The best of last week.

As previously noted, this issue further establishes The New Yorker as the primate-ary reporter of Monkey News after the Ricky Gervais podcast and, of course, Baboon Update. (With some competition from Gorilla Gazette, Lemur News, Primate Eye, and The Simian, perhaps.)

Aside from that, I particularly liked Peter Schjeldahl on Courbet; Ben McGrath on the new prosthesis technology we’ll be needing more and more of the longer we stay in Iraq; Glyn Maxwell’s “Element It Has”; Lizzie Widdicombe on a steam-pipe-explosion evacuation procedure at Grand Central; the BEK, Mick Stevens, and Bob Mankoff cartoons I mean drawings (and several others—it was tough picking favorites this time); and the provocative cover by Anita Kunz, which isn’t quite in Spiegelman shock territory but was certainly being talked about. I know—I heard it with my very ears! —EG