Joyce Wadler deserves the Pulitzer for innovation in trend pieces.

For most journalists, trend and lifestyle pieces are total drags to write. Journalism school grads get into the newspaper biz hoping to be the next Bob Woodward. When they get assigned to write fluff articles about people with eccentric apartments, that spark is often crushed. They start phoning it in, sending out email blasts to friends with subject lines like "re: bad dating/apartment stories. Pls help. Deadline tues. morn,"

Wadler, a longtime New York Times writer, has clearly gone the opposite route with her story about romance-disabling apartments. She has created a modern journalism wonder: the trend piece equivalent of a car crash.

While it contains some classic Times-isms (one prospective dater complains about a date's cliched Klimt and Robert Doisneau prints and another laments that a lover left because of a too-opulent apartment), Wadler profiles two fairly bizarre characters, and manages the very difficult feat of telling their stories with a straight face.

According to the story, 70-year-old millionaire Albert Podell has apparently had some trouble meeting the right lady, and blames his tiny, cluttered rent controlled Soho apartment for his problems. Which, judging from the description of the apartment, seems reasonable.

Then there's 46-year-old Bob Strauss, whose apartment seems far more acceptable for other human beings than Podell, save a couple of eccentric touches.

Thank god the article includes photographs. Otherwise, the reader would never know that Albert looks like Warwick Davis's Leprechaun in grandpa sandals and a too-tight bright red turtleneck. It took a heroic amount of restraint for Wadler to keep that out of the text.

The picture also illuminates the sad case of Bob Strauss. He looks like a salt and pepper-haired Frankenstein crossed with Subway spokes-schlub Jared, and apparently has a fair amount of trouble navigating a buttoned-down shirt. His collar is askew in about seven different ways and his shirt front is awkwardly stuffed into his droopy jeans, showing off a tasty weave belt.

Miraculously, Wadler kept herself from mentioning that the stuffed seal is obviously the least of this chief's dating problems or underlining the irony that Captain Suave allegedly writes a DATING COLUMN FOR MATCH.COM by, like, I don't know, writing it in all-caps or something.

Honestly, I read the article twice. It's an article in the "Home and Garden" section of the New York Times. Nothing in that section has ever appealed to me before. And I'm not alone: it's the most emailed story on the Times site.