In the Washington Post, Katha Pollitt handily dismantles Charlotte Allen’s recent piece about dumb broads, “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” And the editorial philosophy behind it, too.
And Ben Yagoda, who’s written books about (among other things) both New Yorker history and wily parts of speech and is therefore permanently OK in my book, asks in Slate, “But is it such a terrible thing that so many lying memoirists have been exposed? On the contrary: It’s evidence that the system works.” And he continues (internal link is mine): “In the wake of the Frey and now the Jones scandals, there’s been hand-wringing about the need for fact-checking—or lie-detector tests or something!—at publishing houses. But you’re never going to stop people from making stuff up.”

From the UPI story:

New York’s Long Island University announced this year’s George Polk Awards for excellence in journalism in 14 categories, led by a writer for the New Yorker.

The announcement from the school’s Brooklyn campus said John McPhee, a New Yorker non-fiction writer, has won the George Polk Career Award for “his extraordinary contributions as a prolific author, essayist and educator, who is considered to be one of the pioneers of creative non-fiction.”

Congratulations! Here’s McPhee’s New Yorker bio (I don’t much like using the abbreviation “bio” as a legitimate word, but “biography” makes me think of books and A&E specials, so there isn’t a perfect synonym), with links to several of his most well-known pieces.

Speaking of words and things, here’s a Louis Menand-approved semicolon, on a New York City Transit sign, no less. (It’s Lynne Truss-approved, too, which may rile Menand, who doesn’t have much truck with Truss, as you recall.) Dig the funny correction, too. Too bad Times reporters probably can’t freelance for The New Yorker; this would’ve been a perfect Talk of the Town.

Martin Schneider writes:
My mother is the American correspondent for the Austrian newspaper Der Standard. Recently she started a blog on American topics, a mix of quick bursts about the primaries (for now) and clarifications of American expressions or habits that never get explained in the standard resources that a German-speaking audience would consult (“selling the Brooklyn Bridge,” “Dear John letter,” and so on).
The recent Obama/Clinton cover remix prompted her on Monday to introduce her readers to a certain waistcoated dandy. Whether you read German or not, enjoy the Eustace-y goodness.
Update: Confronted with a deluge of requests (well, one), I supply the following quick and dirty translation. I fully await adjustment from my mom, who has me cornered in the German department.

“The New Yorker, yes, The New Yorker” for a long time was the theme of an ad campaign for this esteemed magazine. This statement of confirmation was the answer to the astonishment of an unseen listener in the face of all of the interesting, unexpected, and not-at-all-old-fashioned things that could these days be found in the by no means stodgy New Yorker.
Once again, The New Yorker has surpassed everyone: The following cover [refers to first link below, Clinton/Obama Eustace cover] is a variation on the likeness of a certain Eustace Tilley, a made-up character who every February for decades (indeed, from the very beginning) captured in simultaneously traditional and satirical (“tongue-in-cheek”) fashion the cool detachment of New Yorker readers.
The week of February 5 (it’s the edition of February 11, but it appears much earlier) The New Yorker ran the following cover:
http://www.newyorker.com/images/covers/2008/2008_02_11_p323.gif
I am perhaps also permitted to hark back to the simple, elegant, and endlessly moving New Yorker cover after 9/11:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Spiegelman-cover.jpg

Hope that helps!
—MCS

Dexter Filkins takes a look at George Packer’s play Betrayed: “Mr. Packer doesn’t spare the American government, but it’s not really the focus of ‘Betrayed.’ The light, instead, is on the Iraqis: their dreams, their strivings, the collapse of their faith. It was the struggles of the Iraqis that stayed with Mr. Packer after the journalism was done, and what prompted him to bring ‘Betrayed’ to the stage.”
Also in the Times, natch, A.O. Scott muses about the state of romantic comedies, but, unlike David Denby in his July 23rd essay on the subject, finds the typical modern leading man “the kind of nice guy — the Ralph Bellamy type — whom these earlier heroines would have triumphed by rejecting.” Seth Rogen, Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Owen Wilson, Adam Sandler, Keanu Reeves, Vince Vaughn, Matthew McConaughey as Ralph Bellamy? We wish.

The Virginia Snedeker show at the Morris Museum will knock your socks off and bring back welcome memories of New Yorker art past.
“Jeffrey Toobin didn’t see it coming.”
Calvin Tomkins’s Profile of John Currin, which floored me, “needs to be read by major newspaper art critics.”
From “Reading the New Yorker at the Gut Doctor,” a poem by Benjamin Nardolilli:
The writer of the essay wonders, and so do I
Why put your suffering on a stage,
When it fits much better inside a page?

The Rest Is Noise is nominated for a Bloggie for Best Weblog About Music. “Voting will close at 10:00 PM EST on Thursday, January 31.” So do it now and, if you haven’t had your primary yet, get your voting fingers limber!
Speaking of contests, here’s another Eustace Tilley (and some links to more news on the contest that, to be frank, I’m including here so I don’t lose them); not at all speaking of contests, here’s an endearing and informative page at the Folk Music Archives, featuring a bunch of questions and answers about Bob Dylan (yes!), hamburgers, Ice Cider Jubilee, Harry Belafonte, and other folkie subjects. Also more or less unrelated, although you could make some connections on the socialism side: my friend Scott McLemee’s latest piece for Inside Higher Education, about Bob Avakian, Tom Cruise, and Chairman Mao, not necessarily in that order.

In Susan Morrison, Jane Kramer, and Elizabeth Kolbert news: an NPR segment about the new book Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary, edited by Morrison; the link to the show includes an excerpt from the book. Guests: Morrison, Dahlia Lithwick, and Robin Givhan. There’s a very interesting discussion in the comments of this Leonard Lopate forum on Clinton (and Clintons) in general.
In Orhan Pamuk news: two stories by my friend Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times, one about Article 301, the law under which Pamuk was prosecuted, and another about the arrest of Veli Kucuk, who is said to have been plotting to kill the writer.
In David “Law & Order” Remnick news: I missed a story (and accompanying audio interview) in the San Francisco Chronicle about Remnick when it was first published in 2006, so I’m glad I happened on it now. Remnick discusses, among other things, his “very bad Bob Dylan jones” (I hear ya, comrade), the digital future, and the mistaken perception that The New Yorker was ever “pro-war” on Iraq.
In cartoonist news: I hope you’re keeping up with Mick Stevens’s posts on the new cartoonists’ blog.
That’s all; I’m going to hear Franz Wright read at the 92nd St. Y. If I don’t post for days, it’ll be because I’m too stunned by those bittersweet and startling creations to type.

I thought L.A. Times writer David Sarno, writing on Web Scout, had a good point about the finger-pointing that happened after various online writers got various details of Heath Ledger’s death wrong in their rapid-response blogging:

If you watched the story of Heath Ledger’s death explode chaotically across the Internet, with facts, errors, inconsistencies and confusions flying every which way, you may have concluded that in the new digital media’s race to break stories in minutes, accuracy has been left in the dust.
…
But here’s the problem: Stories have never arrived to the world fully formed or vetted. Journalists have generally had hours — not minutes or seconds — to craft a story from the blast wave of facts and factoids that comes in the wake of a bombshell.
What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process — reporting — as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.

Briefly, some other (unrelated) links you’ll like: Bridget Collins, one of the chefs profiled in that very good New Yorker story about school lunches a year or two ago (find me the link and I’ll send you a copy of Sweet Valley High from 1983), has been hired to do her magic in Medford, Mass.; the Observer talks to George Packer, whose play Betrayed opens Feb. 6; and the National Catholic Reporter has a piece on the end of reading that responds to Caleb Crain’s recent story, among others. Caleb has been writing some very interesting blog posts that follow up on his piece, too, like “Is Reading Online Worse Than Reading Print?” and “Are Americans Spending Less on Reading?” Stop reading this blog, read his instead, then go buy a book! Then read it, in the bathtub—it’s nice, if you haven’t done it in a while.

NCR writer and Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth includes some prescriptions for university teaching that will no doubt be controversial, and others — “Every four years a teacher should have a reduced course load to participate in a faculty seminar to read, for example, the new translation of War and Peace or eight books on Iraq” — that sound pretty reasonable to me. Especially since professors aren’t guaranteed summers off anymore, committees multiply like Gremlins, and adjuncts have to wait tables and tutor in their spare time, so all that academic leisure in people’s imaginations is slipping away faster than you can say “Tenure? Dream on.”