Martin Schneider writes:
Jeff Bezos of Amazon unveiled the Kindle 2 today; apparently it represents a significant upgrade.
Also released today is the Kindle version of The New Yorker. Starting now, for $2.99 a month, you will get your New Yorker subscription on your Kindle. How does it get there? “Free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet.” (Amazon Whispernet—doesn’t that sound like something Tarzan might have to free himself from?)
Amazon user “Dick Diver” approves: “I’ve been waiting for this now for over a year.” He’s hoping that more magazines are on the way.

Emily Gordon writes:
From the New York Observer, masthead (or at least ownership statement) news:

The New Yorker’s publisher Drew Schutte is leaving the magazine to become the senior vice president and chief revenue officer of Condé Nast’s newly consolidated internet group, Condé Nast Digital.
…
Meanwhile, Lisa Hughes has been named the new publisher of the magazine, which makes her the third one that David Remnick will work with in the decade-plus he’s been The New Yorker‘s top editor. Ms. Hughes has been the publisher of Condé Nast Traveler since 1995, a 14-year span regarded as an eternity in publishing circles. A source tells us, "She’s tough, smart, but this will be a really big test for her."
Here’s the full release:

(Continue reading.)

Warm wishes and best of luck to Mr. Schutte (pictured here with “a reporter,” as they say in Talk of the Town), and we send Ms. Hughes good vibes as she takes on a tough role. (We know a little about these challenges, as companies like to say, as the editor of a magazine called Print.) Here’s to a prosperous and enjoyable career at The New Yorker.

Martin Schneider writes:
Dramatist (and friend of Emily) Brian Parks has unveiled the Village Voice’s 2008 New Yorker Cartoonist Final Standings, and the winner is… Danny Shanahan, who managed to elicit a chuckle from Parks 15 out of 23 tries, for a whopping .652 amusement percentage. The Top 5 (and the only ones to crack .500) are Shanahan, Christopher Weyant, Zachary Kanin, Farley Katz, and Paul Noth. Congrats to that quintet for pleasing a tough judge!
Parks selected Bruce Eric Kaplan’s September 8 effort as Cartoon of the Year. (I preferred Parks’s 5th-place finisher, by Kanin.)
The standings feature all cartoonists who had 10 or more cartoons during 2008. You could some interesting things with a list like that: calculate how many have unambiguously female names (3) or how many have names that feature a Z (5). The possibilities are endless!

Emily Gordon writes:
We’re all in a whirlwind—or, in my case, a state of advanced humility barely distinguishable from a blue funk—after the inauguration’s pomp and stirring addresses, in plain speech, rhetoric, verse, and song. While you’re coming down from the high—or, in my case, shooting for neutral—here are some links to savor and explore.
Jill Lepore: “Our Better History,” an “In the News” post on newyorker.com about Obama’s inauguration speech today, and a long piece written before today, “Have Inaugural Addresses Been Getting Worse?“ Is there anything Jill Lepore can’t write about, I wonder? She is my current favorite contributor to the magazine. I’m reading her piece now on the possibly exaggerated death of newspapers, and while I might add a footnote about doomsaying bloggers’ mixed motives (Vanessa Grigoriadis has a good handle on the panicked retaliation of the “creative underclass,” many of whom were probably editors of their high school or college papers), I am, as ever, all admiration. Her sprightly, scholarly sentences brighten the pages, and she teaches, too. I’d read anything by her, and thanks to the editors’ ever more frequent inclusion of her pieces, I intend to.
All the newyorker.com inauguration coverage, which includes…
Various responses to the George Packer post (and Packer’s post-post) on the choice of Elizabeth Alexander as inaugural poet, including this one from Book Bench writer Jenna Krajeski.
Elizabeth was my teacher when I was a graduate student at NYU, and I was thrilled to see her at the podium, calm and dignified. At the Irish bar where my workmates and I watched the inauguration telecast, the crowd was as alert and contemplative during her poem as it was during the most solemn, lively, and challenging moments of the prayers and speeches, if that’s any indication of how a poem goes over with a populace that persists in believing it doesn’t like poetry, the same populace that delights in song lyrics, nursery rhymes, rhyming slogans, hip-hop, and so on and so forth. I did a quick look around the web for the printed poem, but ran out of time; let me know if you spot it anywhere. (Update: Here’s one; thanks, reader!)
If you haven’t read much of Alexander’s poetry, you can read some in The New Yorker; here (via Digital Edition) are “Autumn Passage,” “When,” and “Smile,” which is perhaps particularly riveting reading today.
Finally, remembering hopeful inaugurations past, here’s a terrific White House concert from 1980 to download for free. It’ll either make you happy, or keep you happy, I swear it. (Then, if you like, you can read Philip Hamburger on Jimmy Carter’s inauguration on your Digital Edition.) From Jesper Deleuran of the Facebook fan group “Doc Watson Rules!!!” (which you should join, since he does):

Here is a link to a site, where you, among other things can find this live recording from 1980, where president Jimmy Carter had invited Doc Watson and Bill Monroe to play on the lawn of the White House. It is possible to download the 16 tracks from the concert. First 6 with Doc, then 7 with Bill Monroe and his band, and last but not least 3 tunes where Doc and Bill play together alone. This is a must for a Doc Watson fan.

http://croz.fm/files/category-doc-watson.php

Happy inauguration day, all, and before tomorrow, let’s all start by doing something small to honor the service Obama spoke of so passionately. Vain musclemen who never seem to notice the mothers struggling up the subway stairs with bags and carriages, I’m looking at you. Right after I finish looking at me, of course.

Time Magazine calls The New Yorker‘s post-election cover, by Bob Staake, the best magazine cover of the year. “Simply spectacular,” they say. Curiously, NBC’s Domenico Montanaro points out that Barack Obama appeared on 48 percent of Time‘s covers in 2008, albeit sometimes in the “skybox,” that cute folded-down corner that previews a secondary story in the issue—I didn’t know that’s what it’s called!
Call for entries: As the Irvin-mad Emily noticed the other day, the 2009 Eustace Tilley Contest is under way! Send in your depiction of Eustace Tilley by January 15, 2009. Françoise Mouly will curate a slide show with the top entries.
The Aurora Theater Company of Berkeley, California, is putting on George Packer’s Betrayed in January. I’ve seen it, and it comes recommended. The play is about the failure of the American authorities in Iraq to support those courageous Iraqis who risked their lives by collaborating with the occupying forces. Here’s the original article from The New Yorker. Now that Iraq is a bit out of the headlines, I’m curious whether the play feels dated in any way—a perhaps inevitable fate for material as “newsy” as this.
Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter blog reviews Booth, a 1999 book about legendary New Yorker cartoonist George Booth. Hey—we’re fans.
The New York Public Library has a fairly random picture of William Shawn, which kind of thing always cheers me up.
Oh, and here’s a 2003 article by me about the connections between A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life. I think it’s good. Merry Christmas!

_Pollux writes:_ Yes, we are “pro-pigeon”:http://emdashes.com/2006/02/i-salute-fellow-propigeon-new.php here at Emdashes, and we believe that these feathered friends of ours are not only beautiful icons of “New York and _New Yorker_ culture”:http://emdashes.com/2007/03/the-pigeon-files-part-the-firs.php but also need to be protected across America. That’s why we’ve given our support to “the proposal”:http://www.change.org/ideas/view/protect_pigeons_under_the_migratory_bird_treaty_act to change the legal status of the feral pigeon, first submitted by “The New York Bird Club”:http://www.manhattanbirdclub.com/ as one of the Ideas for Change in America.

Jonathan writes:
Since I first moved to the vanished city where I picked up–nay, purchased–a Village Voice each week to read his column, Times fashion hound and sometime Talk contributor Guy Trebay’s words have accompanied me along the borderlands between two New Yorks, the one I know and the one I don’t yet.
Still braced by Emily’s encyclical on the care that can add grace to regular communication at little cost, I was happy to see Trebay’s declaration of faith in physical Christmas cards, be they inspired divinely (from a holiday fair at Brick Church on the Upper East Side), or Divinely (by John Waters). Trebay is one of six writers in the Times identifying “The One Luxury I Won’t Do Without” this year (illustrated warmly by Greg Clarke, who has done at least one lovely New Yorker cover that I know of).

Been busy at the Alpine hacienda the last week or so, and I’ve been remiss in posting lately. Schemes “gang agley”:http://www.electricscotland.com/burns/mouse.html and all that. So here’s one of those omnibus posts everyone likes.
Wonderful to “see”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/roger-angells-greetings-friend.php so “much”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/banned-words-and-phrases-holid.php of “Emily”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/more-good-news-because-we-need.php the last day or two! -Thx- Thanks for that unmistakable verve!
As Emily “reported,”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/hooray-a-new-david-remnick-boo.php David Remnick will write a book on Barack Obama. It will be his first book that isn’t a compilation or an edited work since he took over as _New Yorker_ editor in 1998. _That_ is a big deal. And, of course, good news!
How very nice to see an abstract cover on the magazine’s big year-ender.
David Fincher’s newest movie, _The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,_ based on an unlikely F. Scott Fitzgerald story, appears to be a stunner. On the subject of making movies of Fitzgerald stories, has anyone considered adapting “The Jelly-Bean”? On a road trip many, many years ago, I listened to “Dylan Baker”:http://www.amazon.com/Stories-F-Scott-Fitzgerald/dp/0694524468 marvelously reproduce the lazy Southern rhythms of the story (it’s set in Georgia), and I think it might work on the big screen. It’s nothing like _The Great Gatsby,_ which apparently is also true of _Button._ Anyone agree or disagree, or have other candidates?
Oh, and how do people feel about the new adaptation of Richard Yates’s novel _Revolutionary Road_? I don’t think I could bring myself to watch such depressing material, honestly. I had the same problem with Zoë Heller’s _Notes on a Scandal_; the book was excellent, but I was not able to finish the movie.
I wanted to mention a swell new blog, “Daily Routines,” an ongoing compilation of passages from writers discussing their daily routines. It cites _The New Yorker_ about as much as any other source. I am a sucker for this sort of thing, interviews with artists, honest discourse on the process….
Sigh. I suspect (fear) that “The Transition” podcast is so named because they’ll be putting the “Campaign Trail” in hiatus until there is an actual, you know, campaign under way. I trust that Ryan Lizza will be able to find plenty to occupy him in Obama’s first year.
I’ve recently taken up cooking. (Until now I have always been strictly a microwave chef.) So when is _The New Yorker_ going to come out with a cookbook, anyway?

Emily can’t stop writing, so she writes:
Dwight Garner (hi, Dwight!) has a lovely, and appropriately detailed, story about Roger Angell’s famous holiday poem, a tradition we’d been missing. I love that Angell edited Ogden Nash and now keeps the art of absurd partial rhymes from being entirely unjustly marginalized. I also like this quote from Paul Muldoon: “I myself make no distinction between ‘light’ verse and — what? — heavy verse.”
Elsewhere in noble production, the impossibly soignée Françoise Mouly is also, as you may know, a publisher of gorgeous and educational comics for children; Publishers Weekly praises her; and on Bookreporter.com, she blogs.

“Nextbook”:http://www.nextbook.org is a sharp site we like with a fresh take on Jewish subjects. They’ve got a new “piece”:http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=1795 on Israel by Shalom Auslander that is really on the ball; be warned that that description is punningly intended. If you are familiar with his work, that may not come as a surprise.
Speaking of which, I “mentioned this”:http://emdashes.com/2008/10/new-yorker-festival-klam-leona.php during the Festival, but—Matthew Klam cited a work by Auslander in which he discusses good and evil and how they are related, as if they behaved like people, saying that “Light and Dark are buddies, and they hang out after work.” Anyone know where this comes from? (Perhaps Klam himself will let us know.) I’d like to read that.