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Tierney: The existence of losers and my knowledge of Scrabble proves my earlier point. I will use discredited tropes of evolutionary psychology to back it up. Is there a phrenologist in the house?

Kristof: Why am I the only one who cares when bad stuff happens? Why is it up to one adventuring Indiana Jones-like columnist to save the world? Being Nicholas Kristof is a heavy burden.

$2.66 and scarcely worth that.

That out of the way, let's move on to the good stuff. Remember Daniel Okrent's last column, in which he delivered a straight-out-of-left-field sucker punch to Paul Krugman, the dearly missed Maureen Down, and the less missed William Safire? It was mystifying why he abandoned his practice of giving the journalists critiqued a chance to rebut, Dowd said to New York Magazine, and Krugman took a break from brainwashing Princeton students will liberal talk of secular supply curves and abortions-on-demand to pen an angry letter, published by the Times along with all the complimentary letters by regular folk last weekend. The Times knows when they have a good thing going, so the ads have gone up around town for a bare-knuckle brawl between the Public Editor and the Statistic-Slinging Selective-Citer.

Pre-fight analysis after the jump.

Krugman sez:

He offered no examples of my "disturbing habit," and maybe I should stop there: surely it's inappropriate for the public editor to attack the ethics of one of the paper's writers without providing any supporting evidence. He responded to my request for examples with criticisms of specific columns. Those criticisms were simply wrong: in each of those columns I played entirely fair with my readers, using the standard data in the standard way.

That should be the end of the story.

Oh, but it isn't. Okrent, who says he was perhaps trying to "subconsciously" make sure no one missed him, will be having a public brawl with Krugman on the pages of the Times Public Editor's not-a-blog. It hasn't started yet, but it'll clearly drum up some interest in the OpEd page — sort of like when a show that everyone suspects will be cancelled starts throwing out bizarre plot twists and killing off characters; "Okrent's gone, see, but he's not really gone, and he returns for an epic battle with Krugman, and we have this big cliffhanger where they've drawn their swords and they're facing each other in the empty void of Calame's web journal... and the stage is set for the return of Maureen Dowd!"

The only problem with this sort of behavior, of course, is that it leads to the regular, more boring characters getting neglected. So Tierney rambles on about Scrabble and David Brooks just goes completely nuts, as desperate for attention as a toddler with a new baby brother.

But who will win the showdown? The way we see it, Krugman's actually smart — like, almost Nobel smart. Okrent's just some freelancer who got lucky. He can spin a phrase, and few are as effective with smug condescension, but Krugman's army of slave graduate assistant researchers may win it for him. Stay tuned, 'cause as long as it's free, we'll be covering it. -AP

The Urge to Win [NYT]
Day 141 of Bush's Silence [NYT]
The Grumpiest Ombudsman [NYM]
Goodbye, Public Editor No. 1, and Thanks [NYT]