At/on/in/with/from/for Radar online, Choire Sicha compares this week’s New York and New Yorker.

Scott McLemee makes a fiercely elegant argument for giving book review sections the vote of confidence they deserve.

Martin Schneider writes:
Anyone whose interest was piqued by D.T. Max’s Profile of Grant Achatz in the May 12 issue will want to check out the versatile Kathryn Yu’s Flickr group of the 27 Alinea courses she consumed last week. Molecular gastronomy seems designed to be ridiculed, but I for one am fascinated–and I’m not even a foodie.

Martin Schneider writes:
Ben Bass has just posted a really engaging tribute to Anthony Lane that everyone reading this should check out ASAP. I’m glad to see Lane’s “poison pen” defended with such spirit. (And I agree that it’s too easy to accentuate Tina Brown’s flaws.)

From a Newsweek story by Malcolm Jones called “Who Was More Important: Lincoln or Darwin?”:

As soon as you do start comparing this odd couple, you discover there is more to this birthday coincidence [of being born on the same day in 1809] than the same astrological chart (as Aquarians, they should both be stubborn, visionary, tolerant, free-spirited, rebellious, genial but remote and detached–hmmm, so far so good). As we approach their shared bicentennial, there is already one book that gives them double billing, historian David R. Contosta’s “Rebel Giants,” with another coming early next year from New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik.

Thanks to Brian Sholis for this one!

Martin Schneider writes:
Here’s a curious Flickr group dedicated to author photos of New Yorker people. If you’ve always wondered what John McPhee or Dana Goodyear look like (I didn’t know), this is worth a look.
Note: Loyal reader ZP of I Hate the New Yorker (who recently wrote about all the mentions of Roy Cohn, in prose and cartoons, through the years of The New Yorker) told us about this ages ago, but we lost track of it somehow.

Martin Schneider writes:
Hats off to the reader who said of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe that “it kept him up all night”—skip to about 10 minutes in. I love the idea! (The adjective above comes from a pullquote emblazoned on a paperback copy of David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be that I once owned.)

on Slashdot—a lively discussion of Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent piece.

Martin Schneider writes:
On his blog Lined & Unlined, designer and writer Rob Giampietro provides an occasion to reflect on the evocative illustrations that accompany New Yorker short stories in these post–Tina Brown times.
His Flickr set of New Yorker fiction openers is a terrific resource as well.