Peter Coviello, the former chair of Africana studies at Bowdoin College, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s alma mater, absolutely excoriates The New York Times for its piece on Mamdani’s “elite” education, under the Literary Hub headline “Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani”:

Like so many other bits of Times coverage, the whole of the piece is structured as an orchestrated encounter. Some people say this; however, others say this. It’s so offhand you can think you’re gazing through a pane of glass. Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two “sides,” or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it. Instead, what you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling “appraisal” surgically excised.

I’d bookmarked the NYT piece (“How a Small Elite College Influenced Mamdani’s World View”) but found its thesis so obviously and infuriatingly slanted (“The mayoral candidate has said his education at Bowdoin College was formative. But critics say that his degree exemplifies how colleges steep students in leftist dogma.”) that I let it slip by uncommented. I’m glad Coviello did not.