New York Times

As a child, Terry Landau used to look over her mother's shoulder as she did the daily crossword puzzle in the New York Herald Tribune. By age 15, she was hooked. Today, Landau still does daily puzzles, but quite differently from the way her mother did. Every night about 10, the 52-year-old paralegal logs on to the Internet from her Manhattan apartment to do the next day's puzzle on The New York Times Web site. Using crossword puzzle software, she types her answers into the black-and-white grid on the screen.

Baltimore's own Stacy Keibler was front and center Thursday night for her boyfriend George Clooney's record-breaking fundraising fete for President Obama. She may have missed being at Clooney's side for the recent White House Correspondent's dinner. And she may have missed that state dinner that he attended a few months ago. But, ending speculation (at least for the moment) that the two of them are on the rocks, she wasn't going to miss this. Guests paid $40,000 each to be there.

The New York Times admitted today it was fooled by The Onion and ran fake material based on the satirical newspaper's article.  In an article published last week called " Tiger Beat: Still Squeaky Clean After All These Years ," the NYT ran a photo of the magazine with a photo of President Barack Obama on the cover.  The Times' correction today said:  A series of pictures last Sunday of covers of the magazine Tiger Beat, with...

We'll say this much: Trevor Pryce is an interesting fellow. The former Ravens defensive lineman penned a column for The New York Times this weekend , the point of which was to say that being retired at age 37 is boring. This is no doubt a fascinating piece of work. No less than Jason Whitlock, the Fox columnist who revels in his belief that he tells all of the most difficult truths, gave it a shout out on Twitter. And it's true that Pryce gives us a very vivid idea of what happens when the games are gone.

Fernando writes Rice and Curry, a blog about Sri Lankan food and spicy cuisine. He posted just yesterday from Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo, about Sri Lankan street food. UPDATE: S.H. Fernando's "Rice & Curry: Sri Lankan Home Cooking" has been included among the New York Times notable cookbooks for 2011 .   Definitely have a look . Fernando's new book, "Rice & Curry: Sri Lankan Home Cooking" is a great gift for an adventurous home cook, especially if it's packaged with Skiz's Original Sri Lankan curry powders , which come in raw and roasted versions, which can be ordered through the Rice & Curry website.

The sale of the Boston Globe to the New York Times has a familiar ring to Marylanders. Much the same thing, for much the same reasons, occurred here when The Sun and The Evening Sun were bought by the Times Mirror Co. in 1986. There aren't many independently owned major daily newspapers left in this country controlled by a family or two with a long tradition of publishing -- the Providence Journal-Bulletin and the Dallas Morning News are examples that come to mind. The New York Times is the family-controlled centerpiece of a publishing empire, as is the Los Angeles Times, flagship of Times Mirror.

The debate over whether rape victims should be publicly identified has intensified now that the New York Times and NBC News disclosed the name of the woman who has charged that she was raped by William Kennedy Smith.A growing number of journalists argue that by keeping victims' names private, the media are perpetuating a stigma that rape victims have something to be ashamed of.But many journalists and legal scholars counter that focusing attention on the accuser can effectively put rape victims rather than assailants under suspicion, and that the decision over going public should remain with the victim.

The New York Times has announced plans to make its text available on compact disk, joining the growing number of newspapers to do so.The primary market for compact disks is libraries, and The Times announced its plans at a meeting of the American Library Association in Atlanta yesterday.Increasingly, publishers are taking advantage of the storage capacity of the small plastic compact disks, an offshoot of the audio compact disk.A single disk is capable of storing the equivalent of 250,000 double-spaced typed pages.

NEW YORK -- The Boston Globe, one of the few large U.S. newspapers that remain under family control, would be sold to the New York Times Co. under a $1.1 billion merger agreement approved yesterday by the boards of both companies.The deal provides that the Globe would retain its management and editorial autonomy. Yet it adds to the decades-long centralization of U.S. communications, under which many independently owned news organizations have been sold or closed down. It would also considerably expand the role of the Times Co. and its controlling family, the Sulzbergers, in the country's media.

If the Gray Lady didn't have enough problems battling industrywide woes, now she has Rupert Murdoch to worry about. The media billionaire has made no secret of his desire to take aim at The New York Times once his News Corp. acquires Dow Jones & Co. and its flagshipThe Wall Street Journal in a $5 billion deal expected to close this fall. Murdoch said during an earnings conference call last week that he wanted the financial newspaper to have "more coverage of national, international and nonbusiness news ... all to better compete with The New York Times and other national newspapers."

It takes a few seconds to realize what you are looking at. The Sunday cover of The New York Times always features one of the very best photographs taken in the world that week, and those shots are very often quite jarring. In some faraway land, you often learn with your first sip of coffee that people are living through the unthinkable. But this Sunday's cover didn't cause an immediate, visceral reaction. This took some studying. Set in the middle of the page -- and not very deep -- was a horizontal photo.

Fernando writes Rice and Curry, a blog about Sri Lankan food and spicy cuisine. He posted just yesterday from Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo, about Sri Lankan street food. UPDATE: S.H. Fernando's "Rice & Curry: Sri Lankan Home Cooking" has been included among the New York Times notable cookbooks for 2011 .   Definitely have a look . Fernando's new book, "Rice & Curry: Sri Lankan Home Cooking" is a great gift for an adventurous home cook, especially if it's packaged with Skiz's Original Sri Lankan curry powders , which come in raw and roasted versions, which can be ordered through the Rice & Curry website.

Michael Pollan's appearance at the Baltimore Speaker Series isn't until January, but there is something I urgently need to tell you about him. The author of the "Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto" is coming to the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall on Jan. 12, 2012 as part of the Baltimore Speaker Series . UPDATE: You don't have to wait untl January to see Michael Pollan. The New York Times contributing writer will open the Strathmore's 2011-21 Speaker Series on Wendesday, Oct. 26 at 8 p.m., in the Music Center.

I just about spit out my coffee Sunday morning when I read that you are going to start charging for access to the online version of The Sun. The Sun website is the worst website I have ever tried to use. Have you ever looked at the Washington Post or the New York Times websites to see how it's done? You couldn't have or yours wouldn't be the way it is. It is very difficult to find any article when one clicks on "Print Edition. " Unless it is an article that is also available online, it is virtually impossible.

Good thing Ron Shapiro isn't a told-you-so kinda guy. Not after The New York Times reported recently on how Chinese companies are finding a back door into the U.S. stock market . Shapiro, a prominent sports agent-attorney whose clients have included Cal Ripken Jr., warned about the same sort of stock market shenanigans 42 years ago, as lead author of a Maryland Law Review article titled, “The 'Going Public Through the Back Door' Phenomenon...

In the spring of 2006, as Katie Couric was ascending to the CBS Evening News as the first woman solo anchor, Jill Abramson - who just happened to be the first woman managing editor of The New York Times - wondered aloud in a Times essay when the qualifier "first woman" would no longer be worth mentioning. We have women Supreme Court justices and women heads of corporations, and we pretty nearly had a woman president. But when Ms. Abramson was elevated early this month to the executive editorship of The New York Times, all the headlines proclaimed that she was the first woman to hold the most hallowed job in American journalism.

The Los Angeles Times won five Pulitzer Prizes yesterday for journalistic work that included a series examining Wal-Mart's business practices, quirky car reviews and gripping photography from the Liberian civil war. An investigation by the New York Times into companies whose disregard of workplace safety led to employee injuries and deaths captured the Pulitzer for public service, journalism's highest honor. No award was given for feature writing, a first since the category was established in 1979.

The Titanic, doomed star of the new movie "Titanic" opening today, was a disaster for newspapers as well as for the 1,517 passengers and crew who died 85 years ago. Not until the Chicago Tribune's "Dewey Defeats Truman" in 1948 were headline writers more embarrassed.The ship hit an iceberg at 11: 40 p.m. Sunday, April 14, 1912. It sank less than three hours later, at 2: 20 a.m. Monday April 15.For almost a day after that, much of the Western world heard the iceberg part but not the sinking and deadly results.

It took The New York Times, in its April 18 obituary, to put William Donald Schaefer's career as Baltimore mayor in perspective. He didn't help the city's schools, nor the city's economy. Bernie Steinberg, Baltimore

The New York Times admitted today it was fooled by The Onion and ran fake material based on the satirical newspaper's article.  In an article published last week called " Tiger Beat: Still Squeaky Clean After All These Years ," the NYT ran a photo of the magazine with a photo of President Barack Obama on the cover.  The Times' correction today said:  A series of pictures last Sunday of covers of the magazine Tiger Beat, with...