New Yorker

New York--Baltimore means many things to many people, and it does also to Tony Hiss, not the least because his family settled in the city more than 200 years ago. There's also the matter of his having spent the last year giving it the up-close-and-personal look for an article for the New Yorker. He likes the Inner Harbor, of course, and the municipal markets and the neighborhoods.And then there's the tomato aspic.We'll get to that later, but these are only some of the reasons Tony Hiss is charmed by Charm City.

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."

Pauline Kael, the former movie critic for The New Yorker, died of natural causes yesterday at her home in Great Barrington, Mass. She was 82. Her first published piece of criticism was an attack on Charles Chaplin's Limelight that appeared in the small San Francisco magazine, City Lights, in 1953. For nearly four decades, she convinced several generations of moviegoers that movies were, as she put it, "our national theater." The power of her arguments and the colloquial wit and panache of her prose revolutionized movie reviewing, New Yorker writing and American criticism in general.

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.

This week's best reading sounds as mundane as mundane can get: a Father's Day tribute to a writer's dad. Yet when the writer is Calvin Trillin, the magazine is the New Yorker (June 20), and the father is as witty as the son, the mundane becomes quite marvelous. Abe Trillin, a man so honorable he at times "seemed to approach the loony side of upright," was a stubborn, sweet-tempered grocer who at too-impressionable an age read about Dink Stover at Yale. From that moment on, he wanted his son to end up an Eli. There weren't too many Jewish families in Kansas City that aspired to such things 50 years ago -- there weren't too many Jewish families in Kansas City, period -- but that didn't discourage Abe. Once he saw the dream fulfilled, he even had the pleasure of following up on it. When son was asked to join one of Yale's senior societies, father had the satisfaction of asking, "That's not the one Stover was in, is it?"

IF the New Yorker were just another magazine, nobody would care who edits it or how. Because it has been unique, because its intelligence and taste have been so high, people do care.Tina Brown, the first female editor after three males, the first English after three Americans, the first splashy journalist after three intellectuals, shook readers up.To save taste, she introduced vulgarity; to preserve tradition, she offended it; to rescue style, she substituted fashion; to preserve worth, she added celebrity.

NEW YORK -- The factions and feuds that have tried the soul of the nation's most prestigious magazine for the past six years may soon come to an end.That was how the New York publishing world received the news yesterday that Pulitzer Prize winner David Remnick -- the most acclaimed writer that Tina Brown hired during her six years as editor of the New Yorker magazine -- had been named as her successor.Brown is the one who engendered those feuds. The Old Guard, who worked for or simply cherished the New Yorker of the 1960s and '70s under William Shawn -- serious, restrained, deeply literary -- lambasted Brown as a betrayer of the tradition, a vulgarian obsessed with glitz, glamour and power-profiles.

Why has the New Yorker, a 70-year-old American institution with a long-standing commitment to exhibiting the work of the country's finest and most influential writers, taken to publishing a special fiction issue? During the reigns of the magazine's three previous editors - the legendary Harold Ross and William Shawn in the first six decades, followed by the impeccably tasteful Robert Gottlieb - nearly every issue of the New Yorker was a fiction issue. The stories in it weren't always first-rate, but a decent number of them were, and they appeared with a comfortable regularity.

THESE ARE the first impressions: Edward T. Norris, the New Yorker who will run the Baltimore Police Department's daily operations, is a restless bantam. Richard P. Rieman Jr., the lawyer and former city lieutenant who will oversee administration, prefers the sidelines. These impressions could be all wrong. After all, Mr. Rieman, during his 20-year career on the force, exhibited such a short fuse he was nicknamed "Screamin' Rieman." But the chemistry seemed right yesterday when Ronald L. Daniel, the police commissioner designate, introduced his deputy commissioner picks.

Let Me Finish Roger Angell Harcourt / 320 pages / $25 Roger Angell writes about his own life even better than he writes about baseball, and that's saying something. His new book, Let Me Finish, is a collection of snapshots from a full life, especially his magical childhood spent in New York. It's hard not to feel envious of his good fortune - the summers in Maine, the glamorous magazine jobs and the fact that his stepfather was the graceful author and essayist E.B. White - but Angell is such a gentleman, you hardly mind.