Looking at the blogosphere, I’ve seen three pieces of writing mentioned in connection with Eliot Spitzer’s stunning predicament; two of them appeared in The New Yorker.

To start, Garth Risk Hallberg at the Millions returns to Nick Paumgarten’s fine profile of the governor from last December, presciently titled “The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer” (little did he know!). Hallberg approvingly quotes Paumgarten’s description of Spitzer’s impulsiveness, which now reads like a masterpiece of understatement.

Second, the scandal reminds The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber of Portnoy’s Complaint, which did not, alas, first appear in The New Yorker, which fact should not prevent us from admiring Brendan Gill’s astonishing description of the novel as “a single, hysterical howl of excrementitious anguish.”

And finally, the Emperors Club that got Spitzer into so much trouble seems to have been more than a little bit pretentious, touting the “individual education, sophistication … erudition and educational standing/accomplishments” of its “models,” prompting the New York Times blog Laugh Lines to quote several lines from Woody Allen’s classic story “The Whore of Mensa.”