In her July 14 article about the premiere of the fourth season of "Mad Men," Alessandra Stanley neglected to include a phrase that precedes potentially revealing facts in film and TV reviews: "spoiler alert." Fans read ahead and the damage was done. A certain string of words made moot a device key to the operation of the "Mad Men" universe-the ignorance on the part of the audience of how much time has lapsed between the previous season and the current one-and she did not give readers the choice of whether or not they wanted to know before the episode aired. The information was placed casually in the middle [...]

Someone smarter than us noted a subtle, perhaps intentional turn of phrase in the New York Times public editor column yesterday. This column was the second whole public editor column devoted to Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley, and her third substantial mention in the ombuds-space-when the first public editor, Dan Okrent left, he couldn't leave without calling a paragraph of her writing "gratuitously nasty." In any event, in her most recent appearance, Stanley is described by current ombudsbot Clark Hoyt as "a prolific writer much admired by editors…." Hold on. Editors? Hmm. Not, you know, readers? Who, yes, actually don't care about her much at all.