Monthly Archives: January 2009

Best of the 02.02.09 Issue: Al Roosten and Army Cats

Martin Schneider writes:
This issue had Adrian Tomine’s cover wryly commenting on the region’s tough winter. (I’d like to say that this cover took me a while to get, because I wasted precious seconds looking for the Obama connection.) Candidates include Larissa MacFarquhar on Caroline Kennedy, Laura Secor on Mohammed Tabibian, and Kelefa Sanneh on Booker T. Washington. You guessed it—this post is not yet complete!
Martin Schneider adds: Having now looked at the issue more carefully, I’m going to single out Nancy Franklin’s evocative roundup of the cable news coverage of the inauguration. It was funny (any sentence referencing Chris Matthews) and the ending had a nice jolt of earned profundity. Brava!

Best of the 01.26.09 Issue: Of Montreal and Drunken Mice

Martin Schneider writes:
This issue had Drew Friedman’s cover combining the visages of Barack Obama and George Washington. Candidates include Atul Gawande on health care reform, Calvin Tompkins on Walton Ford, and Ben McGrath on pessimists. We’ll be expanding this post in due course!
Jonathan Taylor writes:
Ben McGrath’s “The Dystopians” cheered me up infinitely, making me think at least for a while that a lot of things worrying me won’t matter at all soon. The piece gamely absorbs the all-embracing view of its subjects; at every corner, there’s yet another novelistic image of the future as envisioned by James Howard Kunstler, like the aspiring hedge-fund managers who are “going to end up supervisors of rutabaga pickers.”

The Wavy Rule, a Daily Comic by Pollux: Brave New World Book Encyclopedia

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Read Ben McGrath’s fascinating article “The Dystopians” “here.”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/26/090126fa_fact_mcgrath And yes, I get to draw a “thylacine”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine at last, which ties in with Calvin Tomkin’s profile on “Walton Ford,”:http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/ford/index.html which is “here.”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/26/090126fa_fact_tomkins
Click on the cartoon to enlarge it!
Read “The Wavy Rule” archive.

John Updike, 1932-2009

Alfred A. Knopf has announced that John Updike died of lung cancer today at age 76. More words to come (including yours in the comments).

  • The Times obit by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.
  • Updike’s 855 author search results on the New Yorker website, as well as reminiscinces and other posts on the newyorker.com blogs Book Bench and Goings On. (This comment thread is open for readers’ memories of the author.)
  • An archive of Emdashes posts on Updike.
  • The New York Review of Books‘ Updike archive (unfortunately, almost all subscription-only)
  • From Vanity Fair, James Wolcott—noted here just the other day for his all-embracing take on The Widows of Eastwick—with a tribute and a recommendation of a “book that captures Updike’s writerly public persona best.”
  • The London Review of Books‘ homepage showcases 21 essays on Updike from its archives—by 17 men, I might add, including Frank Kermode, the Woods James and Michael, and the Jameses Atlas and Wolcott aforementioned. The Times Literary Supplement unsheaths its 1996 review by Gore Vidal of In the Beauty of the Lilies (and “the failings of its author”), which at 10,000 words is “the longest review ever printed in the TLS.”

Shanahan, Weyant Top Voice’s Year-End Chortle Standings

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!

Denby on Snark: Both Live and Memorex

Martin Schneider writes:
Just a quick note to alert our readers that David Denby will be reading from his new book Snark tonight at the Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side (82nd and Broadway) at 7pm. I hope I can attend (not sure yet).
If you’ll be there, or even if you won’t, you can get in the mood with this meaty interview with the Columbia Journalism Review.

Forbes’ Decent List of 25 Most Influential Media Liberals, Including Hertzberg

_Martin Schneider writes:_
I like this “list”:http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/22/influential-media-obama-oped-cx_tv_ee_hra_0122liberal.html of the 25 most influential liberals in America than the one Tunku Varadarajan, Elisabeth Eaves, and Hana R. Alberts turned out this week for the _Forbes_ website. (Quibbles aside, of course.)
Hendrik Hertzberg finishes at number 17, a couple of spots behind questionably liberal writers Maureen Dowd and Christopher Hitchens. The spot description runs: “Foremost among a tribe of opinion writers that waged a form of moral war against the Bush administration, he has the purest voice in the choir of the East Coast liberal ‘high church.'” But is that really true? (Come to think of it: that role might be taken by Frank Rich, who curiously goes unmentioned.) Anyway, I’d’ve emphasized the unusual grace of his writing style instead—hey, is scrupulous scribbling a path to power?
As I indicated, the list is hard to question, by and large, especially the top pick. But I subscribe to the notion that influence accrues to the regime’s opponents: Rush Limbaugh rises in the Clinton years; Jon Stewart under Bush. Overall, this group is in for some rough years.