Brooks's Epistle to the Anhedonians

Rembrandt self-portrait, 1658, at The Frick Collection. Note the size of the left hand holding the cane.

So who, exactly, paid for David Brooks' $120,000 luxury vacation? Paging @sulliview ... https://t.co/FZ3TlODV0U

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) November 13, 2015

I don't think @sulliview has any power over there where Brooks's travel piece ran, in T, "The Times Style Magazine", devoted to journalistic corruption on a Vogue-like scale, but free of news, which is what makes it OK, more or less. Four Seasons Travel, the company that sells the trip he junketed on, certainly paid for it, out of their PR budget. Brooks will have gotten a fairly fat freelance fee (from T, not Four Seasons) as well, for his pains; the magazine is not his employer. [Wrong on most counts, apparently, per Margaret Sullivan (thanks, Driftglass): T is administratively part of the Times and subject to its ethical rules, and the Times paid for the trip; I suppose there wasn't a writer's fee either. The errors are regretted.]

Four Seasons doesn't have an ad in this issue, which shows pretty good taste (not like Comedy Central, which runs a movie ad during the Daily Show every day of the week the movie's star gets interviewed). And they'd be advertising in T in any case, in the course of the year, because why would they not be, and I'm pretty sure the company is among the partners in Times Journeys, where you take trips "inspired by Times content" accompanied by John Burns, Jeffrey Gettleman, Serge Schmemann or David Shipler. Or Maureen Dowd or Steven Erlanger. God help me I could go to Pakistan with Carlotta Gall?

Berlin

Collegium Hungaricum, Dorotheenstrasse, Mitte.

Last time I was in Europe at all was more than 25 years ago, as the amazing events that changed the structure of the continent were just getting under way in Poland and Hungary in particular, and not paying a lot of attention to them yet—on a last junket for the magazine I'd just quit working for; I went to a fashion show in Milan, a perfume launch in Antibes, a jewelry thing in Paris, and a watch thing in Geneva, and in between showed the young helpmeet around selected bits of a couple of other places to the best of my ability, which was not in fact very great, because my superior skill in languages and my cultural preparation were not matched by my knowledge of what to do with luggage or taxi drivers, or ability to dress in a way appropriate to the wine I might know how to order, or an appropriate amount of money for that matter, because although a junket it was not that generous a junket, but we had a great time.