An experiment in which, instead of writing unfairly hasty sentences when pressed for time, I offer you a fizzy thimbleful of each noteworthy article.

A rough gauge of sophistication as it’s constructed through language, then, can be found in the number of references to Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, painter of The Scream (or other people named Munch), and instances of the word munch, one of the most ungainly, inelegant words in the English language…. When I examined previous New Yorker articles to delve deeper into its Munch-munch ratio (which is 2 since 2000), I found that, in fact, every instance of munch was a quotation of some sort. New Yorker writers had, in fact, a Munch-munch ratio that was undefined. Until Nov. 13.
—Graham Meyer, “Spectral Intrusions,” The Other Tiger

The result is the meta-erroneous belief that The New Yorker has a policy against printing corrections at all—a belief that has made it all the way to the Columbia journalism department. “As I understand it, for many, many years they didn’t even run letters to the editor,” [Nicholas] Lemann said. “It’s fairly recent—I can’t remember when they started—that they run letters. They still, since 1925, have not run corrections.”… In fact, although the weekly “Mail” section is a relatively new addition, the magazine has printed letters since at least 1936.
—Leon Neyfakh, “Off the Record,” New York Observer

It looks like George Packer may finally get the war he’s been asking for. In his 2003 New Yorker essay “War After the War,” which was the basis for the book The Assassin’s Gate and which is one of the single finest pieces of journalism I’ve ever read, Packer made the case that Iraq would be won or lost not in battlefield victories or large-scale campaigns but in tiny human interactions, ground-level points of contact between Iraqis and Americans. His intimate, scene-based reporting became an example of the thing he was advocating, the attentiveness to nuance and context that the military couldn’t get right.
—Gabe Roth, “Right Approach, Wrong Time?,” Roth Brothers

In his interview with Robert Hass to an overflowing crowd at International House, the Columbian artist Fernando Botero mentioned that when reading Seymour Hersh’s article in The New Yorker about American soldiers using torture in the same prison at Abu Ghraib where Saddam Hussein used similar violent tactics, he was deeply shocked…. This, he had not expected of the North Americans. Compelled to respond to this outrage with pencil and brush, he spent the next 14 months creating over a hundred drawings and paintings, based on the photographs which had been published showing the humiliation, abuse, depravity and torture.
—Peter Selz, “The Power of Botero’s Abu Ghraib Images,” The Berkeley Daily Planet (includes one of Botero’s arresting drawings)

Balliett’s page-long, semicolon-laden paragraphs—like Stephen Dixon’s, but more voluptuous—felt like mere transcriptions until, with a decisive snap or a concise, precise image, he would bring us back to the point. Often, it just happened that the point would be a different one—more surprising, less common-sensical, less easily summarized—than the one we thought was being made.
—”Whitney Balliett, 1926-2007,” Quiet Bubble (Another Balliett reflection is here; thanks to Scott McLemee for the tip!)

James Wolcott, who always speaks his mind and does it in such sublime sentences, makes an omelette with some familiar eggs, in particular Adam Gopnik, whose book Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York he’s reviewing. (From The New Republic, signup required.)
A bird-minded blogger wonders: Is there an avian misidentification in this week’s Glen Le Lievre cartoon?
The Ham & High (that’s the Hampstead and Highgate Express) has a winsome, chummy profile of Al Alvarez. Who? Read on, philistine (sorry about the ellipsis points; it’s a long story):

In fact, the poet, novelist and critic is pretty good-natured about most things, inclined to seek out the amusing, quirky side of life in his lengthy essays for the New Yorker, the New York Review and other publications…. A collection of his favourite articles, entitled Risky Business, is published this month…. They cover Alvarez’s well-documented passions for poker, mountaineering and flying – and articles on writers from Philip Roth to Sylvia Plath that remind you how rare it is to find beautifully written, lively, perceptive journalism…. But then Alvarez is several classes above most hacks. As influential poetry editor of the Observer in the 1950s and 60s, he championed the work of Plath, Thom Gunn, Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes…. He reminisces fondly of the days when The Observer devoted pages to work by unknown poets and the New Yorker would commission a 50,000-word article that consumed the magazine over two issues.

Keep reading, it’s fascinating.
Meanwhile, mark your calendars for May 24: Rebecca Mead has an event at the New York Public Library, and it sounds like a pip. It’s inspired by her forthcoming book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding (out on May 10): “A conversation with Rebecca Mead where she will discuss why the American wedding has become an outlandishly extravagant, egregiously expensive, and overwhelmingly demanding production.” In that vein, if you don’t mind being sickened by pinkness, check out this truly hideous site devoted to Cinderella bridal accessories that I discovered the other day after reading Peggy Orenstein’s terrific Times magazine piece on the marketing of princess mania.

Did you hear last week’s This American Life? Act Three, the story of how a guy named Eric can’t seem to buy himself a couch, has some nice echoes of one of my favorite prose pieces of all time, Donald Antrim’s “I Bought a Bed” (which, of course, originally appeared in The New Yorker and is now a chapter in Antrim’s mesmerizing book The Afterlife).
I’m happy to report that Scott McLemee, whose well-hewn and polished thoughts I’ve been enjoying for some time via his column for Inside Higher Ed (I like this recent one about disorganization), has a brand new blog, wittily titled Quick Study. I will be one, I hope, of it. If I were to presume to tell The New Yorker what public intellectuals and potential contributors it is overlooking, my A-list would consist of McLemee.
Speaking of great brains, here’s James Wolcott (and Stephen Manzi) on his fellow great James, Thurber; meanwhile, Popsurfing‘s Michael Giltz reflects on the Shawn family, whom he compares to Salinger’s Glasses and Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums.
R.I.P., Ryszard Kapuscinski (the accents just aren’t coming out right), whose travel-memoir essay “The Open World” is in this week’s New Yorker. (So are two poems, “A Choice” and Ecce Homo”—both are web-only.) Slate reminds us of a 2003 “Culturebox” column by Meghan O’Rourke, in which she “defended literary journalists—including Kapuscinski—who bend the rules of literal truth-telling in order to tell a bigger story.” O’Rourke begins:

Joseph Mitchell’s Old Mr. Flood is a great book. It’s as vivid a portrait of the Fulton Fish Market and of working-class life in New York City as any we have. Old Mr. Flood is also partly invented. Though it was first presented as journalism—most of it ran as magazine pieces in The New Yorker in 1944—Mitchell revealed in the book’s preface some four years later that Mr. Flood was a composite character, as Jack Shafer recently noted in Slate.
With the reappearance of Stephen Glass and the dismissal of Jayson Blair, a certain kind of rule-bending literary journalism has taken it on the chin. Mitchell and other respected sometime-“fabulists”—including A.J. Liebling and Ryszard Kapuscinski—have been lightly tarred and feathered along with the black-listed young journalists. After all, the argument goes, the realms of Fact and Fiction are diametrically opposed. There is no truth but the plain truth. The very currency of journalism is fact; to toy with it once is to devalue it (and your integrity) permanently, whether you are a great stylist or a hack.
This line of reasoning is entirely logical. And yet too rigid an adherence to such standards would mean an impoverishment of American journalism—one that seems unthinkable. There’d be no Old Mr. Flood, no The Honest Rainmaker, by A.J. Liebling; some work by New Journalists like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Norman Mailer would go in the trash. John Hersey is said to have created a composite character in a Life magazine story; does this mean we should think differently of his masterpiece Hiroshima?

And R.I.P., too, Elizabeth Tashjian, who seems to have been, among many other things, the subject of a New Yorker piece.

Elizabeth Tashjian, the celebrated Old Lyme artist and free spirit, was known by millions as the “Nut Lady” after her museum devoted to nuts that she operated for many years in her 17-room mansion. In her characteristic style, she told a writer for The New Yorker magazine several years ago that she never liked being called the “Nut Lady,” but that it was preferable to being known as the state’s certified nut…. As a young woman from an aristocratic Armenian family, she had studied classical art and was well-regarded for her work. Her artistic and independent temperament drew her to the nut, which she drew, painted and sculpted. Her creations were displayed in her Old Lyme Nut Museum, which was listed by the state of Connecticut on its list of tourist attractions until 1988.

Anyone have a working Complete New Yorker (this computer doesn’t like the discs) who can check it out? Squib Report, any interest in pursuing it? It sounds promising, and she sounds like a treasure. I reject a world without eccentrics.
 
Finally, Newsday columnist Sylvia Carter, my former Newsday colleague, writes a fond reminiscence of the neighborhood life and food in Manhattan she relished before moving out to the Island:

I miss my working fireplace, and I miss the high ceilings and the wide plank floors. I miss being able to walk outside my door and instantly become part of a city. It is a city of dogs and their walkers, a city where The New Yorker magazine almost always arrived on Monday instead of Tuesday or Wednesday. Babbo, the famous restaurant where Mario Batali is chef and an owner, was across the street, and he used to sit on my stoop and chat, city-style.

But for non-Manhattanite New Yorkers, it does not arrive on Monday, but on Tuesday, Wednesday, or even Thursday. I’ve long railed against this imbalance, which suggests an embarrassingly old-fashioned bias in the circulation department’s priorities. Readers in the five boroughs of New York City, when do you get your magazine?

Malcolm Gladwell and Joyce Gladwell talk to the whip-smart, glamorous Debbie Millman for her addictive interview show, “Design Matters.” In another podcast, she interviews the justly celebrated typographer Tobias Frere-Jones, brother of Sasha.
This week in the Observer, my old Nation pal Lizzy Ratner has a terrific feature on Calvin Trillin, Alice Trillin, About Alice, and the pining for true companionship that their long romance has inspired.
On his Harvard Law blog, Philip Greenspun notes:

From the January 15, 2007 New Yorker magazine, page 54, in an article [“Expectations,” by Katherine Boo] on a poorly performing school in Denver, Colorado…. Norberto is a junior in high school. His “elder relations” advise him against college: “If you study too much, you forget to get married until you’re so old that nobody wants you.”

Commenter Melissa Gutierrez Crawford responds:

The advice against college in favor of marriage is very Mexican. My grandfather gave my sister a lot of guff when she announced she was going to complete her Master’s degree before marrying her long-time boyfriend because she wanted to have it done before starting a family. She stuck to her guns and had it her way; the only difference it made was that our younger cousin beat her to having kids, which is of dubious value since my sister and her husband are in a more secure living situation thanks in part to their level of education.

…on December 31, which will feature an overflowing bag of virtual presents for people and things New Yorker for the coming year, from a special band of guest contributors. Just a few more days and it’ll be up! Soon after that, I’m happy to report, there’ll be a brand-new Ask the Librarians column, which is always a thrill. Two years—who’da thunk it? For now, my strength and stamina are limited to these little snippets, presented in disjointed-paragraph form:
Lillian Ross appeared on NPR; clever Jason Kottke concocted a witty Nintendo game for New Yorker nuts (via G’ker). Unrelated: A reader crowed at knowing a thing or two (or at least a thing) more than the magazine. I’ve neglected to link to the very engaging Huffington Post blog by Matt Diffee, especially his three-part interview with Bob Mankoff, but it’s really worth reading for a look inside the cartoon department’s selection process; the Washington Post also features Diffee and Mankoff in its own take on this always welcome if now becoming-slightly-repetitive story. Another reader ponders the “palettes” of modern movie critics, including Pauline Kael and Anthony Lane. What would E.B. White have thought of the new Charlotte’s Web movie, asks Ty Burr of The Boston Globe? Today, it turns out, is a notable day in New Yorker and Beatles history. I just happened to land on this New York Times Public Lives profile of Alice Quinn from 2001. Finally, if you’re buying a new subscription to The New Yorker—and why wouldn’t you be?—Consumerist counsels us all to shun the charlatans at magsforless.com. Happy holidays, everybody, and see you at the end of the month for the big birthday party that happens in your head, and mine.

There’s an 826 Seattle now (since ’05, but that’s recent in my book), which is welcome news, and they’re producing some very creative work over there. Here’s a short story by David, who’s in second grade at Brighton Elementary School. Note David’s precocity for book criticism (“The book was very good. But it smelled like badness. It stunk like rotten eggs and somebody’s arm pit”), which may serve him well in his future publishing career, perhaps with his own McSweeney’s imprint. Good ol’ 826—give them a donation so David and friends can terrify us well into the future!

The End of E.B. White
 
At 3:00 A.M. one Tuesday morning, E.B. White wrote down the new story, The Return of Charlotte’s Web. This story was about a spider named Charlotte and a pig named Wilbur who grew horns out of his head. He turned into a bull. The bull was very mean and the people from Mexico, the bullfighters, had to come and fight the bull. The book was very good. But it smelled like badness. It stunk like rotten eggs and somebody’s arm pit.
 
Everybody wore nose plugs.
 
Everybody died because they liked the book so much. Even though it smelled horrible, the story was really good. But when people bought the book and took it home, their houses filled up with the terrible smell and that made people die.
 
E.B. White became filthy rich which allowed him to eat his favorite food: jelly doughnuts. He ate thousands of jelly doughnuts and sometimes he even ate his second favorite food: mayonnaise doughnuts. He never mixed them though. It was either jelly doughnuts or mayonnaise doughnuts.
 
One sad day a giant, black moon rock came from outer space and crushed a scared E.B. White to smithereens. His body oozed out from underneath the giant rock and smelled like old mayonnaise mixed with cranberry jelly. Suddenly, a colossal black hole sucked the ooze and his money away.
 
On the skinny side of the black hole, right there in the eye of it, were all of E.B. White’s books. They were covered with jelly. Nobody knows why.

Via Small Spiral Notebook, there’s an important PEN event this Wednesday:

The Writer’s Conscience: Remembering Anna Politkovskaya & Russia’s Forgotten War
 
When: Wednesday, December 6 @ 7pm
 
Where: Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center: 365 Fifth Ave., NYC
 
“An evening of reading from Anna Politkovskaya’s work and a conversation about the costs of an ongoing but forgotten war.”

Musa Klebnikob, Kati Marton, Dana Priest, David Remnick, among others will feature in the night’s event. I am itching for the opportunity to hear Remnick speak on the subject. He was the Washington Post correspondent in Moscow in the final years of the Soviet Union. The New York Review of Books features a review of his Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker. It is an outstanding overview of the book’s contents as well as Remnick’s approach to reporting and attitude toward his subjects. [NYRB:] “A Far-Flung Correspondent.”

In other news, a blogger hearts Malcolm Gladwell (“the work’s gone all sparkly”) and has gotten terribly behind on reading the magazine (“the blasted things just keep coming and coming, and i keep picking them up out of the mail pile and stashing them at the bottom of the magazine pile because i’m determined to fight my way through the whole wretched mess without cheating or skimping or missing anything”). Meanwhile, ex-New Yorkerite Garrison Keillor hearts Christmas.