Argument, criticism, and the institutional view of this newspaper.
Nothing on this page is reporting. The opinion desk is edited by Bett Nakagawa, who reports to the publisher and not to the editor-in-chief, receives no advance notice of news stories, and attends no news conference. No reporter on the news staff writes, edits, or is consulted on anything published here. Where a piece concerns a subject this newspaper has reported on, we link to the reporting so you can read both and judge for yourself.
The institutional view of They Buried, decided by an editorial board of five and signed by none of them.
We removed four labels last week and defended it on the grounds that a reader is never in doubt. One correspondent pointed out where that fails: a screenshot of a document travels without the page around it.
Twenty-two per cent of this newspaper's income arrives from a donor we have never identified. The board has voted three times on returning it and the margin narrows every time. This is the reasoning, including both dissents, printed at the dissenters' insistence.
Camp Hero's transmit authorisation for 12 August 1983 opens at 23:40 and closes at 00:20. So does the 1943 harbour trial's range-control sheet, to the minute. The scheduling memo gives the reason in one sentence.
This desk reports through accounts because accounts get kept when nobody thinks they matter. Eleven independent classes of record corroborate her account. The twelfth record is our own null result, which we have let stand as a verdict for two years.
Forty-seven years, one sheet of paper, no expiry date and no agency named anywhere on it. Four of the men who signed talked to this newspaper. Three have now broken it in print, and nothing has happened.
I obtained them separately, from three laboratories on three continents, each of which believes it is the only one that ever measured this band. Their ages agree within eighty-six years. All three are stratigraphically impossible.
The two lines name Doreen Vosberg, give a start date in February 1961 and an end date in November 1962, and say she took part. Her daughter's thirty-year wait was a keying code entered on the second day: annuity, not records.
The 1971 instrument between two houses contains a contribution schedule, an earn-out, a non-compete, a break fee and a claw-back. In 1994 a court enforced the break fee and awarded on it.
An unmodulated carrier at 1,347.29 megahertz sits in all nine raw files, across nine consecutive passes, and its Doppler curve tracks the unnumbered object to within three hertz. My June retraction stands. So does this.
Two named authorities issue the same instruction in one archive within a single reign. One countermands the other, and the countermand is entered as a cost — eleven talents, dated, itemised. That is not theology. That is a board.
Thirty-one items on the Khafre subsurface, counted line by line against the borehole footage. Eleven carried a qualifier the evidence did not require. One sentence ran nine times after the document that disproves it was declined, unread.
This desk spent $2,940 on certificates, coroners' findings and police reports. Thirty-six arrived, three jurisdictions refused a stranger, and two of the subjects turned out to be alive. One of them answered his own telephone.
Our correspondent watched a graduate student range the Hadley array and count what came back. The nine returns fix the distance to eleven millimetres. Forty minutes later a Soviet rover's reflector answered just as well.
Two clerks traced 4,138 sentences to origin without being told why. The borrowed ones cluster in four hours nobody in this building is awake for, and a permanent overnight desk was costed and voted down in 2024.
The meter was fourteen months past its calibration date, and the readings were taken on the ×0.5 scale. An officer transcribed them as ×10. Forty-five years later the airman is still being called a liar.
The chair passes down Schedule 1 in French alphabetical order, and the rotation restarts at the top whenever a session is convened late. Eleven of the last fourteen were. Item 14 has been reached once since 1991, for eleven minutes.
Most of our postbag believes something we have investigated and could not stand up. The temptation is to write for the readers we wish we had. Here is why we don't, and where that argument stops.
The public editor read every Nibiru story this newspaper has published since 2019. Fourteen of thirty-one rest on a single contested tablet. Three cite our own back numbers as though they were corroboration.
The Nag Hammadi codices do not describe demons. They describe a bureaucracy — and a bureaucracy is a much harder thing to leave.
Three thousand one hundred and fourteen requests have taught me that the fight is almost never about secrecy. It is about a noun.
A defence of the ratio. Most nights nothing happens, and the nights when nothing happens are the entire reason the other nights mean anything.
Twenty-four pages of estate agent's particulars for a decommissioned regional seat of government. Read as prose it is scrupulous: the plant list, the asbestos register, the dehumidification bill, and a cable across the site the vendor cannot sell.
The 1985 videocassette was open-matte: it kept fourteen per cent of the camera aperture that projection cut away. The microphone sits three points above the theatrical mask line. It is on the negative and was never on a screen.
A new two-volume edition prints the denunciation, the interrogation marginalia and the confessions on the same page for the first time. The gold is gone. What the theft left behind is an audit, not a crime wave.
A new documentary makes twenty-two claims about the production design of a 1980 film. Four are true, three are genuinely unresolvable, and the rest are what happens when you look at anything for nine hours.
Five readers on the removal of four disclaimer layers, one of them a retired trading-standards officer who has been arguing with this newspaper for a year and has never yet been wrong about anything.
Four readers on the corrections archive, the Null Result series, our headline procedure, and one very long complaint about the horoscopes.
A reader writes to say the Sky Desk's signature measure is meaningless, that she checks it every morning anyway, and that this is the newspaper's fault rather than hers.
