As you read the excerpt below from a New York Times article about publisher Martha Stewart, “Stewart’s Celebrity Created Magnet for Scrutiny” (March 7), keep in mind these are two consecutive paragraphs from the same piece, written by Jonathan D. Glater:

“A woman who lords it over other people and who asserts her authority is going to provoke a kind of resentment that a lot of men who do the same thing won’t,” he [Dan M. Kahan, a professor at the Yale Law School] said. “There’s no question about that.”

That is not entirely true. Some of the peccadilloes of male executives certainly have come out in the course of their trials. Mr. Kozlowski’s $6,000 shower curtain received a good deal of attention from the news media.

Can anyone explain the connection between Stewart’s purported ill treatment of what Glater calls “underlings” and former Tyco International Inc. chief executive Dennis Kozloski’s purchase of a four-figure shower curtain, a bizarre badge of success that must have been purchased with the intent of hiding something, consciously or not?

You know, there are “apples and oranges,” and then there are apples and beach towels.

This is a case of the latter.

Call it the Picklerization of the New York Times.