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.

The com­plete absence of coun­try music on the whiplash­ing summer-​music chart New York put together last week is even less sur­pris­ing than the New York Times’s sim­i­lar sin of omis­sion a few weeks ago. And yet if New York is really, as I sug­gested to a friend the other day, the People mag­a­zine for people like us, you’d think they might try to imag­ine an “us” with a little less con­stricted sense of what counts as summer sonic fun.

There’s some­thing to Jane Dark’s sug­ges­tion that these blind spots are all about class, but I don’t know if that fully explains it. I mean, hell, in every respect save dis­pos­able income and zip code, I’m at the demo­graphic heart of the class their ads are gun­ning for, right down to Dr. Hakimi’s Art of Oral Har­mony. But there I go again, lis­ten­ing to—and, shh, even liking!–coun­try music.

Not that I’m too wor­ried; we all, some­how, find our own ways to sur­vive the dik­tats of glossy-​magazine taste. But still you have to wonder what it’s going to take to make coun­try music safe for the archi­tects of medi­ated cool, when even the high-​profile defec­tions of Jack White, Robert Plant, Jewel, Jes­sica Simp­son, and Jon Bon Jovi couldn’t do it.

You have to wonder, that is, until it hits you: Hootie!

Darius Rucker will save us all.

“Monkeys Con­trol a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts” (NYT)

There’s a pretty sur­pris­ing mis­take in today’s NYT story about yesterday’s interest-​rate cut. The offend­ing sen­tence comes in the second para­graph of Steven R. Weisman’s article:

The Fed’s action brought the fed­eral funds rate — the rate it charges banks for overnight loans — to 2 per­cent, from 2.25 per­cent, the lowest level since Novem­ber 2004.

The prob­lem is that clause between em-​dashes. The “rate [the Fed] charges banks for overnight loans” is not the fed­eral funds rate, it’s the dis­count rate. The fed­eral funds rate is the rate that banks charge each other for overnight loans, which rate the Fed is able to con­trol through open-​market operations.

As the head­line of this post indi­cates, I was about to put this down to a brief slip of edi­to­r­ial atten­tion, but look­ing back through the NYT archive, it looks like a fairly common error on the paper’s part. Here’s a sim­i­lar sen­tence from an arti­cle Weis­man wrote a few days ago:

The com­mit­tee also low­ered the fed­eral funds rate, the rate it charges banks for overnight loans, by three-​quarters of a point, to the cur­rent 2.25 percent.

And here’s another from an arti­cle in March, this one writ­ten by Edmund L. Andrews:

The cen­tral bank low­ered its fed­eral funds rate — the rate it charges banks for overnight loans — by three-​quarters of a per­cent­age point, to 2.25 per­cent, and left the door open to addi­tional rate cuts in the months ahead.

In case you don’t trust me on this, here’s how Reuters (cor­rectly) described the fed­eral funds rate in a story about yesterday’s cut:

The cen­tral bank’s action takes the bell­wether fed­eral funds rate target, which banks charge each other for overnight loans, to 2 per­cent — the lowest since Decem­ber 2004.

And for good mea­sure, here’s the AP’s version:

The latest Fed move brought the fed­eral funds rate — the inter­est that banks charge each other — down to 2.25 per­cent, the lowest since late 2004.