A field guide for those who know better but have not—yet.

There is a particular panic that sets in when one considers canceling The New York Times. Not fear of losing the paper so much as fear of losing the self that comes bundled with it.

“Where will I get recipes?”

“The crossword keeps my marriage alive.”

“I can’t just abandon a 200-day Wordle streak!!”

These are real concerns. I had some of them myself.

The modern New York Times is not merely a newspaper. Somewhere along the way, it somehow colonized breakfast, podcasts, recipes, games, product reviews, restaurant choices, movie reviews, and the tiny spaces in life once occupied by silence. For a certain group of us, reading the Times has become less a habit than an identity. At some point, it stopped being something we subscribed to for news about the world and became part of how we understood ourselves. It is no longer just a news source. It is a teacher, ethicist, restaurant guide, therapist, travel agent, film critic, shopping consultant, interior decorator, mechanic, political interpreter, dinner-party conversationalist, and — admittedly — a really, really good lemon pasta recipe.

And yet, for many of us, the paper’s moral and political sensibilities began to feel increasingly narrow, performative, and frankly way too predictable to be interesting. Divergent perspectives still appear from time to time, but in ways that feel curated and episodic — the exceptions to ultimately reinforce the boundaries of acceptable understanding and opinion rather than expand them.

For many Jewish Americans and their allies, after October 7, a relationship that had been wobbly became toxic — and, like many toxic relationships, hard to leave. Not because of any single story. Rather, it was the cumulative effect of framing choices, moral emphases, stories elevated and stories softened, incendiary claims later walked back, factual failures, and narratives that traveled globally long before corrections caught up. And a persistent spotlight placed on a very narrow slice of Jewish voices — overwhelmingly those that fit comfortably within the paper’s existing moral and political framework.

More corrosive than any individual error was the growing recognition that the errors always bent in the same ideological direction.

But canceling the........

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