Yesterday I posted a short item on New York Times copy style, making the point that the newspaper capitalized the word “federal” but not the phrase “cold war.” Turns out I’m wrong. What I said was once true but is true no longer. An editor at the Times, Toby Harshaw, has sent me the following entry from the NYT stylebook:

federal (governmental). Capitalize when part of a proper name (Federal Reserve Board; Federal Bureau of Investigation) but lowercase in other uses: federal courts; federal troops; federal agents.

Also, NYT style does call for a lower-case “cold war.”