“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
Monthly Archives: June 2007
Jeffrey Toobin, Newbie Journo: The Crimson Looks Back
From today’s Crimson, a look at the legal beagle as a Cambridge pup and his evolution into today’s New Yorker contributor. An excerpt (what’s with the single-sentence grafs, by the way?):
Toobin’s parents may have scared their son away from the profession.
His mother, Marlene Sanders, covered the Vietnam War and was a pioneering woman in television reporting. His father, Jerome Toobin, a producer for Bill Moyers, was at the vanguard of public broadcasting.
According to Toobin’s wife, his mother warned her son against going into journalism.
“Don’t touch it,†she said, “because success and failure are so randomly distributed.â€
…
[Years later,] “He was very frustrated with the job at the moment,†current New Yorker editor David Remnick says. It was 1993, and Tina Brown had recently become editor of the eminent weekly.
Remnick had just joined the magazine as a staff writer. He and Toobin met at a dive bar. Over a drink, Remnick suggested Toobin meet with Brown.
“I basically changed careers over a weekend,†Toobin says.
Talk of the Town, the storied house built by E.B. White and James Thurber, needed another layer of paint, and Brown wanted Toobin to add a newsier finish.
Remnick says that Toobin’s experience made him a natural hire.
“He was coming at this a little on the late side, but he had knowledge about an area of life. Jeff had been out in the world,†Remnick says.
“He wasn’t just a graduate of an unfortunate University in the suburbs of Boston,†Remnick—who was rejected from Harvard—says.
You know you can read the full-text archives of (at least in theory) everyone who’s ever written for the Crim, right? For instance, the early reporting of Hendrik Hertzberg, the heartthrob of Barnard Hall. (According to my mother.) As you’ll see if you visit the archive search page, the staffers have some name-variation and other kinks to work out, and the archive is still far from complete. Still, here, for example, is Toobin on Tom Lehrer, of “Masochism Tango” and “The Elements” fame (and here’s a very clever animation of the latter). Catch up with your favorite graduates! By the way, my hed there is kind of a chiasmus, in case you’re keeping track.
Unrelated but breaking (at least by my definition): Here’s an engaging profile (from the Louisville Courier-Journal) of the likably eccentric Fairleigh Brooks, who won the caption contest with his Tarzan “McKenzie” quip.
Sumnertime, and the Living Is Easy: Where Tilley’s Butterfly Must Be Flying
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.
6.04.07 Issue: “I Was Not Trained to Clap”
Each week, the staff of Emdashes (the unflagging Martin Schneider, faraway but beloved intern John Bucher, and me) put the blue ribbons on the outgoing issue’s buttermilkiest Wilburs.
Michael Crawford’s Chekhov cartoon made me laugh; why do people think you’re looking for a conversation if you’re reading in public? It is just the opposite, friend. As for the caption contest: Two of the three entries are quite decent, including David Wilkner’s “I’d like to get your arrow count down” (though Phyllis Mass’s “Have you tried sleeping on your side?” is clearly the funniest, and besides, she’s Phyllis from Philly! How can the judges resist?), and one (“Native American craftsmanship”—sorry, Norm Tabler of Indianapolis) is in surprisingly bad taste. And David Baker’s poem “Never-Ending Birds” is terrific: the best I’ve read in the magazine in recent memory.
In John Colapinto’s Paul McCartney profile, “When I’m Sixty-Four,” McCartney laughs to think of the classically trained musicians who were too snooty to clap on “Hey Jude”; in “How I Spent the War,” Günter Grass shivers to think of the German soldier “Wedontdothat,” who was too—what? we’ll never know—to hold a gun for the Reichsarbeitsdienst. I thought I sensed a note of ambiguous envy in Grass’s description of this perfectly Aryan pacifist.
By the way, ever since I started Emdashes on New Year’s Eve Day, 2004, I’ve been aiming for the perfect reading rhythm wherein I consume the magazine from cover to cover, with nothing omitted, before the new issue arrives. Yesterday, I reached my goal—that is, not only reading everything, but having that feel perfectly natural and reasonable. Now it’s hard to believe it once seemed like an uphill hike, and I read other things this week as well, in case you were wondering. It’s all about gradual conditioning, and you can do it, too! Anyway, that means I have a few more issue favorites to add, and I probably will, as is my wont. Also, if you were as keen on Paul Theroux’s Turkmenistan travel story as we were, you’ll also want to read Theroux’s interview on the subject with Radio Free Europe. —EG
All the best blogs in the left-wing blogosphere were discussing and debating Jeffrey Goldberg’s fine Letter from Washington about the Republican Party’s recent woes. As the caption for the expert Finn Graff illustration inquires, “Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove—who’s most to blame for the Republican Party’s disarray?” Really, the proper question is, Why stop at those three? Also worth a look is the centerpiece advertisement, for the 2007 Blue Planet Run, an around-the-world relay undertaken by twenty runners (!) in an effort to finance “safe water projects around the globe.” The first runner left New York City on Friday. Two MoMA-related items: Nestled in TOTT is an ad for the upcoming Richard Serra exhibition; the pic just looks cool. In GOAT, on pages 24 and 25, is a remarkable photograph by Israeli artist Barry Frydlender—he’s got a solo show at MoMA all summer long. I saw it last week; highly recommended. —MCS
This issue had three things I tasted, recoiled from, and then decided were pretty good: Adam Gopnik’s refusal to, like, edit the shibboleth of youth out of Lacy and Lily’s museum-trip musings; the seamless dramaturgy of David Sedaris’s Reflection on Jackie, the neighborhood child molester; and Paul McCartney’s marveling at the luck of being Paul McCartney (“And there was one guy who wrote ‘Yesterday,’ and I was him”), in an excellent article by John Colapinto. —JB