Martin Schneider writes:
I’m finding the April 26 issue of The New Yorker (green cover) kind of delightful. In no particular order:
1. Hendrik Hertzberg’s Comment is excellent and also clarifies a subject that I’d pretty much missed, President Obama’s recent successes on the nuclear proliferation front. If you think you might have missed it too, do check it out.
1a. Hertzberg quotes Obama’s “Dmitri, we agreed” comment to Medvedev that apparently sealed the deal in the end.
The line possesses … an odd echo* of some of the most delicious dialogue in Dr. Strangelove, which movie Hertzberg cites in the beginning of the Comment, when President Merkin Muffley, played by Peter Sellers, is on the phone to the Russian premier to tell him that the United States is about to destroy the USSR for no good reason:

Well let me finish, Dimitri. Let me finish, Dimitri. Well, listen, how do you think I feel about it? Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dimitri? Why do you think I’m calling you? Just to say hello? Of course I like to speak to you. Of course I like to say hello. Not now, but any time, Dimitri. I’m just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened. It’s a friendly call. Of course it’s a friendly call. Listen, if it wasn’t friendly, … you probably wouldn’t have even got it.

So, so good.
The other thing that struck me about “Dmitri, we agreed” is that it may be the most quintessentially Obamanian statement of any importance he has ever uttered as president. That statement is wholly consistent with the person I supported as early as 2007, voted for in 2008, and haven’t seen quite enough of since.
2. Dana Goodyear’s article on the restaurant Animal in Los Angeles (not available online) is a sheer delight, and towards the end takes on an almost fictive quality. A great subject, and she did the most with it.
3. The letter Saul Bellow wrote to Philip Roth on January 7, 1984 (not available online), is pretty fantastic, even if his appellation for the poor journo who crossed him, “crooked little slut,” is a bit unfortunate.
4. Billy Kimball’s list of rarely heard complaints about the iPad is very funny.
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* Update: Somehow I missed that Hertzberg quoted a different part of Muffley’s telephone monologue to start off his Comment. Kudos to Hertzberg for spotting this echo long before I did.