In which various Emdashers review the issue you may just be getting to.
For me, this issue felt a bit like August scraps tied in an unwieldy bundle. David Owen (“The Dark Side,” about the disappearing night sky) is always terrific, but the truffle in this issue was Burkhard Bilger’s vivid, manly-in-a-good way “The Mushroom Hunters.” Alex Ross’s Mostly Mozart meditation was top-notch, and should be considered seriously as an award submission. I also want to single out Adam Gopnik’s review-essay about Philip K. Dick, which may be the best book review of Gopnik’s I’ve seen. It had a touch of melancholy about it, too; hope everything’s OK. And speaking of melancholy, “Driving Home” has it and much more. So there were a lot of good things in the issue. I take it back. —Emily Gordon
A little boy, a band of nature enthusiasts, a shark—so many things coming into fatal contact with an unyielding surface!
I really liked Michael Schulman’s dizzy TOTT on the tween adulation directed at Zac Efron. It’s a wonderful example of how Talks can take you anywhere in the city.
It’s wonderful to see Paul Simms’s recurring byline in the magazine—for my money, sitcoms come no finer than NewsRadio, and Conchords isn’t far behind (high praise). I expect nothing less than brilliance from Simms, and “My Near-Death Experience” was just that. I love the idea of “incidents of air rage.”
I didn’t quite buy Peter Boyer’s thesis, to wit, that Rudy Giuliani’s character flaws make him a formidable candidate in the general election—but I thoroughly enjoyed his fine, serious Political Scene entry nonetheless. One of the rewards of election years is the certainty of precisely such Lemann-esque articles, and “Mayberry Man” is an honorable addition to that canon. I can’t get enough of them.
T Cooper’s powerful story about Cambodia, “Swimming,” worked for me on a number of levels. There was a nice economy in the way Cooper earned the various emotional payoffs in the story. Good fiction, that.
I’ve recently become a twitcher, so I was particularly taken with Filip Pagowski‘s evocative, near-ambiguous, smeary spot illustrations in this issue. —Martin Schneider

In which various Emdashes contributors note what we liked in last week’s issue.
New department alert! Never before has an issue of The New Yorker boasted a Dept. of Entomology—until now. I think Elizabeth Kolbert’s blend of the personal and the scientific is a model of the genre. Also, if you’re looking at Michael Specter’s spam damnation and wondering who or what Nanospore LLC might be, here’s your answer. I can never recall whether Nanospore’s debut illustration was under Shawn or Ross.
I noticed in Peter Schjeldahl’s review of the Sara and Gerald Murphy show that the vaunted department is referred to as a “Profile”—that capital P surprised me; has it been uppercase for long? Librarians? (I guess it was always u.c. Maybe it just looked weird because they had it as “1962 New Yorker Profile” where it made it seem that the final word just had to be l.c. File under “Things only a copy editor would ponder.”) Paul Goldberger’s review of the Times‘ gleaming new digs makes me want to take a tour of the premises—and Bloomberg HQ, too. —Martin Schneider

The best of last week.
As previously noted, this issue further establishes The New Yorker as the primate-ary reporter of Monkey News after the Ricky Gervais podcast and, of course, Baboon Update. (With some competition from Gorilla Gazette, Lemur News, Primate Eye, and The Simian, perhaps.)

Aside from that, I particularly liked Peter Schjeldahl on Courbet; Ben McGrath on the new prosthesis technology we’ll be needing more and more of the longer we stay in Iraq; Glyn Maxwell’s “Element It Has”; Lizzie Widdicombe on a steam-pipe-explosion evacuation procedure at Grand Central; the BEK, Mick Stevens, and Bob Mankoff cartoons I mean drawings (and several others—it was tough picking favorites this time); and the provocative cover by Anita Kunz, which isn’t quite in Spiegelman shock territory but was certainly being talked about. I know—I heard it with my very ears! —EG

The best of last week.
I think Antonya Nelson’s “Shauntrelle” should be shortlisted for Best American Short Stories. Something’s been going on with the New Yorker fiction in the past several months, and it’s even fresher than Fanny Mann’s facelift. Keep on doing what you’re doing, fiction faction! Also, you may not realize that there’s now a fiction podcast on the website; do not miss Donald Antrim reading Donald Barthelme’s 1974 story “I Bought a Little City,” or, for that matter, Edwidge Danticat discussing Junot Diaz’s 1995 “The Dating Game.” (Diaz reads this one himself.) Pleasant discovery: Fiction editor Deborah Treisman, who did an appealingly subtle job introducing Lorrie Moore and Chang-Rae Lee at last year’s New Yorker Festival, also has a very nice voice for radio.

Other standouts: Nick Paumgarten on Mort Zuckerman, the latest in the Let Us Now Parse Famous Men series (I’d love to read Paumgarten, Ken Auletta, &c. on some of these powermongers); Rachel Hadas’s “The Cold Hill Side”; Hilton Als improbably and convincingly praising Xanadu; my friend Caleb Crain writing lightly and beautifully about the heavy subject of whaling; Oliver Sacks on the Piano Man; and, of course, David Denby on those movies.
—EG

In which John Bucher, Martin Schneider (currently on Austrian holiday), and I review the high points and discuss the particulars of the issue you may just be getting to. We occasionally carp, but mostly we celebrate.
I never read thrillers growing up, unless you count the Hardy Boys. And no spy novels, apart from John LeCarré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which I had to read for a fourth-year class on espionage—the class I was in, incidentally, when the attacks of September 11 took place. I didn’t play with G.I. Joes, and, frankly, never understood the ecstasies my Egyptian friend Kareem found in them, flinging himself, and the figurines, around the pool deck at his Toronto home, spittle flying from his mouth—rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, Snake Eyes…noooo!!!
So I was unprepared, at least in a literary sense, for Jon Lee Anderson’s ducking, barrel-rolling, ricocheting account (audio here) of American opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan, “The Taliban’s Opium War.” About midway through the piece, the prose turned all And then we heard an explosion over the ridge; there were shell casings and bone fragments all around. We poked our head out of the foxhole, and I had to remind myself that I wasn’t reading a paperback I’d found wedged between two bus seats. And just seconds after that admittedly disparaging thought, I had another: Shit, the guy got shot at, for four hours, in Afghanistan. He’s got more street cred—field cred, whatever—than Fifty. —JB
I’m a fan of David Sedaris, and in part because the Greyhound bus system and I have recently been excessively intimate, I’ve been catching up on old episodes of This American Life. I’m always glad to hear a Sedaris segment is coming up; I relish his clever, absorbing, self-aware, drolly delivered spoken monologues. So maybe that’s why “This Old House” went down the wrong way—it’s quite possible I’ve just hit my Sedaris quota for the month. But I think it might have more to do with Sedaris’s characterization of “Rosemary Dowd” (a needlessly unkind, and comically unnecessary, pseudonym), his antiques-obsessed landlady. She’s the hero of the story, then she’s discarded as evidence that Sedaris still had some growing up to do. I was sad for poor Rosemary, the crumbling symbol of remembrance. And it reminded me again that I would love to see more of these personal histories and reflections from people who are ladies themselves. —EG

Each week, the Emdashes staff puts the blue ribbons on the aspects of the last issue that most reminded us of Wilbur, the good-hearted, unprejudiced pig radiantly bathed in buttermilk.
I’d like to reassure anyone alarmed by Calvin Trillin’s tale of drugs, arson, and violence in Nova Scotia that we Canadians are a peaceable people, with universal health care, level roads, and excellent hockey players. Trillin is ascending my list of favorite writers. I often flash back to moments from his tales of Alice, his late wife; and “swayve dogs,” from his Letter about Frenchy’s, a Maritime secondhand clothier, makes me smile weekly.
J.D. Salinger poked his head into my last last POTI entry, and I can’t look at those photos of soaring trestles in David Owen’s “The Anti-Gravity Men” without thinking of Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters. Check out that welder! —JB
Speaking of Trillin, I’d like to thank Laura Buckley for introducing the phrase “asshole issues” to my vocabulary. It was one of those lacunae one only recognizes in the act of filling it. It will get a lot of use. —MCS
I’ve already noted my pleasure in Lou Romano’s far from hacklike romantic taxi cover, Nancy Franklin’s incisive column (a Sopranos-mad friend says it’s the best thing she’s read on the show closer), and the excellent writing on architecture and engineering by the underappreciated Owen.
Like John, I admired Trillin’s taut, beautifully told story of island strife, and the review of Tina Brown’s Princess Diana book by John Lanchester was notably sensible; I also appreciated its dignified lack of tittle-tattle about both Brown (which was the clear choice under the circumstances) and Diana (which was admirable; I’m tired of hearing her defined by her taste in couture). John Lahr always makes my list. He is a giant. —EG

What to read in last week’s issue before you let the recycling algore-ithm turn it to colorful pulp? Every Monday, we at Emdashes—archive maven Martin Schneider, intrepid intern John Bucher, and I—review the issue’s high points.
GOAT has a fine Bruce Davidson sixties-era photograph of a sinuous black man leaning on a Chevrolet, his son clutching his leg—a captivating contrast of masculine and feminine.
My prurient thanks, also, to Adrian Tomine for his world-be-damned cover girl on a double-decker New York sightseeing bus, her nose in what can only be (given the paperback’s telltale stripes on a clean white field) the classic Little, Brown edition of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Sigh. —JB
This has come up in the comments, but I really liked D. T. Max’s piece on the Ransom Archive. If it whetted your appetite, check out Ted Bishop’s Riding with Rilke, a travel book by a motorcycling literary scholar in which it serves as the destination—just don’t go in expecting a lot of Rilke. I also enjoyed Miranda July’s cunning tale “Roy Spivey.” I notice that the New Yorker lists “armpits” as one of the few (seven) keywords associated with the piece—possibly a New Yorker first! —MCS
I think I knocked the wind out of myself with my panicky post about finishing the double summer fiction issue a week too soon. I’ve got a few more picks to round out my rant, but in the meantime, I’ll quote an ad from the issue in question, to set the mood for this week: “Nothing relaxes like cocktail piano…nothing!” —EG

I was looking for an old cartoon from the magazine’s first decades to illustrate this post, when I realized that what I was thinking of was a little guy playing a huge piano in an enormous room, singing “I like coffee, I like tea, I like the girls and the girls like me!” This cartoon is from memory, but I will look it up on the Cartoon Bank and get the precise wording and drawing for you, assuming it’s there, of course—you can’t be 100 percent sure with those early ones. Why is that, Bob Mankoff? I’m just curious; I’m sure it has something to do with scanning, or copyright, or touchy ghosts. (Update: It’s there!) In the process of looking for the bananas-song cartoon, which as I mentioned doesn’t exist, I found this funny Leo Cullum cartoon that makes reference to “The Banana Boat Song,” which, as you’ll recall, was the full text for another cartoon (by Danny Shanahan) and another post. Will the circle be unbroken? By and by, Lord, by and by.
But the point of the hed in the first place is to say: No Pick of the Issue, or POTI, as we refer to it here at Emdashes HQ, this week, due to the alarmingly finishable double issue. Tune in next Monday for the Best in Show, since my recent writeup wasn’t an official POTI, just the result of a mild case of sunstroke, a bout of ennui, my personal tallyman, and the long tail end of an ailment “involving the eye, the ear, the nose, and throat,” as Adelaide would say.
In the meantime, what have we got for you? Another Cartoon Caption Contest Interview, a favorite feature of some of you, returning in glorious form under the canny supervision of summer intern John Bucher. Look for it later today, and enjoy! If you’re a contest winner who hasn’t been made famous(er) yet, please contact us. We’re standing by. Or we’ll contact you. Stand by.