Sometimes the smartest thing for news-media revolutionaries to do is pause and admire what the New York Times does wonderfully well, when it does do it.

I've excoriated the blunderbuss of Eighth Avenue often enough to say credibly, I hope, that sometimes it reminds us that serious journalism requires more than instant videos, twitter alerts, reader feeds, and bolt-of-lightning insights. It demands climbing a tenement's stairs the second time to be sure of what's there, or making that last call to an elusive or forgotten source on one's list, or seeing the look on a campaign manager's face as you pop your question.

At times, in other words, there's no substitute for an experienced reporter's going there and bringing both public memory and professional skill to the job -- especially when the story seems obvious and familiar. Telling the truth always takes time and resources.

Corporate bottom-lining now cuts against giving reporters what they need, and it's maddening that so many serious journalists at other newspapers are being starved or corrupted. New media like TPM are striving to fill the breach and often succeeding.

But three pieces in yesterday's Times show what it is we all need to achieve. If you missed them, here they are, and here's why they matter.

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If anyone abetted Iranians' brave, breathtaking defiance of the anti-republican rot in the "Islamic Republic" of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last month, it was Barack Obama. George W. Bush had strengthened that regime by offending Iranians' national pride. Obama weakened it with his March 19 Persian New Year address and his June 4 Cairo speech, eight days before Iran's elections.

"The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations," he said on March 19, "but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization."

Enough Iranians took him up on this to remind the world that sometimes America's strength lies more in its civic depth than in its armed might. As Turkish scholar Ibrahim Kalin put it, "People see in [Obama - and, I'd add, in our 2008 election] something they would like to see in their own leaders, and that, in itself, creates huge expectations." Those expectations are still rising: Yesterday, major Iranian clerics called the election and the regime "illegitimate."

But now comes Joe Biden, raising different expectations.

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On a quiet street in Tehran one night last week, the Iranian-American writer Cameron Abadi was stopped by a teenaged Basij militia member. The youth, still growing his first beard but armed and quite full of himself, demanded in rough provincial dialect that Abadi exhale enough to show if he'd been drinking.

Abadi, clean, was told to move on. But if the boy had had the wit to ply him with some questions, he might then have cried, "Take him in!" and doomed this New York-born-and-bred Yale graduate. Unbeknownst to Abadi, a colleague from a website he was writing for had just been arrested at the airport trying to leave. Abadi, lucky a second time two days ago, got a Turkish Airlines flight via Istanbul to Dusseldorf, where he caught a train to Berlin.

Even when the regime let the streets fill with peaceful citizens by day, it sowed the menace Abadi faced by night. Iranians were shocked because Tehran has so little street crime -- and so few cops -- that people walk at all hours without looking over their shoulders. It's a bit like New York City 70 years ago, when the novelist Howard Fast and his girlfriend slept in Central Park on hot summer nights to escape moral strictures as stifling as their airless apartments. They feared not muggers but an occasional police officer.

In Tehran now, too, the only public menace is the state. But the Iranian state teaches oppressed, angry boys to cling to guns and God -- both dispensed by the state itself, including by that senior boy and ex-traffic engineer, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad. Yet some U.S. neocons and lefties seem to like having him around.

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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's speech gives a virtual green light to the thuggish -- and massive -- Basij militia. It also raises the "moral" and Iranian constitutional ante on future demonstrations. From now on, demonstrators aren't legitimately petitioning for redress of grievances. They're civil disobedients - and, to a dishearteningly hate-filled part of Iranian society, they're something worse.

In civil-disobedience, you break a law non-violently and accept the legal punshiment to show that it's the unjust law that has betrayed the constitution, not your breaking that bad law publicly in order to defend the very rule of law. That strategy is risky enough here, but in Iran, it's inconceivable. Even just demonstrating peacefully will now demand more moral and physical courage than it did yesterday, or than civil disobedience usually does here. It will be cast as disobedience to the constitution itself - to the "Supreme Leader."

Watch the first 20 seconds of his speech and see his listeners' quintessentially fascist salutes, and you know what's coming. But consider that the U.S. hasn't always been better, and that some Americans still aren't.

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From a temporarily secure and undisclosed location (when not in the streets), a former student of mine who's freelancing in Tehran for a European newspaper and two online publications is telling the untold story behind the opposition demonstrations.

I won't light up his name by linking him right now, but here's his find: Many Iranians who voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad voluntarily and with a clear conscience are deciding that he used them to consolidate power in ways they don't like. Yes, Ahmadinejad had legitimate electoral support. But where is it now?

The answer, almost literally, is blowin' in the wind: The next 24 hours should tell whether the regime can suppress the rising anger. The clerks and teachers my former student describes aren't all taking to the streets; they're asking neighbors with friends in the thuggish militia,"Don't the Basij have parents, don't they have children?" Such appeals to decency from Ahmadenijad voters matter in nationalistic, "revolutionary" Iran.

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Not only did Barack Obama's Cairo speech amply vindicate his election and inauguration as Barack Hussein Obama against the scare-mongering of 2008; it flushed out disingenuous ideologues on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

And -- stunningly, though so far not widely remarked - Obama made arguments against violence very much like those made here in April, thanks to the Israeli writer Gershom Gorenberg and the American writer Jonathan Schell, on the indispensability of coercive non-violence to struggles for liberation.

Obama's truths and arguments made believers in the armed-struggle, people's-liberation left squirm. But they made believers in the "This land is our land," Israel-Lobby right squirm, too. It's worth noting how.

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In the 1980s, when Judge Sonia Sotomayor was on the board of New York's Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, I was a columnist critical of some PRLDEF initiatives on racial election districting and on police and fire department promotional exams.

I knew some PRLDEF staff but hadn't heard of Sotomayor, and since I've sworn off posting for awhile to write a book on other subjects, I don't know if she supported the specific suits I criticized. But it's likely, and, in response to some inquiries, I offer here some leads. (Also, my columns on Obama's handling of race in the 2008 campaign are in "Sleeper's Obama Chronicles.")

Republicans look ridiculous going into heat over Sotomayor's comments about her "Latina" perspectives. But that shouldn't stifle criticism by serious observers of positions she took at PRLDEF, or questions about whether her thinking has changed.

First, on what a "Latina" or other ethno-racial viewpoint should and shouldn't bring to court deliberations, here's an instructive, if anecdotal assessment, in Dissent, drawn from my serving on New York juries.

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I never post twice a day -- and I apologize for crowding my fellow bloggers -- but e-mail and online responses to "A Quiet Read," below -- about Gershom Gorenberg's "The Missing Mahatma: Searching for Gandhi or a Martin Luther King in the West Bank" -- show that few know what "coercive non-violence" is. I'd better try to explain.

From the national-security-state right to the "armed struggle" left, people scoff that coercive non-violence is pious pacifism and passivity and that those touting it are either credulous dupes or Machiavellian oppressors. But coercive non-violence requires as much concerted, collective energy as warfare, and more courage than that of the scoffers on both sides, whom history often turns into pious apologists for mass murder.

Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World explains that practitioners of coercive non-violence are committed and disciplined to expel not just the oppressor but the oppressive methods they themselves have internalized. They stop obeying established power and generate new power by doing new things together peacefully that the oppressor disapproves. That needn't mean that they attack or, if attacked, turn violent, although at times, they may: Scoffers seem unaware that Gandhi and King weren't pacifists, and they don't understand what that means. It's urgent that we find out.

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Even with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu almost declaring war on Iran, the most valuable assessment of threats in the Middle East is "The Missing Mahatma: Searching for a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King in the West Bank," Gershom Gorenberg's rich, deep reckoning with how to get Israelis and Palestinians out of their death dance.

If you've followed me on "How (and How Not) to Assess Israel's Moral Self-Destruction," you know how coercive non-violence is becoming the most effective way to win power justly. Some Israelis and Palestinians have noticed this, even if most of their leaders and self-proclaimed spokesmen haven't.

Reading Gorenberg, I was suspicious at first of the fact that this Israeli author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 and contributor to The American Prospect and the dovish Israeli Ha'aretz, had just published his "The Missing Mahatma" in, of all places, the neo-conservative Weekly Standard. Was this some West Bank pacification gambit? But an hour ago Gorenberg told me how the piece wound up where it did.

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I first met Ross Douthat, the New York Times' newest columnist -- and, at 29, its youngest-ever and perhaps its first op-ed page conservative Catholic believer -- four years ago after reviewing his engaging and gutsy student's memoir, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. I've recently reviewed his book, Grand New Party. So herewith some thoughts about the Times' smart and telling but slightly risky choice.

The smart and telling part is that Douthat will outclass not only William Kristol but also a faithless, conniving, faux-populist neo-conservative strain of punditry, whose collapse has been evident recently in loud second thoughts from the historian Robert Kagan at the Washington Post and in the maunderings of David Brooks.

Ironically, Douthat's co-author of Grand New Party, Reihan Salam, worked for Brooks at the Times in 2003-4. But Douthat comes from somewhere else and is going somewhere else, and he is not alone. He may give serious left-liberals an adversary they deserve, because, unlike Kristol and Brooks, he has more beliefs than insecurities.

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Blogging at the New York Times under the boringly provocative title "Neoconservatism Lives!", Times Book Review Sub-Altern Editor for Life Barry Gewen touts Times regular reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn's latest suggestion -- this time in The American Conservative magazine -- that neo-cons are rising again.

Gewen isn't only being provocative, although, Lord knows, he tries. He actually likes the idea: "The Iraq war was never a partisan affair," he explains, adding that "Many prominent Democrats and liberals like Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman and George Packer supported it." Gewen neglects to mention that he supported it, too, along with his boss Sam Tanenhaus and most of the political reviews they published, as I showed here and in The Nation.

And how are Times Book Review readers responding? Click here and enjoy what Gewen wound up provoking.

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I'm sorry, but even as my colleagues parse the Israeli elections, I'm not quite done with Sam Tanenhaus, David Brooks, David Frum, William Kristol, and others who insinuated themselves so brilliantly into public discourse as "conservatives" in the 1990s and did so much damage to the American civil society and republic and therefore, not incidentally, to Israel itself.

Now they're trying to give American conservatism a decent burial as they strive, with unseemly haste and some inexcusable assistance, to get us to think well of them.

A few hours ago in Open Democracy I wrote that I'm not buying. These men should bury themselves for awhile -- in good books, long walks, quiet conversations, and, above all, public silence. Then I may forgive them for making the mistake of their lives -- and ours. But I doubt that I or, for that matter, honorable conservatives, will think well of them soon. Here's why.

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At The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier's Halfway House for Recovering Neo-conservatives has Sam Tanenhaus' third long elegy for conservatism as a movement and an ideology.

There is a conservative sensibility or wisdom that many liberals are the poorer for missing. But I've often asked Tanenhaus -- most tellingly here and in the Guardian, and Yale Daily News - to admit that conservatives can't reconcile their keening for an ordered, sacred liberty with their obeisance to every riptide of a capitalism that's dissolving the republic, values, and customs they claim to cherish.

At last, he admits it, and he resists his old temptation to blame liberals. Conservatives who dine out too often on liberals' follies forget how to cook for themselves, and Tanenhaus has been a bad chef at the Times, as I showed in The Nation. Let's hope his bio of William F. Buckley, Jr. matches his delicious one of Whittaker Chambers. But if you see a blogger call his New Republic elegy the "must read" of the moment, send him this account of Tanenhaus in 2007.

I'm procrastinating. I'm procrastinating so badly that yesterday I read Samuel Johnson's essay on procrastination in the June 29, 1751 edition of The Rambler. That leaves many more essays on this important problem to read as I gather strength and resolution for the greater work I intend to complete.

I certainly can't afford not to complete it. As I read the many richly-informed posts here at TPM, I am reminded that our desperate world can't afford my procrastination, either.

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Bill Kristol's New York Times column was doomed the day it began on January 7, 2008. And, yes, I told you so right here. But when it comes to warning about David Brooks' brew of intellectual usury and Resentment Lite, I feel a bit like Harry Markopoulos, who tried in vain to alert the SEC to Bernard Madoff's seductive but dangerous fraudulence, only to find the feds lacking lenses or coordinates to recognize the danger.

At least I have a name for Brooks' condition: Status/Self-Esteem Disequilibrium Syndrome (SSEDS). It designates a compulsion to cheapen one's recognized talents and prerogatives with subtle, unnecessary ingratiations and resentments toward those of even higher status and/or higher self-esteem. The syndrome runs deepest in those who live well off of it: High status-seeking, driven by low self-esteem. Unfortunately, many of Brooks' editors and fans suffer from milder variations of the syndrome. No wonder he's syndicated for millions of newspaper readers and on NPR and PBS.

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