Just a hint for those days when you're in a rush and want only the crucial nuggets from the New York Times. It's natural to assume that the need-to-know news in any piece is in those first paragraphs - who, what, when, where, why etc. - that every piece winds from the large to the small, from the important lead to insignificant final paragraphs. And it's true that if you scan those first paragraphs, the ones on the front page in particular, you do get what passes for all the news fit to print in our world (and every now and then a little more as well); that is, what everyone who matters agrees is the news of the day, what you'll also be able to check out at CNN and on the prime-time news casts, what the pundits will then discuss on Crossfire or Charlie Rose or Nightline.

But just for an experiment one day when you're in a hurry, you might try reading the Times in the opposite direction, inside out and bottom to top. Start each piece not with the first paragraphs but with the last ones because the way the Times actually works, if the news everyone can agree on is in the lead and the middle paragraphs of the day's major stories tend to fill in on or offer acceptable background material for the lead paragraphs, it's only at the end that can a reporter can slip in the embarrassing quote, the fact that doesn't fit, the interpretation that really matters. Squirreled away in the throwaway third of the story, are sometimes the most fascinating bits and pieces of the day, meant only for news junkies, the relatively small number of people who read the paper beginning to end. Here are two almost random examples from last week's Times:

Patrick Tyler, a good reporter, now in Iraq, did a long front-page piece Saturday, Iraq Leaders Seek Greater Role Now in Running Nation, on growing Iraqi unease with the occupation, especially among those appointed by the Americans to the Governing Council. The first paragraphs offer the official explanation for not quickly turning over power to our own appointed Iraqis. They are, Tyler writes clearly paraphrasing unnamed "American officials," "not ready to take control of an unstable and still violent country." But if you read all the way through the first 28 paragraphs, at paragraph 29, you suddenly arrive at something quite different -- "other unspoken [and so unquotable] concerns." Here is what Tyler put in the final three paragraphs:

"Some senior American and British officials say privately that they are concerned that if an election was held today, a Shiite muslim cleric might well dominate the polling on the strength of the 60 percent Shiite share of the population.

"Many Iraqis today say such concerns are exaggerated, that Shiites are divided along secular and religious lines and are unlikely to vote as a bloc unless they perceive a threat that they will be disenfranchised as they were in 1932, when the British withdrawal and Sunni duplicity excluded them from political power.

"Still, senior American officials say they are hoping that six months to a year of constitution writing and preparations for national elections will provide a process from which a moderate and secular Shiite leader will emerge to head the first democratic government here, one that would have the independence and self-assurance to avoid tilting toward the conservative Islamists of Iran."

And there you have a deeper interpretation of events. That's the news, really. We want "democracy," but also a government in power that is responsive to us, not the Iranians (or perhaps the Iraqis themselves).