Lloyd Grove is trumpeting a "melodrama on 43rd Street" as he gets a sneak peek at next Sunday's NYTBR, in which Kathryn Harrison pans Maureen Dowd's Are Men Necessary?, suggesting "an award-winning acid tongue just may be a tragic flaw." (For good measure, she adds that the Times columnist works too hard at trying to be funny, "[coming] across as someone who wants to be liked.") But it's not as if Dowd's being particularly singled out by the Review, which has refused to hand out free passes to other NYT op-ed eminences since Sam Tanenhaus took over.

Last year, for example, Michael Kinsley went to town on David Brooks for indulging in "fearless generalizing, clever coinage, jokes and shopping lists." And though Fareed Zakaria loved The World Is Flat, he did take Thomas Friedman to task for padding the text (and conceded that plenty of readers—though not himself—find Friedman's style "irritating").