What’s that? You say you wouldn’t be able to pick David Denby out of a police lineup? Don’t know what Peter Schjeldahl looks like either? Friend, I hear you.
How fortunate that the Charlie Rose program, which is probably the closest thing to The New Yorker on television (nothing closer comes to mind), has suddenly decided to slap most of its past shows onto its website. There’s so much great stuff! (I love Charlie, but he does talk too much. Still, what mainstream show can boast such a high standard of discourse?)
See, in living color, audio tracks in full synchronization with the moving image, full of sound and fury, passion and reason, the following notable personages (many of them several times):
Roger Angell
Tina Brown
David Remnick
Malcolm Gladwell (Bonus: you can watch his hair expand with the years)
Adam Gopnik
Hendrik Hertzberg
Nicholas Lemann
Anthony Lane
David Denby
Jerome Groopman
Jeffrey Toobin
Atul Gawande
Seymour Hersh
John Seabrook
Nancy Franklin
John Lahr
Steve Martin
Dave Eggers
Peter Schjeldahl
Calvin Tomkins
John Updike
Brendan Gill
Calvin Trillin
Philip Gourevitch
Lawrence Wright
… as well as countless other writers and artists with a relationship to the magazine (e.g., Annie Proulx, Ian McEwan, Annie Leibovitz).
—Martin Schneider
Note: When I first posted this, I did not realize that on the show’s website itself, the user is apparently constricted in terms of screen size and also the ability to zip forward and backward (you can pause). The show’s partner in this archival effort is Google Video, where you can see the shows at a more normal size, can fast-forward, and so on. —MCS

Emdashes contributing editor and Squib Reporter Martin Schneider files a welcome post from afar.
Emily has been careful to signal my absence from our weekly Pick of the Issue posts due to my spending a few weeks in a rural Alpine outpost in Austria. Unsurprisingly, its remoteness precludes any possibility of receiving new issues of The New Yorker, so the last issue I received before leaving was the issue of July 9/16. I return on August 17.
That’s about six weeks altogether (the dates don’t match up, but trust me, it is)—a long stretch to be separated from the grist for this particular mill, but I had resigned myself to it. My connectivity combines extreme slowness and great expense, making proper perusal of even the online contents impractical; with a pang, I’ve watched the Picks of the Issue come and go.
Then a friend passed through for the weekend, a journalist in Vienna who’s a voracious consumer of fine American periodicals. On Sunday, he placed a small pile of printed matter on my table, indicating that I could take them or consign them to the Kachelofen.
In that pile were the two most recent issues of The New Yorker: July 28 and August 6.
And I can testify that absence really does make the heart grow fonder. —Martin Schneider

Matthew Yglesias calls out Simon Rich on a few points in this week’s Shouts:

When I was eighteen and Simon Rich was fifteen we were both in Mr Young’s homeroom and he really wasn’t the “sitting silently in the corner” type. I distinctly recall him showing off his juggling moves.

Ha! Writers do so love that “shy little me” voice. Still, as commenter ostap points out, “Showing off juggling moves in home room is entirely consistent with sitting in the corner at parties.” But what’s with that (not Constant) Reader commenter? Sheesh.

Meanwhile, those meanie scientists are after Malcolm Gladwell again. (The subtitle: “Sorry, Malcolm, but the Tipping Point Might Be More Myth Than Math.” He’s a first-name monolith!) Is it me or do Gladwell’s books get treated like original science more than they should be? I regard it as a compliment—Gladwell is so darn good at popularizing, explaining, and repackaging original work mostly done elsewhere that people feel the need to pick apart his theses.
Let’s look at one line from the article: “In reality, tipping—experiencing that exponential growth—is very difficult.” How this represents a debunking is beyond me. Show me the passage where Gladwell says tipping things is a piece of pie, and you win, Ad Age! (But you can’t.) —Martin Schneider
[There’s at least one of Gladwell’s theses that is surely undebunkable! Also, I liked this comment on the Yglesias post: ‘The best part, though, are the key words on the side: ‘Children; Teen-agers; Baseball; Erections; Mothers; Concerts; Popularity.’ From now on, I’m restricting my reading to only what comes up from a Google Alert on those seven words.” —EG]

In which Martin, who’s now abroad and provoking envy among his colleagues here at Emdashes, combines his fondness for newsbreaks—those witty clippings at the end of the occasional New Yorker column—his voracity for research and documentation, and his nimble fingers with the Complete New Yorker DVDs (from which, as Martin points out, newsbreaks are absent). A math student of whom it was once said “She has somehow arrived at the correct solutions, yet does not appear to know how to graph the trigonometric functions we studied this term,” I’m still somewhat fuzzy about what all the figures mean (though I know at least one of them is a fiscal quarter), but I know that you, sage readers, actually made it to Calculus and won’t have any trouble. —EG
ANTICLIMAX DEPARTMENT 11/28 55, 12/5 208
BLOCK THAT METAPHOR! 10/17 49, 10/24 157, 11/21 138, 11/28 147, 12/5 152
BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPARTMENT 10/24 103, 11/28 190
CLEAR DAYS ON THE EDUCATIONAL SCENE 12/5 177
CONSTABULARY NOTES FROM ALL OVER 11/14 168, 12/19 131
DEPARTMENT OF DELICACY 11/21 49
DEPT. OF HIGHER EDUCATION 12/12 167
DEPT. OF UTTER CONFUSION 10/17 167
DON’T GIVE IT A SECOND THOUGHT DEPARTMENT 12/19 127
FAMOUS “WHAT IF”S OF HISTORY 11/21 213
FULLER EXPLANATION DEPT. 12/26 53
HIGHER MATHEMATICS DEPT. 10/17 192
HOW’S THAT AGAIN? DEPARTMENT 10/10 123, 10/17 56, 10/31 133, 11/14 187, 11/21 164, 11/28 104, 12/19 142
IT’S ABOUT TIME DEPARTMENT 12/26 68
LIFE IN CALIFORNIA 11/28 51, 12/19 47
LIFE IN THE FAST LANE 12/26 39
LIFE IN TORONTO 10/17 92
LYRICAL PROSE DEPARTMENT 12/19 121
NEATEST TRICK OF THE WEEK 10/24 48, 10/31 139, 11/14 209, 11/28 167, 12/5 183
NO COMMENT DEPARTMENT 11/7 152, 12/12 188
PERISH THE THOUGHT DEPT. 10/10 153
RAISED EYEBROWS DEPARTMENT 11/7 112, 12/12 148
SENTENCES WE HATED TO COME TO THE END OF 11/28 177
SOCIAL NOTES FROM ALL OVER 10/3 103, 10/10 161, 10/31 144, 11/21 219, 12/12 154, 12/26 43
THAT’S TOO BAD DEPARTMENT 10/17 177
THE MYSTERIOUS EAST 12/19 123
THE OMNIPOTENT WHOM 11/7 47
THERE’LL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND 10/3 132, 12/12 159, 12/26 57
THESE CHANGING TIMES 10/24 53
UH-HUH DEPARTMENT 10/31 125
WE DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT DEPARTMENT 10/3 108
WORDS OF ONE SYLLABLE DEPT. 11/14 139, 11/28 168, 12/12 74
* Fascinating, sprawling Robert Penn Warren poem in 11/14 issue. I dare someone to tackle it.
* Brilliant Al Ross cartoon about literary snobbery in 11/21 issue.
* Engrossing profile on five brothers who are all New York City building superintendents, in 10/24 issue. No other magazine does this sort of thing so well.
* Janet Malcolm on Jeffrey Masson pops up in this quarter. Uh-oh.
* George Steiner on George Orwell looks interesting, 12/12 issue.

Within a day of purchasing it, I scarfed down Ian McEwan’s newest novel (novella is possibly more apt), On Chesil Beach. I would explain that it’s about inexperienced British newlyweds thrusting and parrying on their 1962 wedding night, but then devoted New Yorker readers already know this. (Here’s a swell PDF version of the New Yorker excerpt; here’s hoping you have the required fonts.)
I’d quite forgotten that the first chapter of McEwan’s Enduring Love also appeared in The New Yorker, but the Complete New Yorker confirms (May 19, 1997). In his enthusiastic review of Chesil, Emdashes fave Jonathan Lethem proposes sending McEwan’s opening chapters, “like Albert Pujols’s bats,” to the literary equivalent of Cooperstown; I’d wager it’s Enduring Love he is thinking of first and foremost. Point being, The New Yorker has offered first-rate McEwan before. As for Chesil, I’d aver that you have to go back to his also-possibly-novella Black Dogs to find its gemlike equal in McEwan’s oeuvre.
McEwan also pops up in D.T. Max’s fine “Letter from Austin” about the Ransom Archive. Apparently TPTB in Texas slot working writers into various levels akin to blue-chip stocks: we’re told that McEwan is rated as a worthier investment than Martin Amis, David Foster Wallace, and—gasp—J.D. Salinger! (Surely Chesil shores that status up, but have these arbiters read Saturday?)
In any case, last Friday, I caught McNally Robinson‘s presentation of Doug Biro’s movie about On Chesil Beach (talk about innovative cross-promotion) at the Two Boots theater. The event started with a dramatic reading of a scene from the book by talented actors Darrell Glasgow and Jessica Grant, a rare treat. After the quite skillful movie, National Book Critics Circle president John Freeman led a rousing discussion about McEwan and Chesil Beach with director Biro and novelists Colum McCann and Kathryn Harrison (New Yorker contributors both).
If you missed that event, you can always go to the screening at Labyrinth Books on Wednesday, June 19. It should be good fun!
Note: For anyone eager for insights into On Chesil Beach, the June 3 edition of the New York Times Book Review podcast features a lively chat with McEwan, in which the author discusses the new book and his (very very) early fondness for the Rolling Stones.
—Martin Schneider

Last Wednesday, Emily and I had the rare privilege of attending the second of two performances of Lawrence Wright’s My Trip to Al-Qaeda at Town Hall. I don’t know if any more performances are forthcoming, but I certainly hope so. Look out for it.
Directed by Gregory Mosher, My Trip to Al-Qaeda takes place in an approximation of Wright’s own office, complete with large, uncommented-upon Afghan rug. The few books whose covers we can glean from our seats seem well chosen, if the goal is not to project any particular “meaning.” Nicely played, Mosher. Wright, whose previous acting experience is (according to the program) limited to a high school production of Our Town, has a nice scholarly presence. He may have picked up a thing or two from Denzel Washington on the set of The Siege, a movie he wrote.
That’s right: Wright wrote the movie we all became intensely curious about after September 11, that movie that, according to Wright, became the top-rented movie after the hijacking attacks, giving him the grim distinction of becoming “the first profiteer in the war on terror.” Wright makes sure we understand the ways in which The Siege both was and was not prescient before beginning his narrative proper.
Over seven sections, Wright fills in his complex sketch of the Middle East as we now know it, as we now need to know it. The Middle East of Wright’s presentation is screwed up enough to elicit empathy, and if the United States doesn’t always come off looking so great either, does that make it an exercise in “root causes” or “blame America first”? To Wright’s credit, it never feels like the latter.
Difficult to summarize easily, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, which moves from Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, forces on the reviewer a strategy of revealing isolated points. Wright describes the formative experiences (torture) that turned Abu Musab al-Zarqawi “from a surgeon into a butcher”; the shockingly Pyongyang existence that is the everyday life of a woman or girl in the region; the importance of Naif in the story of Osama Bin Laden and his impressive uncle; the ego boost that destroying an empire (the U.S.S.R.) will provide to an angry band of Afghan guerrillas; and the charnel house that is the masculine side of the region’s psyche—although possibly for not all that much longer.
I won’t soon forget the minute or two of the Al-Qaeda training video that Wright shows.
No such story would be complete—not in 2007, anyway—without reference to witless harassment from the federal authorities soon after the author’s return, nor to chilling factoids emphasizing our current lack of preparedness. Since September 11, the number of Arabic speakers on staff at the CIA has decreased by two, to six.
This is effectively one of The New Yorker‘s finest reportorial pieces in recent years come to life. Parts of the performance are gut-wrenching, parts are hair-raising, but overall, “thought-provoking” is the most apt term.
Afterward, David Remnick came out and asked a few thoughtful questions and led a brief Q. & A., during which Wright indulged his hopeful side, noting that foreign-born Muslims are treated far better in the United States than in Europe and that the Palestinians clearly are ready for a peace treaty with Israel, which might reduce the all-consuming resentment in the region.
Note: For a taste of My Trip to Al-Qaeda, check out this brief clip, obligingly provided by The New Yorker. (By the way, Wright is now “off-book.”)
—Martin Schneider

“The bridge to nowhere, with 233 miles—a $233 million bridge to an island in Alaska with 50 people on it was the tipping point.”
—John McCain, Republican presidential debate, last night
In related news, a search on whitehouse.gov, which contains a searchable archive of all presidential speeches, press conferences, news briefings, etc., yields 0 hits for “tipping point.”
—Martin Schneider

Sumner is a town in Oklahoma.
Do you know how many New Yorker covers incorporate some sort of reference to Sumner? Take a guess.
I’ll give you a hint. It’s more than 37. It’s a lot more than 37.
Don’t believe me? Do a search in the Complete New Yorker archive on the term “SumnerOK” (that’s right, no space).
It’ll return 1,133 hits, every last one of them a cover.
These are the known facts about Sumner, Oklahoma, at least according to the citizens of Wikipedia.
Sumner is in Noble County, Oklahoma, ten miles east of Perry and two miles north of US highway 64.
The town was named for Henry T. Sumner, a businessman from Perry (ten miles to the west).
At its peak, Sumner had a bank, post office, two churches, a school, a grain elevator, and a train stop, but those days are long past. Currently, the only significant buildings still in use are the two churches and the school. The post office opened on May 23, 1894—and closed on July 27, 1957.
In 1905, according to the Oklahoma Territorial Census, Sumner had sixty-four residents, but it now has a population of approximately fifty, a precipitous plunge of 21 percent (est.) over more than a century—an attrition rate of one person about every seven years and three months.
Now, you might think that truly outlandish figure means that Sumner is (somehow or other) represented in every single cover of The New Yorker. But that would be entirely preposterous. 1,133 represents the slenderest fraction of the full 4,109 issues, a mere 27.6 percent of the whole. A mere bagatelle.
It remains unclear what quality this town possesses that has led the hardy toilers on 43rd Street to such heights of monomania over the decades.