Under almost any circumstance, it would be highly unfair to compare NYT managing editor for news Jill Abramson's new "Puppy Diaries" column to Joan Didion's masterpiece essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Unless Abramson asks us to.

See, the second installment of her year-long book proposal about "the challenges and satisfactions of raising a puppy" is entitled "Chewing Toward Bethlehem". It's about chewing and how much puppies like to do it. Let's compare and contrast!

For Didion, who was writing a skeptical piece about the supposedly utopian counterculture taking hold in San Francisco in 1967, her title referenced the last line of Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" in which he imagined that everything in the world was turning rotten.

The title "Chewing Toward Bethlehem," on the other hand, makes no sense. Eh, who cares as long as it hits the NYT's Most Emailed List.