New Yorker

Frances Schoonmaker lived in New York's Upper West Side working as a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College. She took subways and buses, and knew enough to stay alert on the streets of the big city. In nearly 30 years, she never once got mugged. She retired last year, moved to Rodgers Forge and let her guard down. Instead of crossing the street when she saw a suspicious woman on Stevenson Lane this past weekend, she walked by on her way to teach a Sunday school class at her church.

At Throw Grammar From the Train , Jan Freeman alerts us to an article by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker on descriptivism vs. prescriptivism that will not enlighten you. Ms. Acocella rather tiresomely trots out George Orwell and Webster's Third and Dwight Macdonald and Strunk and White (Even conceding that The Elements of Style has become "a cult object," anyone writing for The New Yorker must apparently make...

A NEW YORK LIFE: Of Friends & Others. By Brendan Gill. Poseidon Press. 348 pages. $21.95.IF YOU ARE one of the cultists unrepentantly in love with the New Yorker, you are going to love this book. In a collection of 48 profiles, you are introduced to the rich and the famous, the artistic, the eccentrics, the patricians and the poseurs in the New York world of Brendan Gill.In the course of his long career with the New Yorker, Gill has written "Profiles" and "Reporters at Large," as well as book, movie and play reviews and scores of "Talk of the Town" pieces.

In an antic moment last week, The New Yorker  pitched an appeal to readers:  What word would you most like to eliminate from the English language?   Awesome  and  epic  won some votes because of overuse, phlegm  from disgustingness, but moist , which has recently taken on an evil odor, overwhelmed. In its wisdom, however, The New Yorker chose slacks  as a word worthy of extinction .  This game, as Stan Carey points out at Sentence First , always draws a lot of players . In fact, as you can see on the comments at Johnson 's post on the same subject , all you have to do is broach the subject, and people start trotting out their nominees, like so many would-be Torquemadas hustling the condemned to the stake.  The extremity of the responses speaks to how much we personalize the language.

How was the changing of the guard at The New Yorker? Not "entirely smooth," writes Jim Windolf in the New York Observer. A list of notes and grievances:One of the first things to go when the new regime swept in was a note pinned to the bulletin board outside new editor Tina Brown's office, a memo to the staff written by former editor William Shawn when he departed."

By altering quotations and the circumstances in which they were said, author Janet Malcolm defamed psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson in a New Yorker magazine article. That was the conclusion reached by a jury this week in a celebrated libel case. The jury's inability to agree on how much Mr. Masson should collect is a side issue to all but the protagonists and their lawyers.Some quotes attributed to Mr. Masson were not always the words he used, nor were they always uttered at the time or circumstances described in the article.

Tina Brown, editor of the sassy and hugely successful Vanity Fair magazine, seems an unlikely choice to head the staid but venerable New Yorker -- so unlikely that one observer suggested her appointment was a bit like choosing Madonna to direct the New York City Ballet.Yet Ms. Brown's talent for combining glamour, gossip and good writing in a stylish package is not so far afield from the magazine's traditions. Founder Harold Ross, who edited the 67-year-old magazine until his death in 1951, shaped a periodical that was never boring.

NEW YORK -- The financial difficulties that prompted the collapse of Whittle Communications Corp., the once high-flying alternative media company led by the entrepreneur Christopher Whittle, were significantly more severe than previously believed and masked in part by accounting misrepresentations, says an article in The New Yorker.The article also reported that Benno C. Schmidt Jr., the chief executive of the Edison Project, Whittle's expensive effort to found a chain of privatized schools, recommended to the Edison board that Mr. Whittle be removed as chairman.

Paris. -- The New Yorker magazine has just observed its 70th birthday, with a perfumed double issue and a party. The celebration might better have been denominated in fortnights rather than years, though, since today's New Yorker came into being in October 1992, and is not the magazine founded by Harold Ross in 1925.The new New Yorker is a journal of gossip and insider reports on show-business and fashion, Washington politics, Madison Avenue and Wall Street dealing. It is a publication at the expensive end of a market which has the sordid London tabloid at its low end.I don't say the American tabloid, which has always been sophisticated, with a disabused and knowing attitude toward power and celebrity, a wise-guy attitude, whereas the London tabloid, like the new New Yorker, is in connivance with the people it writes about, whom it envies and indirectly flatters.

'Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of The New Yorker,' by ThomasKunkel. 497 pages. New York: Random House. $25 The best reason to read a literary biography about the editor of a humor magazine is to be entertained, at least every now and then. But there is little fun in 'Genius in Disguise,' the life of Harold Ross (1892-1951), founder and first editor of the New Yorker and a great eccentric.Ross was an unlikely person to create a sophisticated magazine. The son of a Colorado silver prospector, he dropped out of school in the 10th grade to become an itinerant reporter.

Yesterday, when  a story came across the desk with spokesperson in it and I let it go through, I checked the Associated Press Stylebook , and, sure enough, the fossil prohibition against the word is still in the 2011 edition. The editors might change their tune for the 2012 edition, but I doubt it. They cling lovingly to unexamined preferences. I tweeted some advice, "The Associated Press Stylebook continues its fuddy-duddy prohibition of 'spokesperson.' Suggest you ignore it. #ignoreAP," which I would like to expand on here.  Spokesperson has a 1972 citation from the Guardian as the earliest mention in the Oxford English Dictionary . There's also a 1976 citation from The New Yorker , and pray recall that that would be the old New Yorker , under Mr. Shawn's discriminating eye. The word has been around for forty years and can hardly be thought to be a neologism.

Avatar . ( 3 STARS) $31.2 million $595.7 million 7 weeks Rated : PG-13 Running time : 2:40 What it's about : A paraplegic ex-Marine (Sam Worthington, above) controls the body of an "avatar," a body of a creature on another planet, and gets caught up in a struggle between the humans and the natives. Our take : James Cameron has delivered the most-anticipated blend of live-action and motion-capture animation to date, but the story's simplistic.

Frances Schoonmaker lived in New York's Upper West Side working as a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College. She took subways and buses, and knew enough to stay alert on the streets of the big city. In nearly 30 years, she never once got mugged. She retired last year, moved to Rodgers Forge and let her guard down. Instead of crossing the street when she saw a suspicious woman on Stevenson Lane this past weekend, she walked by on her way to teach a Sunday school class at her church.

Americans who value the truth know that Sen. Barack Obama is a Christian, not a radical Muslim. Yet that lie had so penetrated the public's consciousness that when surveyed by the Pew Research Center this spring, 8 in 10 said they had heard rumors that he was a Muslim. Now, a satiric New Yorker magazine cover cartoon depicting Mr. Obama and his wife as terrorists in the Oval Office has caused a significant stir among supporters, already worried about a flood of Internet messages and Web postings filled with lies about the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's beliefs and history.

A satirical New Yorker cover cartoon picturing Barack Obama in the Oval Office dressed as a Muslim, his wife as a terrorist, and a portrait of Osama bin Laden hanging over a fireplace with a burning American flag elicited angry responses yesterday from the Democrat's presidential campaign and his supporters. But The New Yorker defended the artist and its cover, which illustrates an article titled "The Politics of Fear," as a satirical look at the scare tactics and misinformation being used to derail Obama's campaign.

Former defense lawyer and retired city Circuit Judge Elsbeth Bothe has had a fascination with macabre literature since her childhood. "These preoccupations were sparked early as I tossed out Nancy Drew's juvenile sleuthing stories in favor of the New Yorker magazine's marvelously scripted articles called Annals of Crime," said Bothe. "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote This blockbuster account of the detection, trials and ultimate punishment of the two psychopaths who slaughtered an upright Kansas farming family was originally published in the New Yorker [as a]

Writer Tony Hiss has scattered bouquets around town in his article "Reinventing Baltimore," which appears in the April 29 New Yorker magazine, just out on newstands, and Baltimoreans are responding favorably."

Maybe New Yorker editor Tina Brown and her well-connected writers, often celebrities themselves, wanted to prove that they're not just a bunch of au courant social swells and intellectuals, that they could compete with the British Sun, the News of the World, the Daily Mail and the other tabloids after all. That they could gossip, predict the future, name-drop and ooze saccharin sentiment with the best of them.How else to understand the Sept. 15 issue of the New Yorker, which pays strange tribute to the late Princess of Wales?

With injured local favorite Ah Day on the sidelines, a flock of New Yorkers will be at Laurel Park today to seek the winner's share of the purse in the Grade II, $300,000 General George Handicap. The field of eight has only one home entry, John Alecci-trained Ryan's for Real, and one other not stabled in New York, Marvel Wood, who campaigns primarily at Philadelphia Park and Delaware Park. And both are decided long shots in the morning line. They face a daunting task in trying to get on the board against shippers from New York who stand in the barns of Todd Pletcher, Kiaran McLaughlin, Rick and Tony Dutrow and Bruce Levine.