Rich Mintz  

It’s worth making special note of the fact that The New Yorker has been putting out a superb product of late, fully readable from cover to cover.  The long profiles of Anna Faris and Jane Fonda in recent issues have made me look at both of those people with a new respect, the current affairs stuff (e.g., Jon Lee Anderson) is as good as ever, and the cultural criticism has been spot-on.

I loved Lauren Collins’ background story on the royal wedding and the Middletons, which was pitch-perfect:

To Americans, the Middletons seem a laudably mobile bunch. In Britain, they make an almost novelistically engineered claque of arrivistes. Their name is Middleton, as though cherry-picked by Dickens to signal their status as archetypes of the striving bourgeoisie.

Poor Middletons, who are in an impossible position, forever trapped in a tautology. By all accounts they’re perfectly charming and good-natured, well-behaved, industrious, and unimpeachably good parents who raised a delightful, self-aware daughter.  But they’ll never be “our sort,” defined essentially as “what people such as the Middletons are not.”

As I tweeted last week, the mystifying British obsession with “poshness” has been on broad public display over the past month; I experienced it both in London, and through an American filter, and I must say that as an American it is difficult to understand. British people seem to have the same sort of adolescent, awkward relationship to “poshness” that Americans have to “race”: it’s a topic that gets far more attention than it seems like it should, that’s tied into deep insecurity and social guilt, that people try to gloss over or make light of but that nobody seems to be able to let go of.

I find it entertaining that everyone in Britain seems to agree who is and is not “posh,” but when you ask them to explain the markers, they are difficult to quantify, riddled with exceptions and shadings, and almost impossible for an outsider to internalize.  Which, I guess, is the definition of a shared social code.

I didn’t think this was possible, but the recent New York magazine profile of Bernie Madoff and family, based on a series of prison interviews, has left me feeling a little sorry for the guy, who apparently got in over his head and couldn’t believe nobody caught him for years. Secrets are difficult to keep, especially from one’s family, and I don’t envy him.

He also made the point that one of the outcomes of the situation is that many of his friends who invested early became exceptionally wealthy, thanks to him — he says that their gains in the early years were all legitimately earned, but it doesn’t matter, his point stands either way. Now these various influential families from Long Island and New York City won’t have anything to do with him or his family, but as he accurately points out, none of them are living out of Dumpsters.

Read the whole thing for yourself…

I’m surprised to be saying this, but after a week, I’m mighty impressed by The Daily, News Corp’s attempt to produce a daily news magazine optimized for the iPad. The UI’s still a little ponderous, but it’s not terrible — and I think the fact that I find myself deliberately reaching for a Murdoch publication on a regular basis, expecting to be happy with what I find, speaks for itself.

It reminds me of the value of curated content, as opposed to the endless flood of largely undifferentiated stuff I usually spend my time with. The bloggers I read in Google Reader are smart people, or uncover treasures, or both; but I largely consume that stuff in bits and pieces. In no way is it a well-rounded or deliberately shaped experience. I do buy the NYT more days than not, but I spend less time with it than I used to.

In the Daily, the editors have created something that’s just meaty enough to make me wonder how they manage to do it every day, without feeling overwhelming (like the Times sometimes does). They make good use of photographs, are experimenting with interactive features, the ads are unobtrusive (so far). I even caught myself reading part of the sports section today, which is unheard of.

I would in fact pay 40 bucks a year for this, and that’s the real test. When my free period lapses (soon), I’ll probably subscribe. So put this one in the “more successful than unsuccessful” column.

Um, ya think? (Click to enlarge.)

Yeah, I know what they meant (after clicking through to the story), but doesn’t it strike you odd, too?

If you’re not reading “Sam Biddle’s” occasional series “Diary of an Unemployed Class of ’10 Philosophy Major in New York City” from The Awl, you should be. Gimmicky it is, but after four installments I’m hooked, and the writing is laugh-out-loud sharp at times. Consider this, from part four:

An impossibly tall, grinning, heron-like woman clothed in a matte black trapezoid shimmered in the light of the sloppy sun and waved from behind a barricade. My shirt smelled like ramen seasoning powder in the humid wind. She was standing in front of one of those walls with patterned logos on it that awful people pose before to be photographed at momentous occasions like the launching of a handbag line. I remembered last summer, when L___ told me about his friend’s fundraiser for “nightlife preservation” in New York—is there any way to place something like that in more than one set of quotation marks? I imagine there were a lot of red carpet logo walls there. I thought of this now and closed my eyes and faced the gut-punching sun and thought about how it’s supposed to burn out in a trillion years or whatever, and how maybe that could come a little sooner and it wouldn’t be so bad.

I was laughing out loud at “heron-like,” coughing at “trapezoid,” and steeling myself against diarrhea by the end of that sentence. Imagine fifty paragraphs of this and you start to get the idea. Whoever this guy is, he’s got a writing career ahead of him.