Dan Barry

First John Tierney, and now this! In early 2007, fellow New York Times columnist Dan Barry will be giving up his "About New York" metro column to join the paper's national desk.

In the yet-to-be-named column, Barry will be "taking his voice and his notebook beyond the Hudson to 47 other states," according to a press release. Alaska and Hawaii need not apply.  read more »

Full release is after the jump.

Dan Barry's story in the Times today about writings by a victim of 9/11 that her North Dakota family only discovered in the last two months, having put off looking in her laptop as long as they could, was a sad and moving piece, the kind readers gravitate to before they have to swallow their Iraq and Iran. No wonder it was on the front page. Good reporting. I have a nit to pick. Barry made us wait nearly ten inches to read the late Ann Nelson's prose: a list of goals in life that the 30-year-old Cantor Fitzgerald trader had begun, and titled "Top 100." She had gotten as far as resolution #36 ("Learn about wine") before she died. Evidently, Barry and his editors decided that the laptop angle—how it got to North Dakota, how long mom put off opening it, etc.—was worth the long wait. Or maybe they felt that her list was anticlimactic in its homely simplicity. ("1. Be healthy/healthful... 11. Never be ashamed of who I am.") But the effect was that a reader had to navigate a lot of emotional prose about the bereaved's response to the victim's computer before Ann Nelson got to speak, posthumously. I think that was a mistake. Nelson's words are straightforward and wise, and deserved a higher place amid Barry's (more ornate) prose. The story should have begun with them, a taste anyway, then broken off to the laptop narrative.

P.S. Some readers are going to say I'm picking on Barry, who I criticized last week. O.K.—I'll move on.

Oy. Did I really write that The Times' Dan Barry was blaming David Blaine for murders in the outer boroughs? Unh, yes. Barry responded to that and my criticism of the Times coverage of David Blaine:

first, the times wrote a long sunday piece on may 7th about blaine and did a television review on the 9th, all before our supposed wink-off of blaine on the 10th. second, i like stunts and magic. i just don't embrace faux crises when we have enough real ones. i don't like professional sufferers with christ complexes. i measure bravery a little differently. and, lastly, i suggest this faux drama -- gee, i hope his liver is all right! -- was a distraction, even a welcome one, from realities beyond lincoln center, like war and murder.

Well, I still think Blaine is brave, and people respond to that. But I apologize; I should have been more nuanced.

Did you notice how awful the Times was to David Blaine today? The stunning end to his marine marathon at Lincoln Center got winked off in the Arts section, while Dan Barry in his Metro section column (sorry—Times Select) seemed to say that Blaine was responsible for blowing up soldiers in Iraq and murdering people in the Outer Boroughs. I think I got that right. Have these people ever heard of spectacle, or daring? Cristo piously panelling the park in puke-inducing pumpkin is precious, but Blaine just isn't high art enough. He should have charged $65 a head to have those silent audiences...