Looks like New York Times columnist and globe-trotter Nicholas Kristof is feeling kind of shitty about being so rich and the Africans being so poor. It is a noble (banal) sentiment, but in our limited experience, the spiritual poverty of the wealthy may suck but at least you aren’t fucking hungry all the time, and you can go to the doctor and get some mood pills, and you’re probably not going to die before your twentieth birthday, of AIDS. [Twitter]

New York Times opinion editor Andrew Rosenthal lost all professional credibility when he hired “lightning rod conservative” Bill Kristol late last year and then — and then! — called Liberals “intolerant” for not accepting this “serious, respected conservative intellectual” as a particularly edifying addition. Well, Kristol’s one-year contract is almost up, and we’re amazed that Andrew Rosenthal still has a job. Any job. So what’s the fixin’ plan for 2009, Rosenthal? His answer: hire, uh, rock stars such as that U2 guy who cares about AIDS, The Bono. MORE »

In a shrewd bid for that public service Pulitzer, the New York Times has been running a series of articles about five diseases that, while extinct in the developed world, continue to afflict Third World nations. In Sunday’s paper, the Times reported on filariasis, a disease of the lymphatic system that causes swelling and fever. MORE »

Jeffrey Hinzman is a U.S. soldier applying for political asylum in Canada based on his refusal to fight in the Iraq war. The Wall Street Journal reports: MORE »

A federal appeals court greenlighted former Army scientist Stephen Hatfill to proceed with his libel action against New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof yesterday. Kristof published a series of 2002 columns accusing the FBI of dragging its feet in investigating Hatfill as a full-blown suspect in the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. You know, it was also Kristof who was the first person who reported on Joe Wilson’s charge that the Bush administration’s Niger yellow-cake cause for invading Iraq was bogus, thereby setting in motion the inadvertent chain of events landing Judy Miller in jail between extended bouts in Scooter Libby’s (merely metaphorical, we’re sure) lap. We’re not advancing an argument here, just noting an odd congruence. But we will note that if we were Times senior management, we’d closely heed Kristof’s veiled appeal in today’s Editor and Publisher piece on the TimesSelect fiasco: MORE »