Happy 50th column, Sasha Frere-Jones.
By the way, there have been a lot of primates in the magazine lately. Here’s SFJ:

The opera, perhaps to the relief of those encountering sung exposition for the first time, begins with images. On a thin scrim in front of the stage, the Chinese ideogram for “monkey” appears, followed by a series of crisp animations by Hewlett that echo the opening sequence of the Japanese television series: a stone egg perched on top of a mountain lights up, wobbles with pending life, and rolls down a hill, where it breaks open, revealing the monkey king, who emerges with a loud “Eeeeeeeeeee!” Then the scrim lifts to show Monkey, played by the Chinese singer and acrobat Fei Yang, surrounded by his subjects, also monkeys (and acrobats), who scamper up green bamboo poles.

What with the bonobos in the same number and at least two other bits of monkey business in recent issues—this BEK cartoon and Jack Handey’s hilariously cruel nature documentary—it’s a veritable barrel full of ’em, and hey, I approve. Martin, how about a brief departure from The Pigeon Files to do a quick monkey memo from the archives?

Update: More monkeys, in Ben McGrath’s “Muscle Memory.” (The bionic prosthesis technology is being tried out on them: “We have video of monkeys, actually controlling arms, working in 3-D space,” [said Colonel Geoffrey Ling].) Monkeys, shine.

From the Times:

Steve Coll, whose résumé as a journalist includes two Pulitzer Prizes, a stint as managing editor of The Washington Post and a job as a staff writer at The New Yorker, is now ready to try his hand at something else: a Washington public policy institute.
Mr. Coll plans to take over a nonpartisan public policy institute, the New America Foundation, in September…. After winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,” he left the paper to write for The New Yorker, which he will continue to do. This new position, he said, will permit him to “preserve a little bit of my own life as author” and to collaborate with a group of “smart engaged people who are part of a conversation that I want to be a part of.”

Kevin Fitzpatrick from the Dorothy Parker Society is covering the trial of the century: Stuart Y. Silverstein vs. Penguin Putnam, Inc., a copyright snafu years in the making that’s going to take days to unravel in court. Here’s his excellent coverage of day one of what promises to be at least ten. For background, here’s my previous post on the same topic. Kevin also wrote a detailed explanation of the case on the Dorothy Parker site last year, newly updated.
And in his “Paper Cuts” blog on the Times website, Dwight Garner congratulates and briefly interviews the latest New Yorker caption contest winner, Joel Brouwer, who also happens to be a poet and contributor to the Book Review. Brouwer told Dwight (who’s edited me a few times):

I sent in a caption on a lark – first time! – and laughed when they called to say I was a finalist, but then was kind of weirdly embarrassed to win. I was particularly amused/suicidal to note that my winning caption came out the same week that Poetry magazine published a long poem of mine, and the e-mail congratulation ratio for the two achievements ran about 50 to 1.

There’s more, so read all about it! Joel, I hope you have some time to talk to our intern, John, about your many talents and preoccupations.

If, like me, you want to get the feel of this Ryan Lizza character in advance of his August 1 start as The New Yorker‘s Washington Correspondent, you’d do well to wander through the ten pieces the writer himself feels to be his finest. —John Bucher
From the New Republic intro:

After a nearly a decade…Ryan Lizza will leave us to become the Washington Correspondent for The New Yorker. From impeachment to the 2000 recount, from the White House to the presidential campaign, Ryan has covered it all, so we asked him for his favorite pieces from the past ten years.

A warm Emdashes welcome to Ryan Lizza, who, on August 1 becomes The New Yorker‘s new Washington Correspondent.
Lizza comes to the magazine from The New Republic (some of his recent articles), where he has been a political correspondent since 1998, most recently as a senior editor. As David Remnick announced today, Lizza will cover Washington, national politics, and the 2008 Presidential campaign. —John Bucher

From Women’s Wear Daily (when did they start being such a major source of media news, I wonder?):

MOVING ON: Not many correspondents leave the hallowed halls of The New Yorker, but the Condé Nast weekly has just lost a big one: Jeffrey Goldberg, its Washington correspondent, who’s leaving to join the cerebral literati’s other favorite mag, The Atlantic, as a national correspondent. The last departure at this level of The New Yorker was two years ago. Goldberg will assume his new position later this summer and will be based in The Atlantic’s Washington office. He’d been with The New Yorker since 2000, covering foreign policy and the conflict in the Middle East. His work earned him several journalism honors, including a National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2003 for his writings on Islamic terrorism. “[New Yorker editor] David Remnick is terrific — everybody there is terrific — but The Atlantic made me a very attractive offer,” Goldberg told WWD. “[Atlantic editor] James Bennet is a good friend of mine and The Atlantic is early in the process of reimagining themselves. That’s interesting to me.” Goldberg added that he likely would travel back to the Middle East more so than in recent years at The New Yorker.
In addition to his seven years at The New Yorker, Goldberg is author of the memoir “Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide,” and covered the Middle East for The New York Times Magazine, where he and Bennet worked together, and the Mafia for New York magazine. He also has written for Slate, The Jerusalem Post and The Washington Post. And his departure at The New Yorker will no doubt set off a scramble among every journalist in the nation’s capital to nab the spot. — Stephanie D. Smith

The breeze is blowing through 4 Times Square, as elevators go up and down and doors open and close. For instance, George Packer’s new blog on newyorker.com, “Interesting Times,” has launched, and its title promises news good and bad, alarming and amusing. And in first person, no less! You know whose blog I’d like to read? Michael Specter. He has an incredible range of interests and approaches to his subjects, has scintillating anecdotes he can toss off as lightly as a pair of bedroom slippers, and travels like a fiend. How about it? It could be called (drawing from pieces past) “Search and Deploy,” “The Long Ride” (written en route to and from assignments), or perhaps simply “I Am Specter.” If this is in fact in the works, fear no moles, royal denizens; I thought of it my own self.
Anyway, you’ve no doubt read of Dan Baum‘s departure from the magazine, and the end of his and Margaret Knox’s New Orleans blog; the late blog is lauded here on The Wayward Episcopalian, within a long list of excellent resources on the city’s quick destruction and slow recovery.
But I’m burying the lede: I’m very glad to see that Nancy Franklin is back with a critical yet empathetic review of John From Cincinnati and a salute to The Sopranos. What’s more, one of my favorite New Yorkerites, David Owen—whose book about the evil Educational Testing Service, None of the Above (which is much meatier than the current cover design would have you believe) actually changed my life back in 1988—has a typically meticulous and engagingly written story in this issue about architecture and the structural engineer Cecil Balmond (sadly, not online). All that plus an especially fine Talk section and Calvin Trillin’s remarkable Canada Journal has me whistling this week. I don’t approve of whistling or humming for no good reason, but such circumstances provide an allowance.
Speaking of structural engineers, the life of William LeMessurier, whose obituary is in the Times today, has a New Yorker connection: the magazine was the first to do an extensive report (by Joe Morgenstern in the May 29, 1995 issue) on the bolstering of LeMessurier’s Citicorp building, which the engineer oversaw with heartening care. From the obituary: “He once told a class at Harvard: ‘You have a social obligation. In return for getting a license and being regarded with respect, you’re supposed to be self-sacrificing and look beyond the interests of yourself and your client to society as a whole. And the most wonderful part of my story is that when I did it, nothing bad happened.’ ”

It’s Thursday, and I’m finished. The issue is spent. I am at sea without an issue to paddle with—I’m almost Paddle-to-the-Sea! Fiction editors, this is the best you could do? Let half a dozen rich and juicy stories about doomed ne’er-do-wells on Hawaii beaches and toothy movie stars on planes and wild Dominican daughters and ghostly girls and physics—and a dessert plate of petits fours of poignant movie stories that have only wet my whistle—slip down my gullet like so many fresh oysters, and I’m supposed to be set till next Monday? No. I am done, and bereft, like that Inconvenient Truth polar bear with no ice floe in sight. And mixing metaphors like a fruitcake (examples abound above). You see what this is doing to me?
Of course, there were the other articles. And they were alarmingly quick treats, too, and moving (Edwidge Danticat) and fascinating yet troubling (the nicely titled “Final Destination”; I still don’t understand why this guy won’t put these incredible archives online), and other stuff I’ll get into later; lord knows I’ve got time. I need another dense Middle East piece to make me feel better informed and appropriately challenged yet alarmed anew about my inadequate knowledge of the issues’ intricacies, and determined to go back to that NYRB primer I’ve dipped into less than I should have in the past ten years. With more than a week to go, I need something that would take a day or two to work on. I mean it; I miss it!
I guess this is what the new fiction podcasts are for, to ease the shakes, although curiously the word “podcast” (and please correct me if I’m wrong) hasn’t actually appeared in the magazine to advertise the podcasts, or maybe the type is just extra-small. In any case, I’ll be diverted by some of your multimedia gewgaws, fiction editors. (This savvy Canadian law professor would recommend I do so, I think.) But don’t think I’ll forget that you’ve made an issue that, while meaty and delicious as a Second Avenue Deli brisket sandwich, R.I.P. deli and cud-chewing brisket source, is not time-consuming enough for the time in which I have to consume it.
Here’s a funny fact: I think I may be Danticat’s first publisher. She had a pared-down, urgent poem called “Saw Fish Soup” in The Columbia Review when I was editor, and I still remember it.

An occasional feature in which, instead of writing unjustly hasty sentences when pressed for time, I offer you a fizzy thimbleful of each noteworthy article.
Emdashes friend B—— points us to this welcome sight: more Little King animations. You’ll remember this first Soglow find, which puts both the King and Santa in some peculiar situations.
From Nourishing Obscurity, a link to Jonathan Yardley on James Thurber:

Thurber in my youth wasn’t something you went to the bookstore for — though of course you could — but something that came in the mail almost every week, as regular and reliable as the clocks of Columbus, Ohio, which he wrote about in the pages of the New Yorker…. One does indeed turn to Thurber for the drawings, but the great glory is his prose. Whether he was the funniest of all American writers can be debated to the end of time, but he was much more than funny. Like his friend White he was wise, and there was a soft spot to him.

There’s a scrumptious selection of New Yorker covers here at Joanna Rees Photography; Rees introduces the gallery thus:

Today I presented a lecture on the cover art of The New Yorker magazine based on the USA Today article (2005) ‘That Should “Cover” It’ by Francoise Mouly. As I prepared the power point presentation I became delighted and intrigued by the covers and spent a considerable amount of time unearthing some of The New Yorker’s hidden gems…. Saul Steinberg describes the covers as ‘pictures that change the way a person sees the world, making visible concepts so fundamental that the viewer cannot remember how he or she thought before seeing them.’

The Christian Science Monitor reports on the magazine industry, which is still (partly) in excellent health:

While there have been some high-profile magazine failures in the last decade (including Talk, George, and, most recently, the movie magazine Premiere), the total circulation of American magazines rose to 370 million in 2006, the highest since 2000…. High-brow magazines like The New Yorker and The Economist are doing especially well, and there are some 200 more magazines about just three subjects – dogs, golf, and interior design – than there were just a decade ago.

Here’s cartoonist Mike Lynch (and Eli Stein, who Lynch links to) on the agony of cartoon look day, with a great vintage photo of an extremely clean-cut cartoonist crew from the old Saturday Evening Post.

Boing Boing’s vintage boombox reminds me of that dazzling 1959 iPod that I posted around the dawn of time. Someone or other picked it up, and it was one of my most dramatic hit days ever—certainly the biggest non-New Yorker-related spike in Emdashes history. I’ve heard before that anything at all Apple-related (e.g., my post about NYPD iPod flyers) is catnip for the international blogosphere, and I can attest to that.

And finally, Manifest Destiny would like you to stop using the construction “an historic.” What will Ben Yagoda say about this, I wonder? And who did his clever cover design?