The magazine is providing some of the best New Orleans coverage I’ve seen so far, especially from the hardworking, empathetic Dan Baum in Talk. All his pieces so far are riveting contributions that are a serious pleasure to read as well, and I hope he’s working on a feature-length story. This is sound, un-self-aggrandizing, and entertaining journalism—hell, writing—and I admire it.

Meanwhile, the Target-sponsored issue turns out not to be such a big deal, at least according to the American Society of Magazine Editors, which elected to give The New Yorker a little dressing-down (as it were) but nothing more serious. From AdAge:

After a regularly scheduled board meeting this afternoon, the society issued a statement that said, “Our guidelines do call for a publisher’s note to readers in single-advertiser issues, and The New Yorker has agreed to include such a note when and if they do this again.”

Predictably, and as you know I do like a little predictability, Lewis Lazare is very maaaaaad about that. I’ve come to think of him as a friend, really. It’s good to see people caring so much about the magazine that they raise their blood pressure to a Targety red on its behalf. AdAge ads:

In a column last week, Mr. Lazare called today’s ASME meeting and its action or inaction regarding the issue a potentially “defining moment” in its history.

Many editors and advertisers have disagreed, calling the issue as a masterstroke of magazine advertising that did not breach the boundary between ads and editorial.

Others have more or less shrugged, suggesting that the publishing industry faces bigger issues, like rising advertiser demands for a print version of product placement. ASME is still in the process of revising its guidelines to address such activities; its new guidelines are expected to be released at the American Magazine Conference next month.

Porch Duty [Dan Baum, New Yorker]
On the Roof [Baum, New Yorker]
Kajun’s [Baum, New Yorker]
Interview with Baum [for Smoke and Mirrors; levity.com]

This seems like an excellent time to buy the great A.J. Liebling’s book The Earl of Louisiana. Says the press:

In the summer of 1959, A. J. Liebling, veteran writer for the New Yorker, came to Louisiana to cover a series of bizarre events that began when Governor Earl K. Long was committed to a mental institution. Captivated by his subject, Liebling remained to write the fascinating yet tragic story of “Uncle Earl’s” final year in politics. First published in 1961, The Earl of Louisiana recreates a stormy era in Louisiana politics and captures the style and personality of one of the most colorful and paradoxical figures in the state’s history. This edition of the book includes a foreword by T. Harry Williams, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Huey Long: A Biography.

Jonathan Yardley wrote in the Washington Post:

Turn to the opening sentences of A. J. Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana and three things happen. You are dazzled by the wit and acuity of Liebling’s prose, you want to keep reading for as long as he keeps writing, and you are struck by how deeply the character of American politics has changed in the four-plus decades since The Earl of Louisiana was first published…. [It] is best read today as an evocation of Louisiana before it fell victim to the inevitable forces of homogenization, as a portrait of a distinctive and unexpectedly endearing man who scarcely deserves the ridicule that has become his lot and—this above all—as an opportunity to read a few words from the typewriter of the one and only A. J. Liebling…. One of the best books ever written about American politics.

Here it is on Amazon and Powell’s.

John Hagel comments at length on and quotes from “The Cellular Church,” Malcolm Gladwell’s recent piece about Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church. How frustrating and sad that neither FEMA nor, say, the present Democratic Party can move this effectively and productively beneath the bureacratic thicket—and communicate this clearly—to actually help people in all kinds of need.

The Capital Times’ Doug Moe, who has a stellar memory for things New Yorker, fondly recalls his favorite Darwin Award winners and contenders:

This is actually the 20th anniversary of my all-time favorite Darwin moment. Incredibly, the hero of the story, Larry Walters, received only “honorable mention” from the Darwin committee when it handed out its 1983 awards. But eventually George Plimpton wrote a New Yorker article about Walters, and a New York playwright wrote a play based on his exploits.

Walters was a 33-year-old California truck driver in July 1982 when he perpetrated the event that would bring him notoriety around the world. According to Plimpton’s piece, which ran in the New Yorker much later, in June 1998, Walters came on his idea as a little boy at Disneyland.

“The first thing when we walked in,” Walters said, “there was a lady holding what seemed like a zillion Mickey Mouse balloons, and I went, ‘Wow!’ I know that’s when the idea developed. I mean, you get enough of those and they’re going to lift you up!” Read on for the inevitable disaster.

Forget what Emerson said—consistency is one of the only things that can keep us from madness in this fallen world. I mean that. And so, in keeping with his other statements on the magazine’s recent Target-sponsored issue, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Lewis Lazare is still mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. (As it happens, I’m watching Network right now, and Peter Finch actually bellows “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” That doesn’t sound as good shouted out the window as the misquoted version, though.) He writes:

That issue, featuring a slew of Target “ads” masquerading as illustrations done up in the style of the New Yorker‘s famous drawings and cartoons, marked the first time in the magazine’s storied history that it had published an edition with just one advertiser.

He goes on to report the actual news development, which is that the American Society of Magazine Editors is meeting on Tuesday to discuss (or, as Lazare writes ominously, “deal with”) the Targety issue. I think this is all going to blow over, but I understand what it’s like to get a bee in your bonnet about something. (I once co-wrote a column in the free paper The Resident called Gotham Gadabouts, and didn’t we have a whole hive of bees nipping at our scalps about everything from the Sunday Times to the superstores? And good for us, I say still.)

I’d still like to point out, once again, that those ads—and I spent a lot of time with them—really were not “done up in the style of the New Yorker‘s famous drawings and cartoons.” They weren’t, Lewis. They looked like big, garish splotches of gussied-up Targetness in the middle of The New Yorker. They looked like well-wrought, graphic-designy ads, and they weren’t about anything in particular besides “Hey look! Buildings and stuff!” They were even a little crass, in a self-conscious way. But they were fun, colorful (New Yorker cartoons these days, except the ones that take up a full page and are by Roz Chast or Sempé, are not in color), and momentary. I suggest that the next time the magazine has a one-sponsor issue (assuming it isn’t at the bottom of the Hudson with concrete blocks on its feet after the ASME deals with it), the ads be a little more toned down. But I enjoyed them anyway, because it was as though the New Yorker giant was sleeping and the tiny Target elves got in for a night and planted silly temporary tattoos all over it. Please note the words “tiny” and “temporary.” The New Yorker brand (if we’re going to speak in these terms) is a hell of a lot stronger than the logo of even a graphically gifted superstore. And I know an ad from an illo. I know Lazare does too, but for consistency’s sake, I’ll allow him his point.

Danny Schechter quotes Nicholas Lemann from his interview with Daniel Cappello on the magazine’s website:

As you shake your head at these stories, often staring at them with disbelief, fiction merges with faction. Nicholas Lemann writes about his in the New Yorker, with references to authors who have imagined the scenarios we now see playing out. In an interview published on the magazine’s website, he also talks about what the country is learning about the city where he grew up:

For context, let’s think about New Yorker readers, who, I’m guessing, regularly go to places like Jamaica—kind of tropical-resort-like places. New Orleans is a lot like those places, politically and sociologically, in the sense that you go to them and you’re aware, in some part of your mind, that the life lived by most people in the place where you are is not the life that you are living as a tourist, but you don’t know the details. So part of what you’re seeing here is just the underlying condition of the poor in New Orleans. New Orleans is a city with a lot of poor people. They’re not always suffering this dramatically, but they’re suffering a lot of the time, and it’s invisible to people most of the time. So part of the effect of Katrina is making the usually invisible visible.

Here’s Lemann’s Talk of the Town, “In the Ruins.” More New Yorker coverage of Katrina, gathered on the website:

PLUS: A special Talk of the Town section on the hurricane, with Lemann, David Remnick, Dan Baum, and Christine Wiltz. AND: From 1987, John McPhee on taming the waters of Louisiana and, from 1993, James B. Stewart on his Illinois home town, threatened by floodwaters.

PLUS: How to help.

From the National Catholic Reporter’s Arthur Jones, who’s about to retire as editor at large, in a piece about his tenure there and the state of the Church:

The Wojtyla-Ratzinger continuum doesn’t play only to empty pews. Hundreds of millions of heaven-bound Catholics just want Jesus. They stand in line and question nothing. As is their right. Others, more pugnacious, Catholics steadfastly loyal and questioning, rooted in their eucharistic communities and New Testament realities, remain to demand better from the institution. People of large heart and devotion still confidently demur from much the Vatican would impose. The New Yorker lately quoted one of the sillier little U.S. bishops saying such folks are Mass-going non-Catholics. Hey-ho! There are very few bishops in this country who can cast the first stone about anything. (Fear not, folks, it’s the memoirists, not the bishops’ obituary writers, who get the final word.) More.

From the invaluable Greg.org:

Finally, New Yorker Articles Via RSS

Google News started indexing The New Yorker, and using this link, you can see the links of up to 100 articles from the magazine…. More.

Yay! Thanks, Greg!

From today’s Times piece about how email is changing the recorded nature of literary correspondence:

Although David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said he considers the collected letters of Harold Ross, the magazine’s founding editor, ”the best book I’ve ever read about The New Yorker,” you won’t see Remnick’s collected letters — or e-mail correspondence — any time soon. ”Oh, God forbid,” Remnick said. For one thing, The New Yorker routinely purges messages from its system. Deborah Treisman, who as The New Yorker’s fiction editor is in communication with most major living writers, confessed she doesn’t always save her messages. ”Unfortunately, since I haven’t discovered any convenient way to electronically archive e-mail correspondence, I don’t usually save it, and it gets erased from our server after a few months,” Treisman said. ”If there’s a particularly entertaining or illuminating back-and-forth with a writer over the editing process, though, I do sometimes print and file the e-mails.” The fiction department files eventually go to the New York Public Library, she said, ”so conceivably someone could, in the distant future, dig all of this up.”

The impact on future scholarship is ”not something that I’ve spent much time thinking about,” Remnick said. ”I’d say something a little bit radical: as much as I respect lots of scholarship in general, what matters most is the books and not ‘book chat,’ ” he said. ”Something’s obviously been lost, even though I don’t think it’s the most important literary thing we could lose.”

Later: Why I love Nicholson Baker.

One writer who systematically saves his e-mail is Nicholson Baker, whose book Double Fold was a cri de coeur about what is lost when libraries convert newspapers and other rare materials to microfilm. ”I regret deleting things afterward, even sometimes spam,” Baker said. ”I’ve saved almost everything, incoming and outgoing, since 1993, except for a thousand or so messages that went away after a shipping company dropped my computer. That amounts to over two gigabytes of correspondence — I know because my old version of Outlook froze when I passed the two gigabyte barrier. When software changes, I convert the old mail into the new format. It’s the only functioning filing system I have.”

Funny 1994 interview with Baker [ALTX; “What’s wrong with things being sophomoric once in a while? The sophomore year has been given a bad rap.”]

This chilling roundup of depressingly accurate warnings from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, The New York Times, and “All Things Considered” about what would happen to the city if a big hurricane hit. From three years ago.