Today we commence a promising new series in which the artist undertakes to pitcher—er, picture—clever homophones. Click to enlarge!

More by Paul Morris: Enter our exciting contest to name the upside-down question-mark! Entries accepted until August 25. Plus, “The Wavy Rule” archive; “Arnjuice,” a wistful, funny webcomic; a smorgasbord of multimedia at Flickr; and beautifully off-kilter cartoon collections for sale and free download at Lulu.

What’s all this about a global war on terroir? Righteous epaulets, dude! As always, click to enlarge!

More by Paul Morris: Enter our exciting contest to name the upside-down question-mark! Entries accepted until August 25. Plus, “The Wavy Rule” archive; “Arnjuice,” a wistful, funny webcomic; a smorgasbord of multimedia at Flickr; and beautifully off-kilter cartoon collections for sale and free download at Lulu.

Who says you can’t be pretentious with simplicity, or simple with pretension? Not me—click to enlarge!

More by Paul Morris: Enter our exciting contest to name the upside-down question-mark! Entries accepted until August 25. Plus, “The Wavy Rule” archive; “Arnjuice,” a wistful, funny webcomic; a smorgasbord of multimedia at Flickr; and beautifully off-kilter cartoon collections for sale and free download at Lulu.

Paul writes of today’s syncopated (and very modern) “Wavy Rule”: “Central Park Summerstage, Blue Note, Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Iridium–all jazz venues that are reviewed in the latest issue of The New Yorker.” Click to enlarge!

More by Paul Morris: Enter our exciting contest to name the upside-down question-mark! Entries accepted until August 25. Plus, “The Wavy Rule” archive; “Arnjuice,” a wistful, funny webcomic; a smorgasbord of multimedia at Flickr; and beautifully off-kilter cartoon collections for sale and free download at Lulu.

Each Friday, the Emdashes summer interns bring us the news from the ultimate Rossosphere: the blogs and podcasts at newyorker.com. (A dactyl is a metrical foot used in poetry. “Poetry” and “marmalade” are dactyls.) Here’s this week’s report.
Adam Shoemaker
George Packer writes in this week’s edition of Interesting Times about the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish scholar whose love of Germany, even amid the degradations of the 1930s, kept him from leaving his home. Packer is interested in Klemperer’s attack on nationalism, which stemmed from a tenaciously stubborn belief in the rationality of the Enlightenment. The Nazi Olympics are much on the mind these days, and while Packer refuses the easy comparison of that regime and Communist China, he is unable to resist hearing “a faint echo” from 1936 and feeling the broad, dangerous reverberations of nationalism. [Albert Speer’s son did design the Beijing Olympic complex, after all. –Ed.] Packer also offers his thoughts on the dialogue pinging around the media this week concerning Barack Obama’s alleged aloofness and his candidacy’s meaning in the larger sphere of black politics.
Hendrik Hertzberg takes time this week in “Notes on Politics, Mostly” to uncover the hidden racial undertones of John McCain’s new television advertisements, which include an almost subliminally short shot of Barack Obama playing basketball and, less subtly, juxtaposes the Illinois senator with those hardly chaste white women, Ms. Hilton and Ms. Spears. A reader also spurs him to ponder the phallic imagery of the spots. The obelisk as virility symbol is old hat for this art history major; if McCain’s ad makers are going to pin their hopes on hidden visual cues, they could at least take a few pointers from the master.
I was thrilled this week to see Sasha Frere-Jones report on one of my favorite bands, Bon Iver, a.k.a. Justin Vernon, and a performance he “would be celebrating more loudly if Vernon hadn’t wiped [his] mind clean.” These clips may help explain why sharing is often the only proper form of music recommendation: “hyperbole will somehow ruin things.” Frere-Jones also reports on Rock The Bells, where he saw Mos Def, Method Man, Redman, Nas, Jay-Z, and Q-Tip. Pithiest line: “Mr. Def makes his rhymes clear, enjoys moving around, and seems to accept that his job involves being entertaining. His pants were extremely bright.”
In this week’s New Yorker Out Loud, David Grann talks about his look into the bizarre story of Frédéric Bourdin, the shockingly successful French con man whose grandest and possibly last imposture involved a missing child come back from the dead. Just trying to imagine a thirty-year-old Frenchman passing as a Texan high schooler—or wanting to—makes the mind reel. Bourdin is no flesh-and-blood phisher or 419 boy; he dupes in the name of love. Both the article and interview are highly recommended.
Finally, Andy Borowitz uses The Borowitz Report to make a public service announcement to the nation’s “many jerks and douchebags” who are at increased risk of brain tumors due to their incessant cell phone usage. The eminent Dr. Logsdon offers his condolences: “All in all, this has been a tough summer for assholes.”
Sarah Arkebauer
The Cartoon Lounge continues its dueling-sandwich-shops saga with second and third installments. Even as I laughed at how ludicrous the cartoonists’ sandwich shops would be, I found myself wanting to visit them! It seems like everywhere I turn, I am greeted with the symbol of the Olympic games, so I was amused by the cartoon published earlier this week of the Olympic rings as a Venn Diagram.
Meanwhile, in an equally humorous post, the Book Bench linked to an imagining of Hamlet in the form of Facebook’s Newsfeed bursts, and I also enjoyed the photograph post of what are presumably the recent galleys at the New Yorker office. I was pleased, too, to see another update in the “Bookspotting” series; reading the “Bookspotting” posts reminds me to check out what the people I see in public are reading. On a more somber note, the Book Bench reported on a tragic barn fire in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, that destroyed thousands of valuable books, an unfortunate development with the International PEN Poem Relay, and an extensive remembrance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Goings On also posted on Solzhenitsyn; the post is replete with links to articles written about him in the New Yorker over the years. Each profile brings to light a different facet of Solzhenitsyn’s life and times, and both long-time admirers and those new to his work will find much to enjoy and enlighten here. In other news, I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy outrageous slang, and so I was thrilled to see the August 1 post on “Soda-Luncheonette Slang and Jargon” from America Eats!, Pat Willard’s new book on American culinary history. I’m afraid much of the slang is a little out of date, but it’s still wonderful to read about, and I’ve already picked out a couple of gems for my patois.
For my Fiction Podcast update this week, I went back into the archives and listened to Donald Antrim read Donald Barthelme’s 1974 short story “I Bought a Little City.” The story’s opening is punchy and delightful, and the rest of it—and the discussion thereafter—doesn’t disappoint. Indeed, I laughed out loud more than once. The story is short but potent, with an appeal that ensures I will revisit it in the years to come.
Previous intern roundups: the August 1 report; the July 25 report; the July 18 report; the July 11 report.

If Edward Gorey were still with us, and drinking fine wine, this is the fine wine we think he’d be drinking. Today’s “Wavy Rule” returns us to the world of weird wineries, far, far from Napa Valley: First there was the pinot, then the pigeons, and now this. Click to enlarge!

More by Paul Morris: Enter our exciting contest to name the upside-down question-mark! Entries accepted until August 25. Plus, “The Wavy Rule” archive; “Arnjuice,” a wistful, funny webcomic; a smorgasbord of multimedia at Flickr; and beautifully off-kilter cartoon collections for sale and free download at Lulu.

Can the eminent and august be lightly kidded? Sure, we think so. In today’s “Wavy Rule,” Paul considers the mountainous refuge of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn–who died last week, and whom we admired. David Remnick did a Letter From Moscow about the writer in 2001, and Blake Eskin notes The New Yorker‘s coverage of the great Russian over the years. We are glad to contribute this cartoon to the conversation. Click to enlarge! Here’s Paul:
Fun facts: Solzhenitsyn lived in Cavendish, Vermont, from 1977 to 1994. Locals protected his privacy. He attended town meetings, and his children attended the local schools. There’s a good NPR story about his time in Vermont here. Below, a plausible scene of northern discontent.

More by Paul Morris: Enter our exciting contest to name the upside-down question-mark! Entries accepted until August 25. Plus, “The Wavy Rule” archive; a very funny webcomic, “Arnjuice“; a motley Flickr page; various beautifully off-kilter cartoon collections for sale and free download at Lulu.