Jonathan Taylor writes:

• Via the neatly searchable archive of the Harper's Index, they are:

  (Jan. 1993) Percentage of New Yorker articles since Tina Brown became editor whose first sentence includes a person's name: 70
  (July 1996) Chances that a cartoon in The New Yorker's Women's Issue was drawn by a man: 5 in 6

• In the Times Book Review, Craig Seligman shares some (self-) revealing recollections of St. Clair McKelway, on the occasion of a new collection of McKelway's New Yorker reporting.
• At the Edge of the American West, a historian's reflection on Paul Krugman's comments about studying economics versus studying history in the recent New Yorker Profile of him—with some spirited exchanges in the comments. Coincidentally, "Undercover Economist" Tim Harford's latest column in the Financial Times illustrates the persistence of long-ago history in contemporary outcomes.
• Continuing on the history tangent, I was delighted to see Adam Cohen's Times Editorial Observer appreciation of the BBC Radio 4 program (and podcast) "In Our Time," in which Melvyn Bragg harries his academic guests into distilling great topics in civilization into their pithiest essence. (Will Self also wrote about "In Our Time" recently in the London Review of Books.) WNYC's Laura Walker wrote a letter to the Times defending U.S. radio against the suggestion that it doesn't host such erudite discussions. But Walker's counterexamples are telling: All the topics are basically contemporary; none represents the undiluted interest in the past that "In Our Time" exhibits.
• I reviewed Country Driving, by Emdashes fave Peter Hessler, at Bookforum.com.