Shots In The Dark

...In his column today, Nicholas Kristoff writes about the study on hurricanes and global warming by MIT physicist Kerry Emmanuel mentioned below. I agree with the thrust of Kristoff's column, which is that the White House has to accept the reality of global warming, now. But he should have mentioned that there's widespread debate about Kerry's thesis, and he doesn't.

...This is the second article the Times has run about how hard this hurricane has been for people named Katrina. (The first was four or five days ago, in Arts & Leisure.) It was a bad idea the first time....

One of the things I like about the NYT Book Review under new editor Sam Tanenhaus is that is has a newfound sense of timeliness, such as today's essay by Benjamin Kunkel about fiction dealing with terrorism. And Tanenhaus isn't afraid to run contrarian letters, like this one from Donald Trump, who disapproved of Mark Singer's profile of him.

Trump writes: "Most writers want to be successful. Some writers even want to be good writers. I've read John Updike, I've read Orhan Pamuk, I've read Philip Roth. When Mark Singer enters their league, maybe I'll read one of his books. But it will be a long time — he was not born with great writing ability. Until then, maybe he should concentrate on finding his own 'lonely component' and then try to develop himself into a worldclass writer, as futile as that may be, instead of having to write about remarkable people who are clearly outside of his realm."

Orhan Pamuk? Who knew that Donald Trump was into [relatively] obscure Turkish writers....