I finished this issue before the end of Sunday, which left me in a pickle on the G home from Carroll Gardens after the Super Bowl: Since I was without the book I’ve been reading, my friend Debbie Millman’s savvy and hilarious How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer, I had to reread the listings, in detail this time, and luckily a) they were entertaining and b) the ride was short. Meghan Daum, whose classic New Yorker essay of the late ’90s, “My Misspent Youth,” was a piercing warning bell to many who were wearing earmuffs at the time (and then iPods), wrote that one of the hallmarks of arrival among her college friends was to “to know at least two people featured in the New York Times wedding pages on any given Sunday”; I duly report that a subsequent hallmark may be to know at least one performer listed in Goings On About Town who showed up drunker

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In which the editor picks out a few choice cuts from the previous week’s New Yorker.

There have been only a few instances that I can remember where I’ve blushed (hey, I’m a half-Canadian part-Midwestern Yankee Puritan) and turned the page rather than let my fellow squished subway-row-seatmate see the page of the New Yorker I’m reading. That was the case with Joan Acocella’s review of the Playboy centerfold book a year or so ago (some Playmates appeared, small but round, in the accompanying photo collage),

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For some reason, this little unsigned entry in the April 29, 1920 issue of Life magazine (which I just received after a successful eBay auction—I win all my auctions because no one else is ever bidding on what I want) reminded me of James Wood’s piece last week on the new translation of War and Peace.

The Constant and the Inconstant

The characters that one knows in books are more real and unchanging than those one knows in real life. Indeed, those one knows in real life are so unreal that a comparison of them with the ones in books is quite startling. The best friend you have had suddenly develops some quality that you have never suspected, and thenceforth he is quite a different person from what you deemed him. You yourself are often quite dissimilar from what you thought you were yesterday. You survived an unexpected test which you would never have believed possible or you yielded in a manner so absurd that you can scarcely credit it.

But David Copperfield is always the same. Elizabeth Bennet, Lear, Faust, Père Goriot, Ulysses—it makes no difference where you range—they are constant ones.

This is also a very good time to revisit David Remnick’s memorably fine essay on translation (continued)

In which the staff of Emdashes reviews the high points and discusses the particulars of the previous week’s issue (or, occasionally, another edition).

Tessa Hadley’s story “Married Love” started out comic and, by the end, worked in helpless regret. This is one of those stories where it’s difficult to tell where the comic leaves off. The story reminded me of the flaky October-June marriage in Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal; these families could be neighbors. The standout article for me was Rebecca Mead’s Reporter at Large, “Our Man in Pyongyang,” about Bobby Egan, a New Jersey restaurateur who is our primary back channel to North Korea.

And if you were considering following Nancy Franklin’s

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In which the staff of Emdashes reviews the high points and discusses the particulars of the previous week’s issue (or, occasionally, another edition).

Jean-Claude Floc’h is a discovery I attribute to The Complete New Yorker, so it was a treat to see his drawing of an old-timey golfer on page 24. My admiration for Floc’h suggests that I am bigger fan of the ligne claire style than I even realize.

I enjoyed Nick Paumgarten’s excellent look at the Mannahatta Project, which answers all of the questions a reader could expect to have at the outset, and then some. Loved his description of New Yorkers as having “a kind of a superheated parochial self-regard.” I applaud Paumgarten’s desire and ability to come up with outsize formulations; it made the article more of a magnificent flower.

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