I have emerged victorious from reading Lawrence Wright's Carlos Slim profile in this week's New Yorker. (The article is about the Mexican billionaire-mogul, in light of his financial entanglement with the New York Times.) Here are a few thoughts.

• One incredibly irksome thing that writers keep doing, when writing on the situation of the Times, is describing the layoffs at the Times in this way: "[T]he Times had resisted making the sort of staff cuts that have decimated newsrooms all over America. But in April Times employees were informed of a five-per-cent pay cut. Soon afterward, a hundred employees were fired from the business side."
  
  Well, actually, the Times company got rid of 750 people in the course of a single week not very many months ago! But no one actually cares about the physical laborers, and the drivers, and all the people who used to be involved in putting out a paper before the company's profit-model crashed and burned. The sacred newsroom, though! All A-OK! Sort of, not really!
  
  But to have executive editor Bill Keller say that the "people you need to actually be the New York Times" are the "reporters, editors, photographers, graphic artists, and Web producers" is noble and maddening. The people you need, to be the Times, once were the pressmen and the delivery men. Now they are the online advertising sales people.
  
  But I won't take him too strongly to task, since at least he included web producers in his list of all things that are good. (Boy, the Times sure changed its attitude fast! How they used to sneer at blogs.)

• It is epically hilarious, when the New Yorker is struggling financially, that this article is not online. They believe that this is a good financial choice.
• The support expressed for Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. by the likes of Thomas Friedman and Frank Rich-at least, when they are speaking on the record!-is absurd. Rich: "Any change in ownership would be highly traumatic." You know what's going to be traumatic? Chapter 11. Friedman expressed his hope that any future partners with the Times would be "a junior partner to the Sulzberger family," whatever that vague and strange construction means. In any event! This is not the actual story of the viewpoint inside the New York Times about Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. right now.
• The New Yorker did itself a disservice with the question-mark sub-headline about Carlos Slim. "[W]hat does he want with the 'Times'?" Answer: Read between the lines, if you must. There is a long accounting of the growth of his various companies, which were largely bought up during financial crisis and which operate as, essentially, monopolies. The comparison is fair! Yet there is no answer at all to the question. Time will tell! Maybe we will know while there is still a New Yorker to tell us about it.