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The most recent story was notable because it was not so much about Edwards' haircut as about the modern-day male who likes mirrors, which Edwards was taken to represent. Staff writer Peder Zane chronicled growth in sales of men's grooming products and plastic surgery and increased male interest in facials, pedicures and mud masks.

"It wasn't a haircut story. It was using the Edwards haircut story to explain something larger that it's connected to," Zane told me. "If people read it as an Edwards story, that was not my intention."

That may have not been the intention, but I think at least some people indeed did read it as another haircut story. The headline read "Edwards' hair cuts both ways."

I had two problems with the story. One was that it buys into the narrative of Edwards as a primper -- "if he does take the top prize," the story concluded, "America's growing legion of primpers may offer the loudest cheers.' That contributes to the right-wing cartooning of Edwards as less than masculine.

More problematic to me is that the story re-inflates the haircut "issue" as an ongoing campaign topic, even if it wasn't intended as such. My own feeling is that the original story did merit reporting -- with the mansion and the hedge fund, Hollywood hair-styling does raise questions about Edwards' populist bona fides. Edwards suffers from the three H's, a friend said: haircut, home, hedge fund.

But to continue to return to the hair story, to put it on the front page, even in the context of cultural commentary, seems to me to confer the newspaper's imprimatur on the haircut as a legitimate campaign issue. It's a trivial topic, and the newspaper should treat it as such. As several readers told me last week, let's move on.

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