New York Times

Almost every day, my in box fattens with e-mails from America's freelance writers -- adding their voices to those I quoted a couple of weeks ago about the devastating downturn in the writing market. In bemoaning the need for speed, the flight from quality and the persistent decrease in pay, it turns out writers have a lot in common with photographers. And graphic artists. And architects. And musicians. And, well, with just about anyone who sees his creative endeavors being commodified or who is exposed to low-cost foreign competition via the Internet.

Most reporters would love to make $75,000. In a year. So it set my eyes to blinking when I read that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman got paid that much for a single speech, sponsored last week by the San Francisco Bay Area's clean air district.

NEW YORK -- It has been criticized for being ingrown and unscientific, a weekly work of fiction that -- for all its seeming authoritativeness -- is shrouded in mystery. So when the New York Times Book Review announced it would begin splitting its paperback bestseller list into two lists, one reserved for quality paperback fiction, a chorus of voices in publishing began parsing What It All Meant.

The difference between a million and a billion is a number so vast that it would seem nearly impossible to confuse the two. Take pennies. At the website of the Mega Penny Project, you can see that a million pennies stack up to be about the size of a filing cabinet. A billion would be about the size of five school buses. Or take real estate. A home in a nice part of Los Angeles might cost a million dollars. A billion dollars would buy the whole neighborhood. But journalists can't seem to keep the two numbers straight.

Robert Ginty, a versatile actor who starred in the 1980 film "The Exterminator" and built a varied career as a producer, director and actor in film, television and the stage, has died. He was 60. Ginty died Monday at his home in Los Angeles, said Michael Einfeld, manager for Ginty's son, James Francis Ginty. He had cancer. Ginty had a recurring role as Lt. T.J. Wiley in "Baa Baa Black Sheep," which aired on NBC from 1976 to 78 and which he described to the New York Times in 1984 as dealing with "the innocents of World War II, a bunch of gung-ho young kid pilots."

A New York Times reporter was jailed Wednesday for refusing to submit to questioning by a special prosecutor investigating possible wrongdoing by the Bush administration, but a Time magazine reporter avoided jail at the last minute by agreeing to cooperate with the government. U.S. District Judge Thomas F.

Right about then, the Age of Aquarius seemed to be reaching an apocalyptic conclusion: Amid campus riots, a contentious war and political assassinations, it was hard not to feel fatalistic. And Robert Silverberg, a New York writer who'd recently watched his home burn to the ground and now felt his marriage turning to ash as well, sat down to write one of the darkest books in American literature, as well as one of the most unjustly overlooked. The reasons "Dying Inside," published in 1972, is not as well known as "Portnoy's Complaint" or "Rabbit, Run" are complex.

AS commentators and public officials survey the morass of loss and desolation that once was a great American city called New Orleans, one of the words we hear and read over and over again is "unimaginable." In fact, the tragedy that this week destroyed a vibrant metropolitan area that was home to 1.4 million people and the city proper that was a national cultural treasure was not simply imagined but foreseen with a prescience that now seems eerily precise.

The editor of the New York Times said how proud he was of one of the paper's campaign investigations of John McCain. Another top Timesman praised the same story as "a powerful examination" of a politician's apparent blindness to ethical concerns. You would have thought they moved the Pulitzer Prizes up a couple of months when, actually, the crowing from the Newspaper of Record came Thursday, after its success in fending off a $27-million defamation case.

I have to admit it would be fun to join the rollicking beat-down of the New York Times and Alessandra Stanley that has followed the chief television critic's egregiously error-ridden tribute to Walter Cronkite. Wasn't the public fascinated, after all, to learn that Stanley and the nation's Paper of Record managed eight mistakes in an almost 1,200-word tribute to Uncle Walter?

The difference between a million and a billion is a number so vast that it would seem nearly impossible to confuse the two. Take pennies. At the website of the Mega Penny Project, you can see that a million pennies stack up to be about the size of a filing cabinet. A billion would be about the size of five school buses. Or take real estate. A home in a nice part of Los Angeles might cost a million dollars. A billion dollars would buy the whole neighborhood. But journalists can't seem to keep the two numbers straight.

Almost every day, my in box fattens with e-mails from America's freelance writers -- adding their voices to those I quoted a couple of weeks ago about the devastating downturn in the writing market. In bemoaning the need for speed, the flight from quality and the persistent decrease in pay, it turns out writers have a lot in common with photographers. And graphic artists. And architects. And musicians. And, well, with just about anyone who sees his creative endeavors being commodified or who is exposed to low-cost foreign competition via the Internet.

Two years ago, after following Tiger Woods down the fairway for a couple of days at the U.S Open at Oakmont, I confided to friends an observation that seemed too absurd for public consumption. From the back, the dude looked like Barry Bonds. His neck was oddly wide. His shoulders were absurdly broad. His biceps were busting out of a tight shirt. For the first time, he wasn't just better than everyone else, he was also bigger. He looked not like a technician lining up a tee shot, but a slugger getting loose for batting practice.

Rena "Rusty" Kanokogi, who once had to disguise herself as a man to compete in judo but whose perseverance was rewarded when she became coach of the U.S. Olympic women's judo team, has died. She was 74. Kanokogi died Saturday in New York after a three-year battle with leukemia, her daughter, Jean, told the Associated Press. "Rusty inspired the sports world to think differently about the notion of women in competitive sports, and her legacy will live on for generations of athletes to come," USA Judo President Lance Nading said in a statement.

Time Eva Hoffman Picador: 214 pp., $14 paper "When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second," Albert Einstein said, by way of explaining relativity. "When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour." Such a notion resonates throughout Eva Hoffman's slender reflection on the chronological conundrum, "Time." Not because Hoffman deals much with Einstein (he merits only two references), but because at the heart of her book is the idea that time is what we make it, that it is not just fluid but impossible to pin down.

Nan Robertson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who brought distinction and change to her newspaper through highly publicized professional and personal battles -- one against sex discrimination at her newspaper, the other against toxic shock syndrome, which nearly killed her -- died Tuesday at a nursing home in Rockville, Md. She was 83. The cause was heart disease, said her stepdaughter-in-law, Jane Freundel Levey. A reporter for the New York Times for 33 years beginning in 1955, Robertson was known for her role in a drive to improve pay and career opportunities for women writers and editors, which culminated in a class-action lawsuit settled in favor of the women plaintiffs in 1978.

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus was diagnosed with prostate cancer in February but has been successfully treated for the disease. Petraeus, 56, head of the U.S. Central Command, oversees operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The general's spokesman, Col. Erik O. Gunhus, released a statement in response to questions from the New York Times. Petraeus received radiation treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for two months, the statement said, adding that it "is assessed to have been successful."

Robert Ginty, a versatile actor who starred in the 1980 film "The Exterminator" and built a varied career as a producer, director and actor in film, television and the stage, has died. He was 60. Ginty died Monday at his home in Los Angeles, said Michael Einfeld, manager for Ginty's son, James Francis Ginty. He had cancer. Ginty had a recurring role as Lt. T.J. Wiley in "Baa Baa Black Sheep," which aired on NBC from 1976 to 78 and which he described to the New York Times in 1984 as dealing with "the innocents of World War II, a bunch of gung-ho young kid pilots."

Ijoined the newspaper business in 1979, part of the generation drawn to journalism by the power of investigative reporting as practiced by Seymour Hersh or Woodward and Bernstein. My first job was as humble as it was traditional. I was among the last copy boys in American journalism. It worked this way: A reporter would type a page on a manual typewriter (an archaic, hand-operated word processor), rip it out and shout "copy!" as he threaded a new sheet of paper into the machine.

I have to admit it would be fun to join the rollicking beat-down of the New York Times and Alessandra Stanley that has followed the chief television critic's egregiously error-ridden tribute to Walter Cronkite. Wasn't the public fascinated, after all, to learn that Stanley and the nation's Paper of Record managed eight mistakes in an almost 1,200-word tribute to Uncle Walter?