The New Yorker

Late last month, The Huffington Post announced that media critic James Warren would bring his "On Magazines" column over from The Chicago Tribune.

In a release at the time, Mr. Warren said, "Like a dogged parole officer, the magazines column has trailed me for nearly three decades, no matter my day job. If I had a buck for every one I've written about which is no longer with us, I could fly business class to Beijing."  read more »

From The New Yorker's collection of letters written by Norman Mailer to everyone from his parents to Jackie Kennedy to William F. Buckley and Don DeLillo:

To the Editor of Playboy
December 21, 1962
Dear Sir,

I wish you hadn’t billed the debate between William Buckley and myself as a meeting between a conservative and a liberal. I don’t care if people call me a radical, a rebel, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist, or even a left conservative, but please don’t ever call me a liberal.

Yours,

Norman Mailer

The New Yorker's classical music critic Alex Ross has been named a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, otherwise known as the genius grant.

The Observer's Doree Shafrir profiled Mr. Ross in 2007, describing his book, The Rest Is Noise, as follows :

The culmination of 10 years’ worth of work, Noise is a rereading of the conventional wisdom about 20th-century classical music: that avant-garde, atonal music was the important music of the century and that in some ways all modern classical music is derived from it. This argument is near-heretical for many scholars of classical music, but what Mr. Ross is really asking for is a complete reorientation of how classical music is appreciated: as part of culture as a whole, not a hermetically sealed world unto itself.  read more »

As a tribute to the late David Foster Wallace, Harper's Magazine, where the writer was a contributing editor, has made his work available on the Web to non-subscribers. Included in the collection of PDFs is Mr. Wallace's "Shipping Out," which formed the basis for his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The January 1996 piece follows Mr. Wallace on an exceedingly miserable luxury cruise to the Caribbean.

Here is Mr. Wallace's bravura description of his cabin's bathroom:

The sink is huge, and its bowl is deep without seeming precipitous or ungentle of grade. Good plate mirror covers the whole wall over the sink.  read more »

Bob Miller has unveiled the 23 titles that will make up his first list at HarperStudio, the imprint he started last spring at HarperCollins with the goal of finding a model for book publishing that doesn't rely on paying authors outsize advances or allowing retailers to return unsold stock. Mr. Miller's announcement, which he made this morning on HarperStudio's new blog, brings to an end several months of industry-wide speculation about just what kinds of projects he'd be able to sign up.

The most eye-catching title on the list is probably the collection of short, unpublished humor pieces by Mark Twain, which will be out in April.  read more »

It's not every Sunday that you pick up The New York Times and find Bill Keller's byline all over the paper. And, according to Mr. Keller, there might be a Sunday someday soon when there won't even be a paper for him to write in.

Stealing a page from the David Remnick playbook, Mr. Keller decided to drop his editor's cap and rewind back to the good old days when he was a senior writer pointing his critical eye to far-off places. In yesterday's Times, Mr. Keller's byline appeared on the cover of Week in Review and Book Review sections for articles about the  read more »

On Tuesday, Vanity Fair's Power & Politics blog posted a satire of The New Yorker's now legendary Barry Blitt cover of Barack and Michelle Obama as flag-burning, Osama bin Laden-honoring terrorists. In VF's version, drawn by illustrator Tim Bower, John and Cindy McCain are portrayed as their own worst caricatures: The presumptive Republican nominee for president is seen hunched over a walker, while his wife is juggling various prescription pills. On the wall is a painting of George W. Bush; in the fireplace, the Constitution.

But to several commenters—you know, those scourges of civilization—on VF.com, the cartoon was a little too similar to one by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's David Horsey that ran a week earlier. In it, the McCain's appear on the cover of The National Review, he's drooling in a wheelchair (mumbling to himself, "Bomb, bomb, bomb—bomb, bomb Iran"), she's pouring prescription pills into her hand. On the wall is a painting of Dick Cheney; in the fireplace, the Constitution.  read more »

Slate's Christopher Beam has something to get off his chest.

In a post last night, Mr. Beam, who writes the website's 'Trailhead' blog, confessed that he may have accidentally set off the ridiculous Barack and Michelle Obama "terrorist fist-bump" meme that found its way into this week's New Yorker's cover illustration by Observer contributor Barry Blitt. That cover has spawned more op-eds, blog posts, news segments, and articles than, frankly, Media Mob is willing to link to, making it the most talked about magazine moment in history since Miley Cyrus bared her back in Vanity Fair, lo, two months ago.

According to Mr.  read more »

THE BOTTOM OF THE HARBOR
By Joseph Mitchell
Pantheon, 293 pages, $23

Since almost as far back as the last World War, magazine writers in New York have been trying to sound like Joseph Mitchell, who would have been 100 years old this year. In honor of his centennial, Pantheon is releasing a new edition of The Bottom of the Harbor, a collection of Mitchell’s New Yorker pieces from the 1940s and ’50s that are all, in the words of the book’s author’s note, "connected in one way or another with the waterfront of New York City."

Mr. Mitchell writes about a restaurant in the old Fulton Fish Market, and its encyclopedic menu of things like shad roe and herring roe and mackerel roe and cod cheeks, and its proprietor, Louis Morino, and Morino’s hometown of Recco, Italy, and Morino’s reluctance to enter the disused upper stories of his restaurant building.  read more »

Music critic. Blogger. Photographer. Composer... Advice columnist?

That's the newest gig The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones can add to his C.V. after appearing in Jezebel's popular "Pot Psychologist" video advice feature this week.

Mr. Frere-Jones appears alongside the usual Pot Psychologists, Tracie "Slut Machine" Egan and Four Four's Richard Juzwiak, answering questions about sex, dating, ailments, and the difference between ambivalence and ambiguity. (Don't even ask about ambidextrousness.)

It's unclear if Mr. Frere-Jones properly prepared himself for the role of Pot Psychologist (he's seen enjoying a large glass of red wine at one point and admiring Ms. Egan's Ikea bedspread), but as always, the video comes with a warning to kids to stay away from drugs.

"It's really easy to get killed in Iraq," says Phillip Robertson, a freelancer who covered the war for Salon and wrote the introduction to the book Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq.

"They want to kill you. All you have to do is give them a chance and somebody will kill you or kidnap you." Mr. Robertson had his own near-kidnap experience, but he managed to get away. His driver's car was totaled, but Salon paid for a replacement. "No one has ever been killed because of me," he says. "And I'm very, very proud of that. There have been repercussions because of my stories but I can look you in the eye and say no one has been seriously hurt because of me."  read more »

A little after 6 p.m. at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, Condé Nast president Richard Beckman was sharing a drink—vodka, olives—with Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend. The two were discussing the same thing everyone in the lobby of Jazz at Lincoln Center at the Time Warner Center was talking about: What the National Magazine Awards can do, or not do, for a magazine.  read more »

On a recent Monday morning David Carey, group president of Condé Nast since early January, welcomed Off the Record to his spacious and spare 18th-floor corner office at 4 Times Square with his hand extended. “Want a smoothie?” he asked, gesturing to a table full of fruit and yogurt parfaits.

The auburn-haired Mr. Carey, 46, is of formidable height—6-foot-1—but has a dad’s slouched, somewhat recessive posture. Grabbing a plate of cantaloupe, he spoke about life in Scarsdale, which he shares with four kids—two pairs of fraternal, mixed-sex twins—and his wife, Lauri, who used to work in special events at the Metropolitan Opera but is now a homemaker. “It’s been fascinating to see all these high-rise towers going up in White Plains and they just opened a Ritz-Carlton, too,” he said, between chomps. “Not just a hotel. But beautiful residences. They have all these condos, and they sold out very quickly.”  read more »

New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh is leaving the newspaper to become a staff writer at The New Yorker, according to an internal memo distributed yesterday. (Radar had reported a rumor to this effect.)

Also heading over to 4 Times Square is New York Magazine contributing editor and writer Ariel Levy, who has already posted the news to her personal web site.

David Remnick wrote in an email to Media Mob that they are both expected to "write reported pieces."  read more »

The Times recently taught those of us who didn’t already know that playing squash can help one’s chances of getting into an Ivy League school. (FYI: Rowing and Latin are similarly good options!) And in this week’s New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten writes an amusing Talk of the Town about this week’s Bear Stearns Tournament of Champions, which will be held in a glass box in Grand Central Terminal.

Last Wednesday, two Egyptians—Mohamed Reda and Badr Aziz—played at the New York Athletic Club to qualify for the tournament. Watching them race around the court was a rapt woman who is hosting the two visiting players, in addition to another Egyptian pair, in her home in Bronxville, a spectacularly wealthy square-mile in Westchester. (The squash pro at a Bronxville club, who is also Egyptian, had arranged with the athletic quad to stay with the local woman, who, along with her son, has apparently grown quite attached to the guests.)

Before their big game, Reda and Aziz slept in, according to the piece, and munched on a breakfast prepared by their host’s housekeeper. A little while later, they went into the village for lunch, where they encountered what was presumably the players’ first encounter with the area’s more skittish residents. As the foreign squash pros walked back home behind a young boy, they noticed him looking back at them nervously. “He ran into the bushes,” Aziz recalled to Mr. Paumgarten, laughing. “Strange Arabs! Terrorists! Ha!”

Kudos to Jeff Bercovici from Portfolio's Mixed Media blog for noticing this amusing correction from The New Yorker's end of the year fiction issue, regarding Malcolm Gladwell's Dec. 17 piece "None of the Above":

CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, "None of the Above," Malcolm Gladwell states that Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their 1994 book "The Bell Curve," proposed that Americans with low I.Q.s be "sequestered in a 'high-tech' version of an Indian reservation." In fact, Herrnstein and Murray deplored the prospect of such "custodialism" and recommended that steps be taken to avert it. We regret the error.

For more on The New Yorker's history with corrections, click here and scroll about halfway down to the second item. 

Harry Mount is the author of a playful and, considering the historically staid subject matter, irreverent book on the principles of Latin, Amo, Amas, Amat…and All That (Short Books). New Yorker scribe Lauren Collins writes a fittingly playful, albeit not altogether irreverent, “Talk of the Town” on the 36-year-old journalist.

Strolling around the New Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum the other day, Mr. Mount, a self-described “Wanker,” began to wax on the etymology of the word “dick.” The subject, em, arose because he was standing before the very object that supposedly spawned the anatomical term. “It’s very useful, if you’ll forgive the vulgarity, to remember the word ‘dick.’ D-I-C-C, for Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. Ionic is a more feminine column. It’s always got the, as it were, twirly-whirly girls’ curls,” he told the magazine, before describing his London primary school’s policy, wherein Latin classes were required for boys but not girls, as “a hangover.”

Then, sitting to sup at a diner near the Met, the conversation turned decidedly juicy. “I was watching Henry V on the plane over—there’s an accepted period of laddish drunkenness in all cultures,” he said. “The Greeks were keen on wine and sexual misbehavior. There’s a great bit of Plato, often read at weddings, about two halves of the same soul being joined. They always neglect to read the part that says the greatest love of all is between two male halves.” (Mr. Mount maintains this homoerotic contention despite having been rolled down a hill in a Porta-Potty during his salad days at Oxford.) As an aside, The Daily Transom hopes to hear plenty more from said writer in the near future.  read more »

This week’s New Yorker, on newsstands today, contains a “Talk of the Town” that tells the bittersweet tale of someone named Cara Hannah. She is, according to the petit profile, currently suffering the brunt of both the Writers Guild strike and the collective towel-throw of Broadway stagehands. After all, Ms. Hannah is a wig stylist. And she not only powders pate-rugs for The Phantom of the Opera, but also for the funny folks at Saturday Night Live.

Because both productions have gone dark, she has been forced to trade in the glamour of eight-hour fittings for James Bond skits at 30 Rock for the bleak, lonely landscape of the classifieds. But after being snubbed by a wig shop and then Macy’s, Ms. Hannah started cutting hair in her bathroom, or, Chez Sullivan Salon, as her fiancé has billed the joint. In just two days, business was booming—she suddenly had more heads to cut and style in her loo than Frédéric Fekkai on a Friday. “I think my prices are attractive,” she told the magazine. “I take into consideration that, you know, I’m making people sit next to my john.”  read more »

Speaking of New Yorker editors, it sounds like Tina Brown has some suggestions for her sucessor at the magazine. She recently told an Indian paper: "I would probably redesign it again. I might make a shorter front of the book section."

We're sure David Remnick appreciates the advice.

And on that note: Happy Thanksgiving!  read more »

The way David Remnick became editor of The New Yorker is well-documented. A few weeks after Tina Brown had unexpectedly quit, S.I. Newhouse offered Michael Kinsley the job, then quickly withdrew his offer and gave it to Mr. Remnick.

Recently, Mr. Remnick gave a speech at Princeton and offered a tiny anecdote about how he won perhaps the most coveted job in magazine journalsim. The Daily Princetonian reports:

Recalling his rise to his current post, Remnick said he was "anointed by mistake." One weekend, he volunteered to write a memo on how to improve the magazine, and since the editor-in-chief position was empty at the time, his suggestions launched him into the job.

Maybe S.I. Newhouse saw the memo a day after he offered Mr. Kinsley the job?  read more »

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has 13 recordings of Richard Strauss’s opera, two cats, a husband and a new book.  read more »

On Friday night, Salman Rushdie was talking about Dorothy—that is, the Dorothy portrayed by Judy Garland in the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz.

Her mantra—“There’s noplace like home!”—is apparently not shared by the literary superstar whose 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, was banned in his native India and resulted in a fatwa against him.  read more »

Can Pamela Maffei McCarthy keep The New Yorker from display-copy repeats?  read more »