Martin Schneider writes:
For months now, The New Yorker has been asking its feature writers and critics to make themselves available on the website to answer readers’ questions about specific articles.
I suppose it’s a cliche that New Yorker employees are aloof, snobby, and unapproachable. Not if you judge by the website, they aren’t! These days, the magazine is all about reaching out. Spend three minutes clicking on the “online-only” section of the website and explain how the staff and its contributors are insulated or unwilling to confront readers and critics. I don’t think it’s true.
Right now, Keith Gessen is up, ready to answer your questions about the trial of the alleged killers of the Russian journalist Anna Polikovskaya. Why don’t you go over and ask him something? While you decide what to ask, here are a few quotations from the “Ask the Author” online feature that caught my attention.
Atul Gawande: “The most important transformation going on in health care worldwide, I think, is that the complexity of medical know-how has exceeded the abilities of individuals.”
D.T. Max: “I think of Wallace’s depression as so intense that living, let alone writing, would have been impossible without treatment. As he described it, it had no component of sadness or wistfulness or affectlessness. It was more like an excruciating physical pain, a buzz saw cutting through his body again and again.”
Ryan Lizza: “I think right now Obama may be on the cusp of overplaying his hand. ”
Peter Schjeldahl: “Having great dead people looking over one’s shoulder is a haunting familiar to all who nurture creative or intellectual ambitions.”
Sasha Frere-Jones: “I like being able to ask [interview subjects] ‘Where are you from? What did your Dad do?’ in person, even if they find it annoying.”
John Lahr: “I always ask for a script, which is now a matter of course for all critics; thirty years ago, this was a demand that I think I started.”
Jill Lepore: “At this particular moment in history, our culture of work and our culture of family life are more or less opposed to one another.”
Deborah Treisman: “Some of the writers published in the magazine in recent years who came to us entirely unsolicited and unagented are Uwem Akpan, David Hoon Kim, Gina Ochsner, and Rebecca Curtis.”
Alex Ross: “If Bernstein had miraculously lived another two decades and been able to carry on composing, I’d guess he would indeed have written some kind of gay opera.”

Martin Schneider writes:
The term “Twitscape” is an invention of Jon Stewart and his staff, and I hope it catches on! Anyone copyright it yet?
jzhang07 Finished Adam Gopnik’s Angels and Ages. A really good & fun book and reads like a 200 page New Yorker article.
(followed by….)
jasonjsiu @jzhang07 200 pages of the new yorker is not my idea of fun…
falameufilho wired magazine is like the new yorker and vanity fair mated and had a retarded son
doctorsreview “Travel is the sherbet between courses of reality” (from a cartoon by Victoria Roberts in The New Yorker) http://tiny.cc/sherbet
odeisel sometimes a cover is just a cover. Please stop overreacting to everything. The Michelle Obama New Yorker cover is fine. Christ
Thandelike if the new yorker mag goes under i will know the world has truly changed. damn those reluctant advertisers of canoes and cat bracelets
janetmock Once again surprised by a long ass profile in the New Yorker that I was initially not going to read; it was on writer-director Tony Gilroy
davidlebovitz If someone could come over and read the stack of New Yorkers on my coffee table, then summarize them for me, that’d be great.
(followed by….)
theveggiequeen @davidlebovitz Maybe you can get George Bush’s reader to it, now that he or she is out of a job. You want New Yorker Cliff Notes?
heidiharu “I want someone whose inner pain is totally hot,” Thank you, The New Yorker. [Hint]
melissagira I never thought of the place my parents lived when I was first born as “a run-down section of Boston.” Thanks, page 53 of the New Yorker.
martinjen Just read the new yorker and kinda wishing I was a Van Dyke.
ksauer7 Thank you, New Yorker, for your insight on similes. You’re as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel-food cake.

Martin Schneider writes:
I mentioned recently that I am a bit of an Orwell junkie. So it with no small pleasure that I announce that, having decisively proven its worth with Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, the New Yorker Book Club now turns to Orwell’s terrific memoir of his days as a dishwasher in Paris and a hobo in England.
I must say, after Revolutionary Road, I was half-expecting the Club to continue with books that are currently in the public eye. This classics-minded selection immensely increases my enthusiasm for the project. Down and Out in Paris and London was probably one of the first “grown-up” books I ever read, but it has been a while. I’m looking forward to this!