet to come. And so it was to be with the Times. Many readers will have their own catalogue of fatuous sto ...

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