The New Yorker has an article on the web about the Perelman affair, and it includes in the 13th paragraph a similar but much better explanation of basic topology concepts than the Times article I criticized in the previous entry. In fact the similarity of the description, using the same examples of bagels or donuts and coffee cups and rubber bands, makes me think that both came from the same source, perhaps a textbook, or a sheet that's passed around by journalists who have to write about difficult topics, and the author of the Times article tried to compress it a bit too much, or just not very well. The New Yorker sometimes makes unintentionally humorous statements about technology, such as the sentence "There were at least a hundred billion numbers in the shopping bags" referring to bags full of CDs in the Unicorn Tapestries article. But often they do a very impressive job with technical descriptions that are clear to technically oriented readers without alienating the non-technical ones.