Here are your TOC grubs, baby birds. It's a double issue (Début Fiction, and don't they look like pleasant young people?), so we'll have lots to talk about. I mean eat. Sometimes metaphors have to mix, like wallflowers at the Mistletoe Mixer. Hey, want to play a fun game? This time you guess which sections all the pieces might be in! Remember, high-falutin' Easterners, lots of people don't have their issue yet. The Pony Express lost a shoe. Boldface here shows the stories I'm most excited about right now.

FILIBLUSTER: Hendrik Hertzberg considers the nuclear option.

WATERGATE DAYS: Seymour M. Hersh recalls the era of Deep Throat.

RECORDS DEPT.: Ben McGrath on Craig Biggio and the pitches that hit him.

HERBERT WARREN WIND: David Remnick remembers the late New Yorker writer.

IN CASE OF EMERGENCY: James Surowiecki on crisis management in business.

David Sedaris
Turbulence: How to fight with a fellow-passenger.

Edmund White
My Women: Why I loved some of them.

Janet Malcolm
Someone Says Yes to It: Gertrude Stein and “The Making of Americans.”

Karen Russell
“Haunting Olivia”: The search for a sister’s ghost.

Uwem Akpan [Interview with Cressida Leyshon, online only]
“An Ex-Mas Feast”: A season on the streets of Nairobi.

Justin Tussing
“The Laser Age”: Dating your teacher.

Adam Gopnik: William Dean Howells’s writing life.

John Updike: Robert Littell’s “Legends.”

Briefly Noted: It’s All Right Now, by Charles Chadwick; The Wonder Spot, by Melissa Bank; Ogden Nash, by Douglas M. Parker; A Mirror in the Roadway, by Morris Dickstein.

Sasha Frere-Jones: The White Stripes’ new album.

John Lahr: “After the Night and the Music,” “BFE.”

Nancy Franklin: “The Inside,” “The Closer.”

David Denby: “Batman Begins,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.”

Les Murray: “The Mare Out on the Road”

Eavan Boland: “An Elegy for My Mother in Which She Scarcely Appears”

Eamon Grennan: “Steady Now”

Ana Juan: “Debut on the Beach”

Frank Cotham, David Sipress, Paul Noth, Barbara Smaller, Carolita Johnson, Kim Warp, Charles Barsotti, P. C. Vey, Bruce Eric Kaplan, John O’Brien, Steve Duenes, Alex Gregory, Victoria Roberts, Matthew Diffee, Michael Maslin, Robert Leighton, Danny Shanahan, Gahan Wilson, Mick Stevens, Leo Cullum, Roz Chast, Edward Koren, Robert Weber, Pat Byrnes, Michael Shaw

Pascal Lemaitre

Hmm, I see I've boldfaced most of the issue. How come the poems are so seldom linked, I wonder? I didn't say these were the only things I'm interested in—I mean, Ben McGrath always rules, but I'm just not that informed about baseball—just the things I'm most excited about before even looking at the issue. (Book review. I'm that dedicated.) If you're wondering, as some have, why I would write a blog about The New Yorker, this is why.

The contents in a much nicer format, with fun colors and illustrations, Flash ads, the Cartier menace, and the Cartoon Bank [New Yorker]