USA Today marks its first quarter-century today. Richard Pérez-Peña’s story in the Times hails the upstart newspaper for a recent series of tough stories about underequipped American troops in Iraq, and one must grudgingly concede that its embrace of microarticles and graphics have probably contributed to a (slightly) better-informed electorate, at least among traveling businessmen. But it is also a testament to the degredation of thoughtful leisure in this country. Without a standard – however disregarded in practice - of carefully cultivated critical reflection, a society as big and complicated as ours is bound to wind up in some “inexplicable” messes, such as ill-conceived wars and exploding deficits.

In short, there is still nothing of the long-range frame of mind at USA Today.

As if the people of Iraq weren’t already suffering enough, they now face a country-wide epidemic of that old-fashioned but by no means extinct horror, cholera.

The last thing I want to do is disappoint my conservative detractors by failing to cluck over the demise of Jeffrey Carter Albrecht, the Texas rock keyboardist who was shot in the head the other day when he banged on a neighbor’s door. Actually, it was his girlfriend’s neighbor. Mr Albrecht had “assaulted” her, according to the Times, and she had locked him out of her house. It was actually late at night, not during the day. I suspect that alcohol was involved. Why else would Mr Albrecht have beaten on a stranger’s back door?

The decedent’s mother, Judith, said of the shooter – who was acting within his rights under Texas law – that she thought “he could have made another choice.” Another choice? But that’s Texas for you. Ladies, even moms, are too polite to say “a better choice.”

Had I been defending my castle against unknown door-pounders, I’d have issued a preliminary warning. Something about stepping back or I’ll be shooting. Perhaps that’s what the shooter thought he was doing when he aimed high. How could he know that Mr Albrecht was six-five?

You can be sure that the good old boys of Texas are still laughing about this one.

There’s a sad story in today’s Metro section, about New Jersey brothers who aren’t speaking to each other because they disagree about illegal immigration. Bryan Lonegan has long been an attorney representing people with immigration problems. His brother, Steve, has long been a very conservative businessman and politician. The brothers could deal with that. But when Steve, currently the mayor of Bogota, NJ, hopped on the anti-illegal immigration bandwagon – an issue that Bryan finds opportunistic at best – his brother objected.

Before, his conservatism was his business. Now he’s on my turf.

Shades of Antigone.

What is it about the American psyche that hates maintenance? Is it the reminder that we’re still where we were? We haven’t moved on to some fresh paradise, haven’t built sparkling new cities in the middle of nowhere? Samuel L Schwartz, New York’s chief engineer for four years twenty years ago writes an understandably impatient Op-Ed piece today. “Catch Me, I’m Falling,” about how much money we would save if we took care of our bridges instead of waiting for them to crack. Not to mention lives.

Rather than lubricating the bearing plates that allow the Williamsburg Bridge to slide back and forth with changes in temperature and loads, we let the bearing plates jam, which cracked the concrete pedestal the span sat on. Twice a year we needed to stop traffic, jack the bridge up and slide the pedestal back in place. Instead of coating the bridge’s steel, we allowed it to become nearly paper-thin. This required the replacement of beams, which made the repairs eligible for federal funds, instead of merely a paint job with city money.

And what is a story about the whiff of corruption, coming from programs for studying abroad, doing on the front page?

Comes now an ill-written account of the work of economic historian Gregory Clark. Nicholas Wade’s “In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence” is one of the gobbledy-gookiest things that I’ve read in the Times in a long time, but it’s typical of the paper’s ability to make hash of new ideas. The first paragraph recites the passage of some (mostly Western) cultures from “abject poverty” to “amazing affluence” via “the industrial revolution” – a revolution that has never been satisfactorily explained. (Why did it happen where and when it did?) Here is the second paragraph:

Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers for both questions.

Suffice it to say that Dr Clark theorizes that Malthusian pressures on the English population led to genetic changes favoring the nonviolence, self-discipline, and ability to save that characterize the middle classes. It’s an interesting idea, and quite possibly correct. But Mr Wade’s second paragraph is so deadly that few readers will get far enough to form an opinion. Who cares about scholars spending twenty years in the archives? Give us the sexy bit: human evolution, which most people seem to think of as having ceased, proceeds as we speak! 

Five thousand years, ago, scientists say, everyone was lactose-intolerant.  Adults could not digest milk. Then God created Denmark and Holland. It didn’t take long for Man to invent Ice Cream.

Maybe this is the problem with newspapers: where a magazine such as The New Yorker would write up Dr Clark’s ideas, the Times is more interested in the academic debate surrounding them. The debate is “news.” Everyone seems to agree that Dr Clark has made some rock-solid findings, but not everyone agrees with his interpretation. The Times projects the debate about that interpretation, which may be lively enough to insiders, ahead of the interpretation itself. General readers who are unfamiliar with Dr Clark’s theories, however, are unlikely to care about the debate. 

Reading The New York Times this morning was very strange. The paper is now a column narrower than it was yesterday (and forever before). The Times says that it’s a purely pragmatic move that will have no effect upon content, but that’s manifestly impossible. The paper certainly isn’t going to reduce its ad space. I’m not really complaining, though. The Times has lost so much of my respect in the past seven years that I consider dropping it at least once a week. “The paper of record” – hah!

There’s an interesting editorial about language: is it a uniquely human thing, or can animals talk, too? All right, what’s interesting is that the Times is editorializing about what seems to me to be a totally religious issue, where “religious” means “believing that human beings are not animals.”

In a new book called “The First Word,” Christine Kenneally catalogs the complex debate over language and includes one particularly revealing experiment in which scientists put two male apes who knew sign language together. One might have expected these guys to start grousing about their keepers, to wonder at beings that are all thumbs and actually seem to enjoy giving away bananas. But, no, they started madly signing at each other, a manual shouting match, and in the end, neither appeared to actually listen to the other.

So, are two creatures actually conversing if they’re both talking and nobody is listening? Where does talking-without-listening put one in the animal brain chain?

Let’s see, talking without listening. Many wives can think of someone who might qualify. Teenagers do, easily. And parents of teenagers. Also, a lot of successful politicians and talk show hosts.

Whoever wrote the editorial left out Woody Allen’s movies. Have you ever noticed how rarely his characters listen to one another?

The narrower broadsheets are really unsettling.