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Best of the 01.26.09 Issue: Of Montreal and Drunken Mice
Filed under: Pick of the Issue Tagged: Atul Gawande, Ben McGrath, Calvin Tomkins, Drew Friedman, Walton Ford
Martin Schneider writes:
This issue had Drew Friedman's cover combining the visages of Barack Obama and George Washington. Candidates include Atul Gawande on health care reform, Calvin Tompkins on Walton Ford, and Ben McGrath on pessimists. We'll be expanding this post in due course!
Jonathan Taylor writes:
Ben McGrath's "The Dystopians" cheered me up infinitely, making me think at least for a while that a lot of things worrying me won't matter at all soon. The piece gamely absorbs the all-embracing view of its subjects; at every corner, there's yet another novelistic image of the future as envisioned by James Howard Kunstler, like the aspiring hedge-fund managers who are "going to end up supervisors of rutabaga pickers."
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Some writing by Emily Gordon
- Review: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (for Newsday)
- Annotated slide show: a wet, festive 2009 Coney Island Mermaid Parade (for nycgo.com)
- Proposal: A better-looking MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
- Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
- Review: Does a redesign of The New Republic mean a change of tune? (for Print)
- Interview: four online obsessives and visual cataloguers, Kate Bingaman, Nicholas Felton, Ellie Harrison, and John D. Freyer (for Print)
- Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
- Interviews: winning New Visual Artists Eleanor Grosch, Zigmunds Lapsa, Christian Cervantes, and Kate & Camilla (for Print)
- Profile: lindy hop legend Frankie Manning (for Newsday, with Robert Fouch)
- Feature: Rea Irvin, illustrator, bon vivant, and The New Yorker's first art director (for Print)
- Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
- Review: My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World by Julian Dibbell (for Newsday)
- Review: Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley (for Newsday)
- Review: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry (for Print)
- Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
- Report: The New Yorker's redesigned website (for Print)
- Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
- Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
- Interview: Matthew Diffee on the appropriately inappropriate cartoons of the The Rejection Collection (for Print)
- Interview: Roz Chast on Brooklyn, pysanky eggs, and animation (for Newsday)
- Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
- Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
- Interview: Edward Gorey (for Newsday)
More clips.
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They say that dashes “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like em dashes—emphasizes what’s between: in particular, between the lines, covers, and issues of a magazine close to my heart.
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Comments
I just got off the phone with a Conde Nast (New Yorker) customer rep. She told me that they've been getting reports from subscribers (me included) who lost their Obama as Washington issue in the mail. Too bad, there's no replacement issue as they ran out of copies. They'll just extend the subscription for two weeks.
I liked the Ralph Steadman illustration; I really liked Gary Giddins’ Bill Frisell review; and I loved Ben McGrath’s “The Dystopians,” particularly the tour of Saratoga Springs in the company of the colorful (and somewhat cracked) James Howard Kunstler. Therefore, I award this week’s POTI to McGrath.