We spend so much time harping on both Jack Shafer and the New York Times, it might've been hard to pick A or B when one's ranking on the other. You still following?

Yesterday Shafer tore the NYT a new one for something we've been constantly monitoring: their trend pieces. Whereas we point out how dated the NYT's items are, Shafer claims they're just making them up.

Take yesterday's (front page) article claiming more Ivy League college women are planning to use their educations to become stay-at-home moms. Scribe Linda Story's story (hah, get it?) technique for convincing us the phenomenon might be true?

Words like "many" and "seems," which we learned in Newswriting 201 to be enemies of newsprint.

So how did, of all newspapers, the New York Times smear this bullshit all over their front page? Shafer, of course, has a theory.

I suspect a Times editor glommed onto the idea while overhearing some cocktail party chatter—"Say, did you hear that Sam blew hundreds of thousands of dollars sending his daughter to Yale and now she and her friends say all they want in the future is to get married and stay at home?"—and passed the concept to the writer or her editors and asked them to develop it.

You can see the editorial gears whirring: The press has already drained our collective anxiety about well-educated women assuming greater power in the workplace. So, the only editorial vein left to mine is our collective anxiety about well-educated women deciding not to work instead. Evidence that the Times editors know how to push our buttons can be found in the fact that as I write, this slight article about college students is the "Most E-Mailed" article on the newspaper's Web site.

Oh, yeah, sorry about that. We got click-happy. We just had to tell everyone not to expect any more Monica Crowley's falling from the Ivy vine.