I was a decent SAT student (and have even been known to lead a Kaplan test-prep session or two), hence explaining my dorky post title.

After a two-week layoff, a fascinating first issue of 2009 to ponder. Interesting subjects, interestingly pursued. I know that my cohorts have plenty of impressions to impart (as, surely, you do too, reader). This post will magically alter as they weigh in. Stay tuned.

—Martin Schneider

From Benjamin Chambers:

My absolute favorite? The Robert Leighton cartoon on p. 44, in which Santa tells the couple that he made “quite a nuisance of himself” the previous night.

The Menand piece on the Village Voice felt as provincial, in its way, as the three-part Liebling profile of Chicago (here, here, and here) that you Martin posted about recently. Menand’s lengthy celebration of the Voice, with the full-page illustration from Jules Feiffer, seemed written for those who’ve lived in the Village. I really like Menand, so I was surprised to find myself wishing he’d be more concise.

I thought for a while my pick would be “Lives of the Saints,” by Jonathan Harr, about the humanitarian disasters in Chad and Darfur and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.) providing services there. But Harr seemed a little easily impressed, and unsure which details mattered.

In Julian Barnes’s story, “The Limner,” a deaf, itinerant painter gets the best of the bully whose portrait he is painting. Smoothly written, the story was enjoyable, but not stellar. I don’t associate Barnes with historical fiction (despite Arthur & George, his massive book on Arthur Conan Doyle), and it’s not common for The New Yorker either, so the setting of the story was a pleasant surprise.

All in all, I liked Patricia Marx’s “Kosher Takeout” best, in which she describes the work of two Rabbis who travel China ensuring that factories making kosher food meet the necessary standards. She plays it for laughs, which I enjoyed, though unlike the Menand and Harr pieces, which should’ve been shorter, I felt her piece should’ve been longer and more detailed.

From Jonathan Taylor:

Of course it’s been noted elsewhere, but it gave me a real little thrill to read Alex Ross’s restrained, to-the-point reply to Tom Wolfe’s letter objecting to Ross’s characterization of Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.” There is, indeed, as Wolfe himself says, “a difference between hysteria and hysterically funny”; I would ask New York magazine exactly whose reaction makes him look like a “weenie”?

Benjamin called Louis Menand’s Voice piece lengthy, but I mostly feel its gaps, and their odd timing. The subtext is the ongoing demise of the Voice—or, at least it was hard not to take it that way, in a week that saw the canning of jazz and civil rights columnist Nat Hentoff and fashion reporter Lynn Yaeger—but I find it a little creepy that this is never overtly acknowledged by Menand’s article, even as it’s cast almost entirely in the past tense. I know it’s about the seminal example set by the founding generation; but it’s still weird that after some thin allusions to later decades, a sentence in the last paragraph is practically the only clue that the Voice is still published at all. I admit it’s partly my bias, due to when I started reading the by-then very different paper in the 1980s; but if the Voice as a recognizable descendant of Mailer’s paper is disappearing, it remains for someone to consider its whole glorious life. Maybe Menand can expand into a book, just to please me.