Jack Shafer took a week off from bugging out about politics and poo-pooing the political conventions to focus his ire on another target: New York Times Sunday Styles. JackShaf minces no words in denouncing the part of the NYTs that he thinks should have been cut when the editors took a hatchet to the Metro and Sports section.

Too bad JS uses the same fuzzy logic that he's criticizing Sunday Styles pieces for in his criticism of Sunday Styles. Jack's rage comes, from all things, about a Cosmo-esque story on straight guys and cats:

How to write a bogus trend story: Start with something you wish were on the rise. State that rise as a fact. Allow that there are no facts, surveys, or test results to support such a fact. Use and reuse the word seems. Collect anecdotes and sprinkle liberally. Drift from your original point as far as you can to collect other data points. Add liberally. Finish with an upbeat quotation like "My cat takes priority over the new relationship. Realistically, unless there's something absolutely amazing about [the woman I'm dating], he wins."

Or in Jack's How to Skewer a Bogus Story:

• Pick the easiest target and only use examples from that one piece in denouncing an entire section of The New York Times

• Don't follow up on any of the original reporter's sources to see if her "facts" check out, just assume they don't and cynically explain why, "A cat therapist alleges that her single, straight, male clientele has grown 25 percent during the last five years. Are cat therapists collecting marriage and sexual orientation information, too?"

• Be completely obvious of your bias when starting out the story:

"As a mélange of fashion notes, celebrity reporting, personal essays, and piffle, Sunday Styles resembles the old-fashioned supermarket tabloids in that it knows that it's a stinking pile of entertaining trash and makes no apologies for it."

Sprinkle Libertarianism with some disdain, and you're done!