An occasional feature in which, instead of writing unjustly hasty sentences when pressed for time, I offer you a fizzy thimbleful of each noteworthy article.

Emdashes friend B—— points us to this welcome sight: more Little King animations. You’ll remember this first Soglow find, which puts both the King and Santa in some peculiar situations.

From Nourishing Obscurity, a link to Jonathan Yardley on James Thurber:

Thurber in my youth wasn’t something you went to the bookstore for — though of course you could — but something that came in the mail almost every week, as regular and reliable as the clocks of Columbus, Ohio, which he wrote about in the pages of the New Yorker…. One does indeed turn to Thurber for the drawings, but the great glory is his prose. Whether he was the funniest of all American writers can be debated to the end of time, but he was much more than funny. Like his friend White he was wise, and there was a soft spot to him.

There’s a scrumptious selection of New Yorker covers here at Joanna Rees Photography; Rees introduces the gallery thus:

Today I presented a lecture on the cover art of The New Yorker magazine based on the USA Today article (2005) ‘That Should “Cover” It’ by Francoise Mouly. As I prepared the power point presentation I became delighted and intrigued by the covers and spent a considerable amount of time unearthing some of The New Yorker’s hidden gems…. Saul Steinberg describes the covers as ‘pictures that change the way a person sees the world, making visible concepts so fundamental that the viewer cannot remember how he or she thought before seeing them.’

The Christian Science Monitor reports on the magazine industry, which is still (partly) in excellent health:

While there have been some high-profile magazine failures in the last decade (including Talk, George, and, most recently, the movie magazine Premiere), the total circulation of American magazines rose to 370 million in 2006, the highest since 2000…. High-brow magazines like The New Yorker and The Economist are doing especially well, and there are some 200 more magazines about just three subjects – dogs, golf, and interior design – than there were just a decade ago.

Here’s cartoonist Mike Lynch (and Eli Stein, who Lynch links to) on the agony of cartoon look day, with a great vintage photo of an extremely clean-cut cartoonist crew from the old Saturday Evening Post.

Boing Boing’s vintage boombox reminds me of that dazzling 1959 iPod that I posted around the dawn of time. Someone or other picked it up, and it was one of my most dramatic hit days ever—certainly the biggest non-New Yorker-related spike in Emdashes history. I’ve heard before that anything at all Apple-related (e.g., my post about NYPD iPod flyers) is catnip for the international blogosphere, and I can attest to that.

And finally, Manifest Destiny would like you to stop using the construction “an historic.” What will Ben Yagoda say about this, I wonder? And who did his clever cover design?