by Kevin Ellis, for Conflict of Interest

One of my great pleasures – still – is reading the New York Times in detail, in hard copy, in my hands many times a week, especially on Sunday.

In 1980s Washington DC, as a young newspaper reporter, the other great pleasure was inserting a quarter into a green metal box and snatching a Washington Post for my subway ride to the newsroom. Thirty minutes later, totally informed, I was ready for Capitol Hill or righting wrongs via the telephone with evil doers, politicians and whistleblowers.

Sadly, the Post is a ghost, although those who remain in the Bezos era do great work.

So it is The Times that brings the pleasure. The paper lived on our magazine table all day every day in New Jersey growing up, my mother having fetched it from the end of the driveway. The only place in my town that still sells the print edition every day is the local food coop. This requires a car ride of a few miles. Worth it.

But what about you? You are reading the clips on Apple News, scrolling Instagram or heaven forbid, watching the network news or MS Now.

So here I offer you a new feature of Conflict of Interest. It is called NYT – Cover to Cover. (Hat top to Phineas Ellis for the name). Why not pick the top five stories in The Times that legendary editor Ben Bradlee used to call “Holy Shit stories,’’ the kind that stop you, change you, inform you and make you talk about it the rest of the day to whomever will listen.

I’ll take stories from anywhere in the paper. (I might even sneak in some stories from the website that don’t appear in the paper. But I will let you know. It’s kind of like telling your readers you are using AI).

I’m already doing the reading. So I may as well share with you.

Here goes – my top five stories from The Times this Sunday.

1. The page 1 story on Trump awarding a no-bid contract to a firm to renovate the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. Trump drove his motorcade onto the floor of the empty pool this week for a photo op, alarming contractor types who said the heavy weight from the trucks (not Trump) could damage joints in the concrete. The no-bid contract didn’t surprise me. That’s par for the course with Trump. What surprised me was that previous presidents hadn’t done this. The Reflecting Pool is a major attraction and a symbol of the American democracy. And it has been allowed to decay. Another temporary Trump victory over Democrats with little imagination.
2. What Are Teen Takeovers? Still in the A section – a story about teenagers running amok in cities. The kids gather in parks and other places. The larger the crowd, the more likely violence ensues. The story brought out the usual tribalism. Law and order folks want the kinds arrested. The kids are looking for outlets, play, excitement, even danger. And they are not getting it in their screen-filled Internet life. So they pour into the streets. I was impressed with the words of Louis Custard, a 16-year-old in Detroit. “What I see is a bunch of kids trying to escape from the modality of their regular day-to-day life.’’ Well said.
3. The Arts & Leisure section has a weekly feature called Headliner, with 10 things you should know about celebrities like this week’s Khloe Kardashian. It is my least favorite part of The Times, its penchant for sucking up to celebrities. But I get the business need. If you are going to pay for coverage of Gaza, you gotta play with Kardashians. We learn that she plays music all day, gets her hair done a lot, lives in a gated community near her family and has a custom-made bed that can host slumber parties. We are doomed. (I struggled through the section’s cover story on what happens to America when the Late Show with Steven Colbert ends later this month. I’d had enough when they broke out the interview with David Letterman waxing philosophic.)
4. The Sunday Opinion section is a weekly roadmap to our crumbling empire and Trump’s corruption. So things can get a little depressing. But the cover story was “A New Theory About Why Americans Aren’t Having More Babies.’’ The answer is because young people these days are giving up on an America that used to promise prosperity via housing, community, education and great health care. Today, all of those issues are in jeopardy and young people are asking whether having kids is worth it. I’m not sure this is such a new theory. Any parent with adult children (like me) has been watching this play out for a decade now.
5. The Book Review did not contain a piece by Dwight Garner, the best book reviewer in America. But it had a small blurb about a new book on Lewis & Clark and their expedition to the Louisiana Territory. If you read Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose, you know what I’m talking about. The new book is This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark. It tells the story through eyes of the people who traveled with the two explorers, including the Shoshone teenager Sacagawea, who saved their lives countless times. Cannot wait!
6. BONUS pick – The entire special section on Design. It focuses on repurposing old buildings for new lives. As I am thinking a lot about empty buildings in my city and how they could be turned into housing, I am putting the section aside for Monday and Tuesday. I wanna go slow.