Sunday Bloody NYT Sunday: The Phoning It In Holiday Weekend Edition

Today's NYT is chock full o' Syria, and rightly so, but we are not smart enough this AM to try to sort that shit out. We are especially confused about whether Bamz is a pussy or a monster. Maybe Thomas Friedman talked to a cab driver about it and will explain it to us later.

If the thought of horrible war doesn't depress/terrify you enough (and if it doesn't, serious, WTF is wrong with you people?) the NYT has got your back with a depressing story of an entirely different stripe about how Berry Gordy just stone cold stole the copyright to "Money" from Barrett Strong, the dude that actually wrote it. This is the very definition of Not Cool, especially since that song is used fucking everywhere now, and it makes us feel bad that Berry Gordy is bad. He's probably not Phil Spector level bad, but still bad.

Moving on! Sunday Styles is always good for a...oh sweet Christ on a cracker. So, you might have stumbled across this little thing called the U.S. Open on the teevee, because near as we can figure it is airing 24 hours a day. Apparently Americans occasionally want to watch something called tennis, which seems a bit nancy boy to us, but rich people really like it. Some of the players even have girlfriends and wives! There are many Stylish words expended to talk about the distressingly cutesy name -- WAG -- (wives and girlfriends, duh) for the ladies what watch their big strapping men play the tennis. There does not seem to be a similarly high-larious name for dudes that date the lady athletes because we do not know why. We know for sure that Sunday Styles fapped over their loving description of what the WAG ladies wear and how they carry skull-crushingly expensive purses because they are ladies! If you want to read about the ladies that actually play the tennis, you can hop on over to another page where Sunday Styles will explain at you that Venus Williams is a hella dope tennis player because she reminds the author of a fashion designer. OK, we're done here.

Let's wander over to Real Estate and find out what the obscenely wealthy are doing, shall we? Besides watching tennis, of course. Apparently the people who sleep on beds of money are willing to buy pretty much anything to get more space in NYC:

A co-op at 205 East 69th Street has been doing a brisk business in “slop sink” rooms: spaces with sinks and plumbing that were once used to store equipment for mopping corridors. The 17-square-foot space goes for $9,762, according to Rose Tallis, an associate broker at Halstead Property. Originally there were 10 on offer; 4 have been sold. The co-op, Ms. Tallis added, has also sold slices of common hallways for prices ranging from $34,000 to $52,000, enabling shareholders to enlarge bathrooms or otherwise increase the size of their apartments.

If we ever meet anyone who brags about having paid $50K for a hallway, we will punch then in the face until they bleed. We will also punch this guy for writing the most formulaic piece ever about how to explain twerking to your parents. Get it? It's funny because sometimes parents have to explain things to children and oh ho ho our sides are LITERALLY splitting with laughter.

Frank Bruni has a mostly harmless, if utterly incomprehensible thing, about how the Chinese have lots of fakety fake fake fake things but is cool because Beyonce lip synced at Bamz Inauguration II: Electric Boogaloo. We cannot argue with these things because we don't care.

MoDo has a profile of D.C.'s lady police chief which somehow manages to simultaneously be boring and fawning, which is quite a feat. The police chief lady is tall! She has brothers who were bullies but that was good and made her stronger better faster longer. She works too much and has pesky dark circles. She has buff arms like FLOTUS. She is clever about concealing her gun when she goes out to dinner with her boyfriend. NEWS YOU CAN USE, PEOPLE.

To be fair, MoDo probably had to be boring this week because Ross Douthat hoovered up all the stupid and then emptied the bag on your kitchen floor. Rivaling the formulaic nonsense of how to explain twerking to your parents tee-hee, the living breathing cretinous goatee turns in the hoariest of hoary columns: the pretend draft of a speech/column/wedding toast, whatevs. Douthat laid back, put on a little smooth jazz, got out the Astroglide, and went to work on his fantasy about how Obama says exactly what Ross Douthat would say, because hawt. After Bamz explains that he is going to bomb the living snot out of Syria because Ross Douthat would, Bamz goes on to talk about medieval philosophy because this is Ross' special alone time goddammit and he likes it that way:

Look: I know Thomas Aquinas wouldn’t endorse a war for American credibility, and I know the Barack Obama of 2007 probably wouldn’t either. But most of my post-cold-war predecessors would, and did. And they’ve bequeathed me a world that — no matter what the headlines suggest — is more at peace than at any point in human history.

Apparently in order for Ross to go over the top, if you know what we mean, Obummer doesn't just have to bomb a country and get his Aquinas on. He also needs, inexplicably, to refer to himself in the third person. Oh, well, to each their own.

Hey! No Friedman faux-folksy explanation of how Syria is flat or vertical or both and there's a McDonalds going in there so we won't bomb them because freedom. No imaginary cab driver/washroom attendant/cabana boy will appear today to serve as a mouthpiece for Tommy Boy's simplistic MBA-speak analysis of the world. How will we ever know what to think about Syria now??? Eh. we're not going to worry our beautiful minds, because we have to devote all our brainpower to figuring out how we can buy a garbage chute for one million dollars to prove what wealthy acquisitive dicks we are, and that's gonna take at least until next Sunday.

 [NYT ]