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Martin Schneider writes:

As Pollux noted recently—and our friend Ben Bass posted too—there is a mind-blowing trick in the special four-Eustace 85th anniversary cover of last month. If you place the four covers in the proper two-by-two configuration, the outlines of the original classic Eustace cover can be discerned.

Now we have Adam Kempa's excellent slider application, which allows you to find it without spreading (multiple copies of) the issue all over your living room floor.

I am endlessly impressed by such cleverness! Françoise Mouly, hats off to you! (A top hat, of course.)

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Martin Schneider writes:

User @alexbarkett (for that is the convention) tweets: "For everyone who was wondering, the audio prelude to all New Yorker podcasts is a song by Isolée called Schrapnell." I checked it out: it does sound right! (Compare.) A back and forth with Mr. Barkett confirmed that he knows the full song and that it only applies to the "Out Loud" podcasts.

Note that when I tried to confirm this fact on Google, I came up bupkes.

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Martin Schneider writes:

If I'm reading my resources correctly, readers are really happy with D.T. Max's story on David Foster Wallace, and really annoyed with Anthony Lane's "spoiler"-laden pan of Watchmen, more because of the pan than because of the spoiler, though.

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Martin Schneider writes:

We're all accustomed to the perspective that The New Yorker is too precious, too pretentious, too serious, too self-absorbed, too too. We run into it all the time, it's a balloon that seemingly demands puncture. People fall over themselves, clutching a needle.

It's therefore instructive to enter "new yorker" as a search term on Twitter and see what people actually

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Yesterday, American Prospect blogger Ezra Klein wrote about VP-Elect Joe Biden’s fondness for railway systems and, more grandly, the happenstance origins of major programs in our country: since Biden likes trains, we might see more train funding, goes the thought. Klein made the following comparison:
For instance, John F. Kennedy’s interest in poverty, which laid the groundwork for the War on Poverty, came because he read Dwight MacDonald’s long essay on Michael Harrington’s book The Other America. And thus a national crusade was born. If he’d missed that issue of The New Yorker, the path of American social policy might have proven quite different.
Now that got my attention. I’d never heard of this. Is it really true? Did JFK really move (continued)

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