P.J. O’Rourke uses a Weekly Standard column to document his recent trip to the world inhabited by the staff and readers of the New York Times.
Do parallel universes exist? I have proof that one does. I confirmed the hypothesis in a manner very like that of the young Isaac Newton, who was sitting in a garden when an apple dropped on his head. I was standing in a convenience store when a Sunday New York Times dropped on my foot. Newton, in a stroke of brilliant insight, comprehended gravity. I, in a throb of bruised toe, opened the April 22, 2018, Sunday Review section.
It had long been my opinion that the writers and editors of the New York Times and, by extension, their readers live on a different planet—the planet where a martini costs $20. But, upon perusal of the Sunday Review section, I see that I was wrong. They do not live on another planet. They live in another cosmos—a universe with different physics, different mathematics, different scientific constants, and different laws of nature.
The lead essay in the Sunday Review is by Amy Chozick, adapted from her new book Chasing Hillary. The headline is a quotation from Hillary Clinton: “They Were Never Going To Let Me Be President.”
The Hillary Clinton of Universe New York Times (UNYT) is similar to the Hillary Clinton of the known universe (U1) except that in UNYT she was the rightful winner of the 2016 election.
Chozick’s subject is time travel—impossible in U1 but commonplace in UNYT . By means of technology unknown to the inhabitants of U1, Chozick transports her UNYT readers to an ancient period of fossilization that political paleontologists of U1 have named “Who Cares?” There, she and her audience experience phenomena hardly imaginable to us. In U1 we sometimes beat a dead horse, but in UNYT they feed it and groom it and ride it around.