Apart from his repulsive habit of publishing Charles (Bell Curve) Murray, can someone please explain to me why David Shipley regularly wastes so many column inches in the New York Times op-ed page on fluff like this?

Nice enough photos, but, er, this is an op-ed page. In the print edition, the photos takes up nearly a third of the page. Does no one on the planet have anything more substantive to offer that could fill those 38 column inches?