How can anyone think, let alone say, the New York Times is anything other than the greatest newspaper in the world?

Two knock-your-socks off articles in just today’s edition:

One to make your blood boil: “The Girls Next Door,” by Peter Landesman.

And one to make your heart melt: “In Death Watch for Stranger, Becoming a Friend to the End,” by N.R. Kleinfield.

[Post-publication addendum (January 26): Oh, for crying out loud. Some readers are congenitally incapable of accepting a definitive statement about anything, unable to read without histrionics even a single sentence as being simply the viewpoint of someone other than themselves, and warped by the notion that their nit-picking reveals some sort of divinely inspired intelligence. How sad. So for these, and for these alone, allow me to qualify the first sentence of this post. I rephrase as follows: “How can anyone think, let alone say, the New York Times is anything other than the greatest newspaper in the world? For no other newspaper in the world provides such a wealth, and such depth, of coverage on so wide a range of issues; no other newspaper deploys such great resources toward that end; no newspaper, while being, like all newspapers and, like all institutions, managed and staffed by multitudes of fallible human beings, so consistently achieves greatness and near-greatness, despite what, in context, can be considered but a handful of mistakes; no newspaper publishes so much first-class, top-notch, award-worthy prose about issues both pressing and otherwise; and no newspaper so consistently provokes the reader to think in a new way about an issue, topic, or subject about which he previously had given no thought whatsoever.” Now, is that okay?]