"He was much less stoked to be assigned by Tina Brown, then editor of The New Yorker, to profile Mr. Trump in 1997."

"Observing him over several months on construction sites, in his Trump Tower office and on a private plane, Mr. Singer concluded that Mr. Trump, in the period before he became a reality TV star, was a man 'who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.' 'That profile,' [said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker], 'got everything about Trump 20 years before he ran for president: the vanity, the casual cruelty, the outsized selfishness. It was all there.'... [After a NYT piece mentioned it], Mr. Trump wrote a letter to the editor attacking Mr. Singer as 'not born with great writing ability.' Mr. Singer sent a mock thank you to Mr. Trump for the publicity, which apparently bumped his book higher on the Amazon book charts. He also enclosed a check for $37.82, 'a small token of my enormous gratitude,' he wrote. Mr. Trump returned the letter with an all-caps note at the bottom, reading, in part, 'MARK — YOU ARE A TOTAL LOSER.' Mr. Trump also cashed the $37.82 check, Mr. Singer later said. Mr. Singer framed a photocopy of it for his apartment."

From "Mark Singer, Longtime Writer for The New Yorker, Dies at 75/He joined the magazine’s staff at 23. Among the subjects of his profiles were the magician Ricky Jay and a pre-politics Donald Trump" (NYT).

I'm sorry to hear that Mark Singer has died. You can click on my tag "Mark Singer" to see how he's come up here over the years. What a distinction to have Trump's "YOU ARE A TOTAL LOSER" in your NYT obituary. To continue the all-caps — RIP.

UPDATE: Upon publishing, I clicked my tag. I'm sorry to say that Trump is in every post.

Sculpting the head of Joe Rogan for a New Yorker illustration.

Video after the jump.

And here's the article with the finished illustration — a photograph of the sculpted head in a fantasy landscape — "Listening to Joe Rogan/How a gift for shooting the shit turned into an online empire—and a political force."

The New Yorker now has its entire 100-year archive digitized and on line.

You can get into everything starting here. I guess you need a subscription, but I have a subscription. I impulsively clicked into the year 1967 because I love 1967, and then into November 11, because I love Saul Steinberg:

But that's not the only Steinberg cover for 1967. There are at least 6 more! But don't get distracted.

"Why did The New Yorker, which perpetuates the myth that they employ an army of meticulous fact-checkers, pollute our understanding of mind and brain by publishing these fabrications for decades?"

Asks Steven Pinker, on X, as he reads the New Yorker article "Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?"

Pinker answers his own question like this: "Because their primary commitment is to a belletristic, literarist, romantic promotion of elite cultural sensibilities over the tough-minded analyses of philistine scientists and technologists, their rival elite.... A common denominator behind Sacks's fabrications was that ineffable, refined intuition can surmount cerebral analysis, which is limited and cramped. It's a theme that runs through some of their other blunders, such as... [t]he many articles by Malcolm Gladwell (like Sacks, a fine essayist) which mixed good reporting with dubious statistical reasoning and misleading claims (e.g., that only practice, not talent, is necessary for achievement, or that IQ above 120 doesn't matter)."

From the New Yorker article, which is by Rachel Aviv: 

"If the White House must be remade, let there be a plan; let it be debated; let the financing be transparent and free of kickbacks and corruption."

"It isn’t complicated, and it’s the very principle at the heart of the American Revolution: following rules is not weakness.... Architecture embodies values; it is not merely a receptacle of them. Simple proportions and human-scale spaces don’t just suggest the spirit of a democratic nation. They are that spirit in three dimensions, with doors and windows. Reverence for the past, and reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known, is not timidity but wisdom, in architecture as in life. To conserve, after all, is the essence of conservatism. The shock that images of the destruction provoke—the grief so many have felt—is not an overreaction to the loss of a beloved building. It is a recognition of something deeper: the central values of democracy being demolished before our eyes. Now we do not only sense it. We see it."

Writes Adam Gopnik, at the end of his New Yorker essay, "Why Trump Tore Down the East Wing/The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat."

Reverence for the past and reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known — but is that your general principle? If it is, you are a committed conservative. 

***

As long as we're talking about rules... the traditional rules of punctuation would reject those those commas after "the past" and "fully known." It's easy to see if you put it this way: Reverence and reluctance is not timidity. Not: Reverence, and reluctance, is not timidity. And, obviously, "is" is wrong! I suspect that at one point the sentence was "Reverence for the past — along with reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known — is not timidity but wisdom, in architecture as in life." 

Punctuation and grammar embody values; they are not merely a receptacle of them. I remember when the great tradition of The New Yorker was scrupulously tending to these matters. Is my grief an overreaction to the loss of a beloved publishing tradition?

"She called The New Yorker 'School' and treated it as such. She studied hard, reading back issues and writing notes to her boyfriends, a trio of married writers..."

"... she nicknamed Europe, Mr. Normalcy and Personality Plus, who all wrote back to her. This made her a less-than-attentive receptionist... Inevitably, she was fired. At home in her apartment, she began to write. At first she played amanuensis to [George W. S. Trow, the acerbic cultural critic best known for his essay 'Within the Context of No-Context'] in a pairing encouraged by Charles McGrath, then an editor at The New Yorker.... 'Yield to it,' Mr. McGrath told her, referring to Mr. Trow’s mind. 'Let it wash over you.' Together, she and Mr. Trow produced Talk of the Town pieces, the short... slice-of-life stories that helped define the magazine. He told her, 'Glimpse genuine joy, in a way, in the middle of world horror.' (She was on her way to interview a dog groomer.)... It was Tina Brown... who encouraged Ms. Rose to write about her romantic life. 'How I Became a Single Woman,' an elliptical coming-of-age tale, appeared in April 1996. (One of its more memorable lines: 'The truth is, it can be a form of actual day-to-day social torture to pretend not to notice the little dishes of poison that married people offer you all the time.') The piece caused a minor ruckus at School. Despite their nicknames, the married men were easily identifiable...."

From "Alison Rose, The New Yorker’s Femme Fatale, Dies at 81/She started as the magazine’s glamorous receptionist and became one of its more singular writers. In one of her last articles, she memorialized her time (and lovers) there" (NYT).

ADDED: Now, I'm reading "How I Became a Single Woman." Excerpt:

"It's tricknological, when white people invoke the holocaust. allows them to step out of their whiteness and slip on fake oppression."

Wrote Doreen St. Félix, in an X post screencapped in an Instapundit post by Ed Driscoll.

St. Félix published an article — in The New Yorker — about the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes foofaraw. I'd skipped that article — I was Sweeneyed out by the time it appeared — but I see from the excerpt at Instapundit that it contained lines like "Interestingly, breasts, and the desire for them, are stereotyped as objects of white desire, as opposed to, say, the Black man’s hunger for ass." The desire is the object of desire? That's defective writing, and The New Yorker got its lofty reputation in part because of its punctilious word editing. But St. Félix is in The New Yorker, thus making her statements conspicuous and goofier than they would be somewhere else, like X (or a blog). 

Hey! It says "Black man’s hunger for ass" in The New Yorker.

The screencappers of X plunged into St. Félix's X account, homing in on posts with the words "hate" and "white people." Go to the Instapundit link to see what they found. 

What calls me is that new word: "tricknological." The adjective is, apparently, formed from the word "Tricknology," which is in the OED and traced back to 1938. It's marked "U.S. disparaging." It means:

"I learnt to paint looking at my own photographs; I used to love looking at a photograph with a magnifying glass and getting ideas about how to put paint on."

"I just simplify and use the shapes. I would never paint a whole house, for instance; I would paint part of one, something that tells a little story but not the whole story."

From "Gretchen Dow Simpson obituary: Artist for The New Yorker/Creator known for the rigid geometry of her depictions of staircases, beaches and exteriors of New England houses, dies aged 85" (London Times).

You can view her work at her website, here.

And check out her mural in Rhode Island:

"Two's a Crowd" — a New Yorker cover by Barry Blitt.

Nicely conceived and drawn.

The expressions are great — especially that one eye of Trump's.

Out of all of "Instagram’s Favorite New Yorker Cartoons in 2024," one stands out as not funny in the way it was thought to be funny back when it was shared.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The New Yorker Cartoons (@newyorkercartoons)

That's from August 21. 

You can check out all of The New Yorker's most shared cartoons here.

There's also this, from July 22, the day after Biden dropped out:

The cartoon editor of The New Yorker "invite[s] you to enjoy these delicious, butyraceous cartoons, which you all dug the most on Instagram in 2023."

I'm reading "Instagram’s Favorite New Yorker Cartoons in 2023/The gags that got the Internet laughing, and liking, the most in the past year."

Lots of cartoons at the link, apparently the ones Instagram users indicated they liked — or, as some people might say, "dug" (and "butyraceous" means like butter, by the way — but I'll just show you my favorite:

 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The New Yorker (@newyorkermag)

Hey, New Yorker, consider the downside of scheduling your "Daily Cartoon" in advance.

Here's today's cartoon, obviously chosen — I hope! — back when the top news was the dreary deja vu of Congress needing to fund the government again and Biden and Trump tripping and stumbling their way toward another major-party nomination:

  

That seems so out of it, even as it's intended to make fun of New Yorker readers who are out of it. Or was it trying to make New Yorker readers feel sophisticated for feeling bored by all the hopeless shenanigans out there in the world? Whichever, it's painfully crass today.

Is this America — men shuffling in slippers, barely alive?

2 things at The New Yorker this morning resonated, and I took these screenshots.

That first article, the one about Trump (I'll get to the second article in another post):

The 4th clue in in today's "Name Drop" game:

"My husband and I both do the shopping, but I’m the one who usually goes to the big grocery store. I kind of like it."

"I like to look at the packaging and the strange products—like the 'outer-space-flavored' soda that Coca-Cola released last year."

From an interview with the cartoonist Roz Chast, interviewed — at "Roz Chast’s 'Fireworks Megastore'/The artist discusses stumbling across surprises while shopping, and rebelling against efficiency" — about her new New Yorker cover.

Have you ever done artwork based on the visual stimulation of shopping? This was based on Chast's encounter with one of those big fireworks stores:

"The decision to publish the Steele dossier originated with the reporter Ben Smith, then the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News...

"In Smith’s telling, the laws of Web traffic, shaped by social media and their ability to disseminate material at exponential, 'viral' rates, unseated old power structures. An old news outlet held its authority by retaining a fixed audience and standing on its record of success. A new one, such as BuzzFeed News, won largely by being linkable and first. When it came to the Steele dossier, which a number of news organizations had in hand, Smith’s concern that someone else would beat him to the link made him feel physically unwell. His site wanted the traffic. And, when the CNN anchor Jake Tapper summarized the contents on air one day, Smith knew that viewers would be Googling for the goods. He and his colleagues, snatching the keyboard back and forth, composed a brief introduction that noted the dossier’s 'specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations' then posted the document itself, in PDF form. In his book, Smith recalls meditating on 'the viral power of an object... something that readers would fixate on and pass hand to hand.'"

Writes Nathan Heller in "BuzzFeed, Gawker, and the Casualties of the Traffic Wars/Ben Smith’s new book shows how the race for clicks spawned—then strangled—the new media" (The New Yorker).

So Smith had a temporary grip on clickbait, but can the man write a book? I see the hardcover, released last Tuesday, is #2,216 at Amazon. But who'd buy that in hardcover? Anyone interested in Smith's musings on virality would go with the Kindle, don't you think? I know I would, because I'd want to be able to cut and paste, using my own skill for presenting something you'd find delectable. But the Kindle version is at #5,107. I'm not interested in reading Smith's insights. Who wants the deeper thoughts of someone who figured out how to ride the moment for thrills? 

So I'm sticking with The New Yorker, which operates in the middle ground between clickbait and books. Nathan Heller pulls some quotation from the book:

"Each time Ed had another encounter with his 'pal, the surgeon'—whom he did not begrudge for having 'to maintain his skills'..."

"... he’d promise to quickly 'be back with fervor at the drawing board, conjuring up malevolent, wicked delights and pleasures for your eyes.' And sure enough, his shaggy Vermonters and Manhattanites, his farmers’-market devotees and NPR donors—by way of ​​Snuffleupagus by way of Daumier—whose pretensions and obsessions he affectionately lampooned, would soon be parading into my in-box. In his final months, he didn’t have the energy to draw as large, or with such obsessive, scratchy detail, as before, but he still couldn’t resist reworking one final cartoon—featuring the Grim Reaper, as a poet—before sending it off to me last week.... On a recent call with Ed, when I expressed awe at the fact that he was still sending in cartoons for me to review, he quoted Mark Twain: 'The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow.' Neither of us mentioned the second half of that line—'there is no humor in heaven.'"

Writes Emma Allen in The New Yorker's "Postscript" — "Edward Koren, the Cheery Philosopher of Cartoons/The artist, who was first published in The New Yorker in 1962, never stopped marvelling at the miracle of a cartoon’s creation."

Here's the NYT obit: "Edward Koren, 87, Whose Cartoon Creatures Poked Fun at People, Dies/For six decades in The New Yorker and elsewhere, his hairy, toothy, long-nosed characters offered witty commentary on the foibles of the American middle class."

"An Evocative Year in New Yorker Illustrations/A collection of some of the most striking images of 2022."

It's quite a collection.

I don't know if you can see it without a subscription, but this is one magazine clearly worth subscribing to. I only have 4 magazine subscriptions, and if I could only have one, this would be it. The others? New York Magazine, New York Review of Books, and Vanity Fair. I subscribed to Vanity Fair for a particular article and don't know if I'll renew my subscription. It needs to measure up. The other 2 have served my purposes well enough — that is, I have access to many things that turn out to be bloggable. But The New Yorker stands alone. Much of it annoys me, but often in a way that proves bloggable. In any case, the illustrations really are phenomenal, and seeing so many collected on one webpage makes an immense impression.

"'There’s nothing more futile than trying to explain a cartoon to someone who doesn’t get it,' Mr. Lorenz said."

"He cited an illustration by Mr. Ziegler of a man standing at the counter of the Bureau of Missing Toast as he tearfully shows a clerk a photo of a well-done slice of bread. ‘It didn’t seem like the craziest thing we’d ever run, but I had people come up to me and say they did not get it — or like it,' Mr. Lorenz said. 'On the other hand, Jack got a half dozen pieces of toast in the mail.'"

From "Lee Lorenz, 90, Cartoonist and Gatekeeper at The New Yorker, Dies/Over 40 years at the magazine he drew hundreds of cartoons and covers and served as art and cartoon editor, recruiting new talent and deciding who got published" (NYT).

"I don’t know if it’s going to be funny—it might be really shitty. We’re still going to put it up, because I don’t care! It’s literally throwing spaghetti at the wall. That’s the only thing that’s brought me any sort of success."

Says Petey, quoted in "Petey’s Earnest Songs and Absurd TikToks/He has become famous online for silly and sweet comedy videos. Now fans are discovering his music" (The New Yorker). 

Petey is a TikTok star, one that I've had served up to me many times as I scroll, mesmerized, on TikTok. I like a lot of people on TikTok, often more than I like Petey, so I was interested to see that — according to The New Yorker — Petey is extra special. 

Watch all the Petey you want at TikTok, here. And I'll just embed a few of his things in YouTube form so you who won't look at TikTok know what we're talking about:

"He said, 'It's your fault for encouraging these videos."

I got there via Know Your Meme, where Nikocado Avocado is a "Top Entry This Week." 

I was at Know Your Meme for something completely unrelated, the meme "Chad" — because that New Yorker humor piece (blogged in the previous post) used the name Chad, repeatedly, but possibly not within the well-known meme. There was the idea that "Dating a Chad (a man named Chad or a man with Chad energy)" should require you to overcome a filibuster in your chat group. There were 5 more iterations of the name Chad in that piece. 

Do the famous New Yorker fact-checkers check to ensure that nothing in an article is a meme or, if it is, that it's used intentionally and correctly? Or are they shaking their fist at the internet and yelling "It's your fault!"