You’ve got to appre­ci­ate this little spot of self-​aware meta-​narcissism in Michael Powell’s NYT pro­file of Barack Obama today, a nice exam­ple of the straight-​faced Times humor that Hen­drik Hertzberg called out a few weeks back:

One of the curiosi­ties about Mr. Obama is his pro­fessed lack of inter­est in the writ­ers who pore over that life, trying to decon­struct his frac­tured family and geog­ra­phy. He claims not to read pro­files that pile high in his plane.