The New York Times has a culture problem
A verdict on the week — plus the week's top stories.
Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week. If you enjoy this newsletter, forward it along to your friends and help The Argument grow!
The Verdict
Earlier this week, The New York Times podcast The Opinions released an episode hosted by Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman that displayed one of the most poorly understood problems in modern journalism: Everyone wants to be on the politics beat.
Spiegelman had brought on New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino and leftist streamer Hasan Piker to discuss a new phrase Spiegelman was looking to coin: Microlooting.
In a tight 35 minutes, the guests managed to laugh their way to justifying a variety of behaviors that most people find abhorrent, from shoplifting to looting to, arguably, even murder.
The core problem with this episode isn’t that three people with fringe moral frameworks decided to talk about ethics, it’s that the interviewer did not display — and likely does not have — the requisite expertise in economics or politics to adequately provide a valuable interview to the public.
The point of the Times Opinion section is, according to its editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, to provide “clashing opinions well expressed.” She once argued that to “champion thoughtful discussion” the section “demand[s] certain standards of cogent argument, logical thought and compelling rhetoric.”
She then distinguished the Opinion section from social media as a place “where ideas can linger a while, be given serious consideration, interrogated and then flourish or perish.” Is that what the Times has produced here?
The point of editors is, ostensibly, to enforce standards. The problem is that the media industry has created a giant loophole for culture writers who wish to opine about politics and economics.
Does Kingsbury or any other Times editor seriously think Spiegelman bringing on Piker and Tolentino to yaaas various crimes constitutes “cogent argument, logical thought and compelling rhetoric”?
There are so many examples I can point to where an interviewer with a baseline knowledge of the issue area would have followed up on claims by Piker or Tolentino, but I want to focus on Spiegelman herself. During the podcast, the Times editor cited the following statistic:
“Eighty-eight corporations made $105 billion in profits in 2025, including Tesla, Southwest, United, Live Nation and Disney. They made $105 billion in profits, and they collectively paid income taxes of zero dollars.”
Now, I am in favor of raising corporate taxes, but this stat is incredibly misleading. Does Spiegelman know this stat is referring just to one specific category of federal tax? Is she aware that the reasons for this specific number often being zero have to do with accelerated depreciation of capital assets? R&D expensing? Stock options? The export deduction? Does she care?
Moreover, does she — or anyone else who edited this episode — know or care that the companies they named likely paid tens of billions in federal taxes last year?1 Do they know that number excludes local property taxes and state taxes?
And yes, we should raise taxes on these corporations, but why are we using a randomly cherry-picked stat to make this claim? What is the point of journalism? What is the point of facts?
I don’t want to spend too much time picking on Spiegelman because she is not the only perpetrator of this industry-wide phenomenon.
One example that has bothered me for years comes from my former employer, The Atlantic, where the very talented and brilliant Xochitl Gonzalez wrote an almost-fantastic piece about her previous life as a wedding planner for the ultra-rich.
I loved this piece. I eagerly read through her escapades planning million-dollar-weddings until I got to the following ludicrous paragraph:
“Critics who roll their eyes at wedding excess seem to forget that this excess creates a lot of jobs. So much of the work behind a wedding is invisible, but it’s done by real people, people who suffer when the wedding industry goes downhill.”
This is not just a throwaway claim. After 5,200 words of regaling us with scintillatingly off-putting anecdotes about a level of wealth 99% of us cannot even aspire to, Gonzalez clearly wanted to humanize her clients. You can almost hear it whispered through the pages: Okay, obviously it’s disgusting that people would spend $50,000 on a wedding photographer or $550 a head for dinner, but these are not all bad people, they are job-creators!
The fundamental misunderstanding behind Gonzalez’s claim is an easy one to make, but just think it through: If for some reason everything were the same but it was culturally verboten to have extravagant weddings, do we think all those people would be jobless? No, the money wouldn’t disappear, it would just get redirected to other purposes.
Yes, demand creates jobs, but if you, like me, are disgusted by a million-dollar wedding, fret not, we are not consigning luxury florists to unemployment. The relevant policy question is whether the composition of employment generated by luxury wedding spending is better or worse than the composition that would result from the next-best use of those dollars.
Of course, anyone who thought about this for even one minute from the perspective of an economics editor would have immediately realized that a casual endorsement of the broken window fallacy should require at least a few sentences of justification. Or better yet, deletion!
But why did Gonzalez, having written an interesting, personal piece, have to make some sort of claim about whether luxury weddings create jobs? Who is asking for this?
The editors at The Atlantic are fantastic, and while I have no idea who edited this piece, I think the problem has less to do with comprehension than standards. Culture pieces are not evaluated in the same way policy pieces are. That makes sense, but only if they don’t make the sorts of claims that demand policy editing.
Most of my free time is spent on reading fiction. This week, I finished Possession by A.S. Byatt, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and also Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. My next reads are Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai and a reread of The Secret History by Donna Tartt.
I say all this to establish that I am not being dismissive when I beg culture writers to get back to writing about culture. It is not a demotion. It is not a jibe. It is a plea.
Your job takes expertise, care, and time, and so does mine. Yes, culture, politics, and economics cannot be cleanly siloed off, but a podcast about the political and economic implications of theft is so far removed from anything that could be conceived of as the beat of a culture editor, it’s clear that something has gone very wrong.
Spiegelman was hired by the Times from a prestigious literary magazine, having worked at The Paris Review and Metrograph‘s cinema magazine. Nothing in her background reveals a focus or specialization in economics or policy.
Wonks are often criticized for not taking culture seriously (perhaps because we devote so much of our energy to the exercise of interrogating studies and demanding models), but I think the decline of taking culture seriously sits first and foremost with culture writers and editors at mainstream media institutions who should, and I say this with love, stay in their lane.
Top stories this week
As we grow, we want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.
Lots of top-notch content this week from what many are, quite frankly, calling the greatest Substack in history.
On Monday, Maibritt Henkel highlighted a veritable chart felony from The New York Times. It is true that there’s been an increase in the rate of women over 35 having children, but that’s not enough to offset the decline in the total number of children caused by reduced birthrates among younger women.
On Wednesday, Mad Libs made a return. Lakshya Jain and Charlotte Swasey, director of analytics at the Searchlight Institute, went toe to toe on how much we can learn from who wins elections. To what extent is a given candidate’s victory or defeat the product of their individual messaging versus the result of structural factors? As with many things, it depends.
Finally, our very own Kelsey Piper took a short victory lap after the D.C. Council introduced a bill to allow Waymo to operate within the city, provided it meets certain safety and monitoring standards. Regular readers will recall that Kelsey EXPOSED the Council’s years-long footdragging on Waymo — despite clear evidence that self-driving cars are safer than human drivers — using FACTS and LOGIC. Three cheers for Kelsey!
🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟
New polling from Inclusive Abundance finds that the most popular Democratic messages on affordability combine elements of both populism and abundance.
Idaho enacted a new “starter home” law, which requires cities with populations of 10,000 or more to allow single-family homes on lots as small as 1,500 square feet.
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek signed six new housing laws, two of which allow cities to expand their urban growth boundaries, which should allow more housing to be built. Economists estimate that Oregon needs to build 29,500 new homes per year; Kotek has set (but not yet met) a more ambitious goal of 36,000 per year.
The House of Representatives voted 231-186 to pass the HEATS Act, which exempts certain geothermal projects on state and private land from federal permitting requirements. All Republicans and 22 Democrats voted “yes.”
Worth watching...
For more than half a century, U.S. foreign policy was drenched with liberal hypocrisy. Jerusalem thinks that was a good thing. Matt doesn’t miss it. Watch them duke it out over foreign policy on this week’s episode of The Argument.
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The Argument recommends
This week, Kobe Yank-Jacobs recommended the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings. He described himself as “genuinely thrilled to hear the VC jargon and get sucked into their mindset for an hour” and was interested to hear what the hosts had to say about Tesla’s latest numbers. (Personally, I only listen to The Argument podcast because I am a loyal employee.)
Eli Richman said that “2025 was such an incredible year for video game music,” pointing in particular to the scores in Clair Obscur, Hades II, and Silksong.
Maibritt Henkel flexed that her friend “casually revealed that he had memorized the T.S. Eliot poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and recommended that you memorize poems so you can recite them to your friends. I second this. I have memorized lots of funny tweets, and most people find that less impressive than when I go bar for bar with “Freestyle” by Lil Baby, which is, in a way, a form of poetry.
I’m entering exam mode (inshallah I ace them), so I’ve not been consuming as much content. But I have really enjoyed season 2 of BEEF on Netflix — largely because I think Oscar Isaac bears a striking resemblance to me.
—Milan Singh
More to read:
Stop blaming ugly buildings for the housing crisis
Matt Yglesias makes the case that beautiful buildings aren’t enough to beat NIMBYism
I can never talk to an AI anonymously again
Kelsey Piper discovers that Claude knows her writing voice
The anti-market delusion at the heart of the housing crisis
Have you heard the good news? Housing is a market!
While the five companies reported $0 in current federal corporate income tax on combined U.S. pretax profits of roughly $19 billion in fiscal 2025, per ITEP’s analysis of their SEC filings, that figure refers to one specific tax line. Each company also pays the 7.65% employer share of federal payroll taxes on its U.S. workforce, and together they have roughly 580,000 worldwide employees: Tesla (135,000), Disney (231,000), United (107,000), Southwest (72,000), and Live Nation (35,000). The two airlines also remit the 7.5% federal ticket tax plus $5.20 per segment on U.S. passenger sales.
Of course, these companies may have reported zero GAAP-basis income tax expense, they still paid cash income taxes in cash. For example, Tesla paid about $1.2 billion in cash income taxes net of refunds in their FY 2025 ($28 million US federal; $151 million state; remainder foreign). United paid $65 million in cash income taxes. This is very clearly disclosed in TSLA's footnote 12, page 86 of Tesla's SEC-filed financial statements that ITEP so closely "analyzed." Same for United, whose disclosure is on page 59 of its financial statements.
I also would like some more accounting-literate editing of articles when people go spelunking into financial statements!
I totally sympathize with feeling frustration when you see a basic error about economics go unchallenged. But... The Argument has published two pieces that at least heavily implied that post-pandemic inflation was bad for workers, specifically low-income workers. It published Kelsey Piper's piece disputing an object-level fact about how LLMs work. That one really stood out to me because it was based on a misunderstanding of why LLMs don't *sound* like autocomplete, a misunderstanding that could have been corrected by reading the excellent "The Many Masks LLMs Wear." Which I found because it was restacked by one Jerusalem Demsas, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Argument Magazine... the same week Piper's piece came out.
Anyway. I love much of what this magazine publishes, including most of Piper's pieces, which is why I subscribe. It's super valuable, generally lucid, many times a great antidote to a bad narrative. I tend to comment only when I disagree with something; it's a character flaw. I'm working on it. This is mostly just to note that everyone has certain little claims they tend to let slide, and a plea not to. And also to say, if you feel frustrated with cultural writing when it touches on economics... imagine what it's like being a scientist.