Ever notice that the NYTimes.com most-emailed list is slanted toward an older demographic? Maybe because only folks over a certain age—like our Aunt Mabel—still use the email tool. Here’s a quick, annotated guide to what Grandma and Grandpa thought you might be interested in from NYTimes.com …
1. Mom and Dad, a lesson for your kids: Make them feel guilty. Can Auntie send this to my brother and his wife? They could use more of this.
2. Interesting new faces on the list today! Tara Parker-Pope and Gretchen Reynolds are probably at home with their feet kicked up in some spacious Bridgehampton beach house (well, Bridgehampton for Tara; probably Quoge or West Hampton for Gretchen) watching the James Bond marathon on Spike. So welcome John Tierney, from the Science section, who took that top story. And here at no. 2 is a familiar face to the Top 10: Stanley Fish. Sometime over the next month–when nephew Johnny can get some stuff together–we’re going to have a Times personality sweepstakes. Yes, this will require me to plumb the archives and find our what our precious writers wrote and who’s most popular with Auntie. But don’t we want some Fish-Pope wars, like the delightful Reynolds-Pope we have already?
3. Speaking of cold wars!
4. Auntie Julia!
5. We had no idea Auntie was so fascinated with energy. Truly no idea.
6. Krugman two days in a row.
7, Lots of these stories lately. A downer.
8. Add Ron Lieber’s name to the sweepstakes too.
9. Jim Rutenberg tackles a topic that might be fertile ground for Jason Horowitz in a few weeks!
10. We actually fully endorse this web site. Please go to it. In fact, here’s what we wrote to a friend an email last week about it: “so there’s this kind of phenomenal web site named kickstarter.com. it’s a site for the creatives! musicians, artists, journalists, filmmakers, whatever! most likely, they are very poor, and they need money (maybe not a lot) for a project. it’s a slickly designed site, and what you do is you write a description, or put an audio file or post a video. and explain the project, the goal. you’re here because you’re hat-in-hand and this is where generous souls read about your project and drop you a few bucks. it also can help in a pinch. one of my friends recently lost all of the music he had created and saved on his computer going back a few years. he needed $1,000 for the computer handyman to go in and see if he could somehow bring the music back to life. my buddy put his story on this site. he raised $1,800.”
Today’s Tally:
Op-Ed Contributors: 2
Health: 2
Columnists: 1
Money: 1
Food: 1
Books: 1
Technology: 1
Science: 1
Foreign: 1
Education: 1
(We counted the Julia Child story as Food + Books; the Stanley Fish story as op ed contributor + education.)
Overall Tally:
Health: 105
Columnists: 104
Op-Ed Contributors: 42
Food: 34
Technology: 27
Money: 20
Travel: 19
