I love it! I hate it! I love it! I hate it!

No, I’m not talking about Caitlin Flanagan, though she is definitely in the “hate it” camp lately for that inexplicable remark about men being the head of the household on the Colbert Show. That’s not even funny as a spoof.

Tonight, it’s all about the Style section of the Times. From the New Republic:

The Times is hardly breaking new ground with its foray into what may be best described as luxury porn. Most metro areas with the proper concentration of wealth boast at least one slick glossy peddling the luxe life. And, hot on the heels of “Thursday Styles,” last September The Wall Street Journal introduced its own shopping-on-steroids section, suggestively titled “Pursuits.” But it’s one thing for a bunch of glorified ad vehicles–or even the rampantly capitalist Wall Street Journal–to be hawking designer duffel bags and skin cream priced higher than Jack Abramoff’s legal team. After all, these publications unabashedly promote–and generally cater to readers who share–a Trump-esque mine-is-bigger-than-yours attitude toward wealth and consumption. It’s quite another matter, however, for the venerable Times to lend its imprimatur to a genre so awkwardly at odds with its own high-minded liberal sensibility and intellectual pretensions. This, after all, is the same paper that, last year, ran an eleven-part series on class in America, in which it described economic mobility as “the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream” and exhaustively pondered its apparent decline. Social consciousness for The Wall Street Journal may mean crushing the welfare state, but, for the Times, it means earnest editorials packed with noblesse oblige. (Classic snippet from last Thanksgiving: “There is no shame in the poverty Americans suffer today. The shame adheres to those who do nothing to change it.”) Wretched consumer excess may be the American way, but is it really the paper of record’s business to lend it respectability? The disconnect is jarring enough that even “Thursday Styles” appears to be grappling with this question. 

Yeah, but how cool is this dude? Like he’s got his own home museum. Damn, I want one, too.