Talking about New Orleans and the many continuing scandals of government, real estate, the military, etc., that we all know about in a general way if we don’t live in a hurricane-torn place, but Baum’s (and, I assume, Margaret L. Knox’s) recent story brings it as close as you might be able to stand. The photographs in the piece, printed almost to a full spread, are especially shocking despite their similarity to other photos and other scenes. In one, a ruined bed sits in a ruined room, and something about the carving of the bedposts suggests clenched, frantic fists, barely hanging on as the storm takes over. Until I visit the city again there’s part of me that still resists believing it, but I have to.

Thanks to Jon for the tip.

Later: Here’s the magazine’s complete Katrina coverage.

Not only did the dellingerous New Yorker team trounce Self yesterday afternoon (apparently the Selves put up a pretty good fight, though), it wasn’t the only game won this week by our fearless leaders. (I’m excluding Giuliani from that phrase.) The Post has the tale:

THE scribes put a smackdown on the artistic types in the 58th Annual Artists & Writers Softball Game in East Hampton last weekend. New Yorker editor David Remnick, media writer Ken Auletta and 1010 WINS reporter Juliet Papa were on the team that vanquished a squad anchored by Alec Baldwin and game MVP Roy Scheider by a score of 18-9. Umpire Rudy Giuliani led the crowd of 2,000 at Herrick Park in a raucous rendition of “Take Me Out To the Ballgame.” The contest raised more than $45,000 for East End Hospice, East End Day Care and Phoenix House.

Incidentally, this is the 800th published post on Emdashes. (I say published post because I must have 100 drafts I’ve temporarily abandoned, and have a mind to spring them all on you simultaneously in a busy week. Some are pretty fun, actually.) Let’s have a party at 1,000! Actually, the party will very likely be sooner than that. Stay tuned.

More on Grigory Perelman’s refusal of the Fields Medal, as reported in this week’s piece by David Gruber in TNY. From the magazine’s press release, since the piece isn’t online (actually, it is; now linked):

Also this week: In an exclusive interview, Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber report on reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, who many believe has solved the Poincaré conjecture, “a century-old conundrum about the characteristics of three-dimensional spheres” that has come to be “regarded by mathematicians as a holy grail” (“Manifold Destiny,” p. 44). After Perelman posted a proof on the Internet—an unconventional way of publishing mathematical work of such significance—a race began to determine if he had actually proved the conjecture. Nasar and Gruber write, “A consensus was emerging in the math community: Perelman had solved the Poincaré. Even so, the proof’s complexity—and Perelman’s use of shorthand in making some of his most important claims—made it vulnerable to challenge.” Nasar and Gruber write that the prospect of being awarded a Fields Medal, math’s most prestigious prize, matters little to Perelman, who says that he plans to refuse the award. “It was completely irrelevant for me,” he tells the writers. “Everybody understood that if the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed.” Perelman declares that he has retired from the mathematics community and no longer considers himself a professional mathematician: “As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice. Either to make some ugly thing”—a fuss about the math community’s lack of integrity—“or, if I didn’t do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.”

The comic responds to the Blue Collar Comedy Tour story (July 10, not online alas) in an interview with the Austin American-Statesman:

The New Yorker recently came out with a piece that highlighted how White and the other Blue Collar Comedy Tour comics — Jeff “You Might Be a Redneck” Foxworthy, Larry the “Git’er done!” Cable Guy and Bill “Here’s Your Sign” Engvall — get little respect from industry types because Hollywood can’t view blue-collar America, specifically Southern accents, through anything but haughty, elitist glasses.

White and I spoke over the phone. I was in my apartment in lovely South Austin, and he was in his mansion in Atlanta.

Wait. Let’s say we’re playing golf on his gated community’s private course. God, I’m terrible at this game.

Austin American-Statesman: So you read the New Yorker article?

Ron White: Yeah that’s great. Get me real drunk in a bar after I just played for 18,000 people; see what happens next. Cont’d.

Related, kinda: Dana Goodyear’s Profile of Sarah Silverman. “Her arms are long and her center of gravity is low: she is five feet seven, and moves like a vervet monkey…. [Penn Jillette] says, ‘I really think that her sensibility—not her style—and her material and her ability to write and her timing would all work just as well if she looked like Gilbert Gottfried. And yet she doesn’t in any way deny who she is. That’s all you want.’ ”

Tall drink of water and good egg (don’t think too hard about that pair of metaphors) Andy Borowitz has a book coming out in October that I’m totally jazzed about—The Republican Playbook (Hyperion, $16.95), a document stolen right from under the nose of President Thimblebrain and published just in time for the fall feudfest. From the PW review: “A Republican-to-English glossary translates ‘personal responsibility’ to ‘welfare cuts’ and ‘My fellow Americans’ to ‘My fellow evangelical Christians.’ More silly, but still amusing, is a ‘Democrat to French conversion chart,’ rendering Joseph Biden as ‘Giscard Boudin.’ ” Pre-order, pronto. Borowitz thinks he might just have time to do a little Emdashes Q & A, so look forward to that.

Related: Ring My Bell [Borowitz Shouts & Murmurs becomes a Fringe Festival play]

A Kansan ABC affiliate picks as its “hot website” the newly and deservedly touted Silence of the City, where rejected Talks of the Town get a second chance to shimmy in the vaudeville spotlight after they’ve been yanked offstage by the editorial cane with a blat of the tuba. The newsreaders seem a bit baffled by it all (“They probably just get a ton of entries; I know The New Yorker is a popular magazine”), but it’s a nice story with earnest footage of clicking through the blog, which is one of those ever-present, funny old-new media flirtations.

Related: City of the Semi-Silents

Lemann responds to Jeff Jarvis’ remarks today in the Guardian‘s Comment Is Free. All I’d add to my side note about the original New Yorker story is that it would be smart to hire Bryan Keefer. So, people who hire, get on it!

Speaking of the web and everything, Comment Is Free looks different from the newspaper sites I’m used to reading. They explain:

Comment is free is a major expansion of Guardian comment and analysis on the web. It is a collective group blog, bringing together regular columnists from the Guardian and Observer newspapers with other writers and commentators representing a wide range of experience and interests. The aim is to host an open-ended space for debate, dispute, argument and agreement and to invite users to comment on everything they read.

Huh, I feel the spray of the wave of the future! Or maybe I’m just swayed by the clean, pretty design (I’m fond of red and green, as you can see).

Related: Back to the Future

As I spend some time wrestling with a very large issue.

A hoot: Christopher Buckley’s “Stations of the Mel.”

Coming soon: More letters about crambles.

Andrea Batista Schlesinger writes in the Huffington Post:

“Amateur Hour” is what Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, calls the rise of Internet journalism and the blogosphere in last week’s New Yorker.

I can’t help wondering if Ned Lamont’s primary victory in Connecticut has influenced his thinking.

Since then, I asssume she means, or else Lemann’s reporting would have have had to include time travel; even the Wayback Machine can’t do that!

Anyway, opinions TK. The long and short of it: Lemann has some sound points, and as anyone who knows me knows, I’m an ardent defender of long-established and stringent journalism practices (I work at PRINT, for crying out loud). I also think some of the journalism he cites as mundane or trivial—printable robots, harmless hazing, mountain-dulcimer man—could just as easily be New Yorker pieces if they were properly written. (No one, not even the rain, should begin a story with a dictionary definition.) Along with the new Charles Addams biography, out in September and agreeably juicy, I’m reading a solid ’70s history called Literary New York, which has some detailed passages in it about ’20s magazines that I’m going to type out here. There’s some fluff on the web. There’s society gossip and stuff that dates instantly and bad jokes and pettiness and emerging brilliance. Make what connections you will—I’m sleepy after a delicious dinner and long conversation, but when I can, I’ll reprint it here. If nothing else, it’s good reading.

Later: And of course, Steven Johnson has the last and (for now) best word: Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism (So Can We Stop Talking About Them Now?) Via Lindsayism, who adds a witty word. Double true.

“He has mixed martinis for Marilyn Monroe and Charles Bronson, poured Scotch for John Lennon and served a tipple to Henry Kissinger. In his nearly six decades of tending bar, Hoy Wong has shaken and stirred with the best of ’em – and he has no plans to stop anytime soon….” He’ll be celebrating at the hotel on August 22. Here’s the whole excellent story.