Martin Schneider writes:
A new issue of The New Yorker comes out today. A preview of its contents, adapted from the magazine’s press release:
In “Offensive Play,” Malcolm Gladwell wonders if the football fans who have recently been horrified by the quarterback Michael Vick’s involvement in dogfighting are overlooking the more troubling aspects of their own sport. “Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport,” Gladwell writes. Yet scientists have recently found evidence that the violence inherent in football can result in serious brain degeneration for players, long after their playing days are over.
In “The Secret Keeper,” William Finnegan explores how Jules Kroll pioneered the corporate-intelligence industry, growing his business from a side job, investigating kickbacks in his father’s printing business, to Kroll, Inc., “the world’s preëminent detective agency, with three thousand employees, countless subcontractors, and offices in sixty cities in more than thirty-five countries.”
In “The Gossip Mill,” Rebecca Mead writes about Alloy Entertainment, the company behind Gossip Girl, The A-List, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and examines the process by which the company produces young-adult novels and spins them off into television shows and feature films.
In Comment, Hendrik Hertzberg on Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.
In The Financial Page, James Surowiecki examines why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s stance on climate-change legislation is bad for business.
Calvin Tomkins profiles the artist Urs Fischer.
In Shouts & Murmurs, Ellis Weiner imagines a downsized, digitized marketing plan for a forthcoming book.
Adam Gopnik looks back on Irving Penn’s life and legacy.
Joan Acocella reads Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall.
Daniel Zalewski asks why the kids are in charge in today’s picture books.
James Wood contemplates Lydia Davis’s “very, very short stories.”
John Lahr reviews Jude Law’s turn as Hamlet.
Alex Ross notes the changes at the New York Philharmonic since Alan Gilbert’s appointment as director.
David Denby reviews Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are and An Education.
There is a short story by Julian Barnes.

Martin Schneider writes:
A new issue of The New Yorker comes out today. It is the Money Issue. A preview of its contents, adapted from the magazine’s press release:
In “Inside the Crisis,” Ryan Lizza examines the inner workings of Obama’s economic team, interviewing all the major players—Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Christina Romer, Peter Orszag, Jared Bernstein, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, Joe Biden—plus many other Administration officials, to provide a look at how Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, former Treasury Secretary, and “one of the most brilliant economists of his generation,” has steered the Administration’s economic policy.
In “Searching for Trouble,” Ken Auletta goes inside Google to tell the story of the company’s growth and future.
In “Call Me,” Tad Friend profiles Nikki Finke, the entertainment-business reporter who has been running the Web site Deadline Hollywood Daily out of her Los Angeles apartment since 2006.
In Comment, Michael Specter asks why so many people fear the H1N1 vaccine more than the disease itself.
In the Financial Page, James Surowiecki looks at the recession’s impact on consumer behavior.
David Owen explores solutions to the problem of regulating executive compensation.
In Shouts & Murmurs, Yoni Brenner offers program notes on orchestral classics.
Nick Paumgarten looks at attempts to predict the financial markets using numerical patterns, and profiles one man whose strategy has predicted many of the major peaks and crashes of the past thirty years.
There is a portfolio of cartoons about the stock market.
Jill Lepore goes back to the roots of management consulting and asks how the idea of efficiency took over our lives.
Hilton Als reviews Tracy Letts’s latest play Superior Donuts.
Peter Schjeldahl visits the Luc Tuymans traveling retrospective, currently in Columbus, Ohio.
Anthony Lane watches Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying.
There is a short story by Tessa Hadley.

Martin Schneider writes:
(We neglected to execute this feature the last couple of weeks, but now we’re back on the stick.)
A new issue of The New Yorker comes out tomorrow. A preview of its contents, adapted from the magazine’s press release:
In “Gangland,” Jon Lee Anderson goes inside Morro do Dendê, one of the more dangerous favelas in Rio de Janeiro, to explore the rarely seen world within the shantytown slums and to meet with Fernandinho, the favela’s head gangster, who runs the drug trade and dispenses justice through an armed posse.
In “Rational Irrationality,” John Cassidy provides a new reading of the economic crisis and discusses its implications for the regulatory overhaul that President Obama has suggested.
“When I think of the people I know who are active in Iran’s pro-democracy movement,” a correspondent writes from Tehran, in “Veiled Threat,” “I think first of the women.” Looking back on the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and this summer’s demonstrations over the contested Presidential election, the writer says, “I’m struck by the absence of women in the first, the paucity of women in the second, and the triumphant presence of women in the third.”
In Comment, Elizabeth Kolbert looks ahead to December’s U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and describes the steps the U.S. must take to become a true leader in climate-change legislation.
In Shouts & Murmurs, Zev Borow compares his spouse to home electronics.
Robert Polidori photographs the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations.
Anthony Lane profiles the filmmaker Michael Haneke.
Nancy Franklin watches The Jay Leno Show.
James Wood considers the latest work in the author Robert Powers’s science-fiction oeuvre.
Alex Ross describes the shortcomings of the current Tosca at the Met.
Anthony Lane takes in Peter Sellars’s Othello, starring John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
David Denby reviews the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man and Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story.
There is a short story by George Saunders.

Martin Schneider writes:
I found delicious the results of the recent New York Times poll asking, “What Are You Reading on the Subway?”
Let’s have a look!

Magazines:
The New Yorker (1,405 readers)
New York magazine (403 readers)
The Economist (371 readers)
Time Out New York (193 readers)
Time (171 readers)
The New York Times Magazine (109 readers)
Newsweek (91 readers)
Harper’s (89 readers)
The Atlantic (83 readers)
People (60 readers)

These results are fascinating. So, to summarize: more people are reading The New Yorker than are reading finishers 2 through 7 combined. Wow. Wow.
I think of Nielsen, the ratings company, which used to ask its subjects to record their weekly TV watching habits in a journal—they found they had to jettison that system in favor of an automated one, because people were rarely truthful about what they watched. They tended to underreport their hours per week, and they also tended to “forget” about the trashier side of their TV diet.
I think something similar may be at work here too. (Where’s Entertainment Weekly? At least People made the list—barely.)
The books list is similarly (improbably) high-minded, with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Robert Bolaño’s 2666 (!?), and Anna Karenina all finishing well. I half-expected to see Finnegans Wake in there. (Rowling doesn’t make the list.)
I’m being cheeky, but maybe my skepticism is misplaced. I honestly do see people reading The New Yorker on the subway with great regularity, and hell, even if these lists are a touch … aspirational, it’s a fine thing to see such dandy aspirations!