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.

Although I've lived all my life within 30 miles of Times Square, I've never been much of a Giants or Jets fan (when people ask my favorite team, I usually say the Buffalo Bills, because unlike the players for the Jets or Giants, the Bills' high salaries help hold down my New York state income taxes). Yet, as I watched the Super Bowl , I found myself rooting for Baltimore because: •So much of Baltimore is so much like the neighborhood where I grew up in Queens. The attached brick houses with metal awnings shading what our parents called picture windows.

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.

An ambitious bookworm in my youth, I once started Victor Hugo's Les Miserables . It was on a recommended-reading list. I ground to a halt a few pages in and discarded the recommended-reading list. I have never seen the musical and have never consciously listened to any of the tunes. And now, as you are already surmising, I intend to give the movie a miss.  I've had a warning from TheMattWalshBlog : "  I cried tears of blissful joy when Russell Crowe threw himself off a bridge at the end because it meant he'd finally stop singing.

It was planned to be the perfect day trip for a guess-I'm-retired New Yorker who thought he loved baseball and Italian food equally: take the bargain bus down to Baltimore, get the free birthday-month ticket in the upper deck, watch a meaningful game between two teams in playoff contention for two-and-a-half hours, and then take the free bus over to Little Italy where I would be confronted by the same daunting challenge I have every time I've been...

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.

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.

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.

I received a note a couple of days ago from a gentleman concerned about the placement of commas in the various drafts of the Second Amendment. And today, at The New Yorker , Jeffrey Toobin writes that "the text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical. " Well, The New Yorker may not be the best place to go for instruction on grammar and usage . The Founders (it's a little vexing to have to keep explaining this ) loved Latinate constructions, one of which is the absolute, a phrase modifying a whole clause, often consisting of a noun and a participle.

As a member of the arts community, I find it to be very exciting that Harford County will get a new arts center funded by a major contribution from Emily Bayless Graham ("Designs are unveiled for Harford arts center," Oct. 24). What bothers me however is the hiring of a New York firm to design it. Maryland, and particularly Baltimore and it's surrounding counties, have several extremely talented architectural firms, some of which have excellent reputations for this type of project.

It was planned to be the perfect day trip for a guess-I'm-retired New Yorker who thought he loved baseball and Italian food equally: take the bargain bus down to Baltimore, get the free birthday-month ticket in the upper deck, watch a meaningful game between two teams in playoff contention for two-and-a-half hours, and then take the free bus over to Little Italy where I would be confronted by the same daunting challenge I have every time I've been...

UPDATE: See end of post for update on another journalist saying Zakaria "borrowed heavily" from him. Following the lead of Time magazine, CNN Friday suspended Sunday morning show host and international affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria for plagiarism. The magazine said its suspension was for a month "pending further review," while CNN put no time limit on its removal of Zakaria from its airwaves. Plagiarism used to be a deadly journalistic sin from which there often was no redemption.  Given the lack of values and ethics in journalism today, however, who knows what will happen to Zakaria.

From John Cassidy's "Why Won't Mitt Romney Release More Tax Returns?" at newyorker.com: "The principal that if your father also ran for President, and released twelve years of tax returns, then you can release just two and claim the family average is a respectable seven years?"                 Yes, at The New Yorker 's website. Principle is the word for a tenet, a rule, a standard. Principal as a noun is either a main participant or the amount of a loan on which interest is calculated.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, enjoying the freedom that only a final term in office can bring, has proposed banning the sale of soda and other sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces at restaurants, sports venues, delis and food carts, effective next March. If you want your drink super-sized, you will have to buy two - or go back for a refill. And New Yorkers, who never harbor an unexpressed thought for very long, are outraged. Some see this as the nanny state gone wild, and another liberty, like the right to consume trans fats in restaurants, trampled by the health-nut mayor (who has built an edifice to his passion here in Baltimore)

Superb editorial packages on two controversial figures, Mark Twain and Frank Sinatra, top the good-reading agenda this week.This week's fiction issue of the New Yorker features an unpublished episode from the newly discovered manuscript of Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," described by E. L. Doctorow in his critical response as "the greatest picaresque since Cervantes and Diderot." The episode, dropped from the 1885 edition of the novel, doesn't contain the word "nigger," which is used 200 times in the published work, but it does suggest why a black educator has campaigned to remove the book from school libraries.

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."

Suddenly, in Britain, of attenuated interest, the Queen's English Society. The organization of crotchet collectors was forty. After the failure of the society's much-ridiculed project for an Academy of English , will waned quickly. The Independent reports that at the society's annual meeting, with an attendance of twenty-two, its chairman, Rhea Williams, announced, "Despite the sending out of a request for nominations for chairman, vice-chairman, administrator, web master, and membership secretary no one came forward to fill any role.

The New Yorker's muddled article on language by Joan Acocella has generated responses , some incredulous, some furious, from linguists and lexicographers demonstrating just how wrong-headed and ignorant the magazine is about prescriptivism and descriptivism. Now Steven Pinker, a principal target of Ms. Acocella's inept criticism, has weighed in with an article at Slate , "False Fronts in the Language Wars," that will gladden your heart if you enjoy seeing a demolition job expertly performed.