The Times announced it will be smaller come 2008 by trimming the size of the paper and losing 5 percent of its news hole. It also announced that Judith Warner, author of the brain-numbing catastrophe of a book that says the government’s lack of fully-funded day-care options is forcing her to cook too many cookies for the bake sales at her children’s school and spend too much time watching soccer games, will be a columnist for the paper for a month — clearly a trial run for a full-time job. Because, see, when you shrink your paper by 5 percent, you want to be sure you decrease the average IQ of your op-ed writers by a comparable percentage.