New Yorker

In a column on this page on Jan. 23, Michael Pakenham wrote that "In the first more than 60 years of the life of the New Yorker," its first two editors "had forbidden anthologies of the work published there" -- an assertion made in several books about the magazine. Gerald J. Gross of Lutherville, a treasured Sun reader, wrote to report that "The New Yorker Book of War Pieces" was published in 1947 by Reynal & Hitchcock, a New York publishing house for which Mr. Gross worked. "I can still recall my meetings with William Shawn to discuss content and format," Mr. Gross wrote us. The Library of Congress Online Catalog indicates that collection was reprinted by Schocken Books in 1989, though it is currently out of print.

"The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway," by Ken Auletta (Random House. 346 pages. $27.50). No writer knows better than Ken Auletta the workings, wranglings and writhing of the men (yes, few if any women) who fashion and control American mass communications. His "Three Blind Mice" defined the television industry. His regular contributions to the New Yorker, "Annals of Communications," are simply the most insightful and inclusive reports on the entire complex of the modern American broadcast and print information and entertainment world.

"The New Yorker Book of Literary Cartoons," edited by Bob Mankoff (Pocket Books, 105 pages, $19.95). Adam and Eve, unshockingly naked, sit in a grove of shedding apple trees. The caption speaks for Adam: "I can't help thinking there's a book in this." A few pages later, a beach scene: A uniformed cop stands, mildly menacingly, above a folding-chaise seated man with a large book in his hands and lap. Thc policeman speaks: "I'm sorry, sir, but Dostoyevsky is not considered summer reading.

Cheer up. Can't be more than eight more weeks of these temperatures, tops.Polls show conclusively that no one who filed in either party can be elected mayor of Baltimore this year.Benjamin Nathaniel Smith had all the advantages except humanity.Hillary Clinton is no New Yorker. Nor are all those folks bubbling over in outrage at her carpet-bagging.Pub Date: 7/07/99

The havoc on Wall Street following the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market boils down to a simple truth: For years, lots of very smart people took lots of very foolish risks. But behind that simple truth is a more surprising one: The financial whizzes made bad decisions in part because that's what they were paid to do. - James Surowiecki, The New Yorker

Psst. Anybody wanna be president of Guatemala?If it's all-out war between Clinton and the insurance industry, don't bet against the insurance industry.Next, the FDA will ban cigarettes on grounds of failing to deliver the satisfaction promised in the ads.A jury in San Francisco has driven the last nail in the coffin of William Shawn's journalism and given license to Tina Brown to reform the New Yorker all she wants.

Christmas at the New Yorker, From the editors of the New Yorker with a foreword by John Updike. Random House. 320 pages. $35. In shops that I go to today, gap-toothed plastic pumpkins glower at red- nose reindeer, which threaten to leap the aisle and kick their goblins out. It's warfare between Halloween and Christmas. Crass commercialization of holidays of spiritual tradition is ancient and unrelenting; get over it. But that's no cause for forgoing the delights of Christmas -- deep or casual.

I set out prepared to detest Lillian Ross's recital of her almost lifelong adulterous liaison with William Shawn. The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, flame-keeper of Gotham's literary fraternity proprieties, had damned the book as "a tasteless, self-dramatizing memoir that presents itself as a valentine ... even as it undermines the very qualities of discretion and taste its subject championed in life. ... Her reminiscences in this volume tend to vacillate between the perfunctory and the defensive, the cloying and the cliched."

When I arrived at the office last Wednesday, I found this message from a friend waiting in my voice mail:"The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Call me the minute you get in."It's funny. But right away I knew the message referred to the earthquake in New York. The one that occurred when it was announced: "Vanity Fair's Tina Brown to Take Over at the New Yorker."It was stunning news. And as word spread that the 38-year-old, British-born Vanity Fair editor -- the one who last year featured a naked, very pregnant Demi Moore on the magazine's cover -- was to take up the reins at the venerable New Yorker, it quickly became the Talk of the Town.

Sir Edward Abraham, 85, an Oxford University professor and biochemist who played an important role in the development of penicillin, died Sunday in Oxford, England, his family said.As a researcher at Oxford, Sir Edward worked with Ernest Chain and Howard Florey on the purification of penicillin, and went on to develop the cephalosporin class of antibiotics now used extensively in the treatment of respiratory infections such as pneumonia and bronchitis.Saul Steinberg, 84, the artist whose drawings appeared in the New Yorker for more than half a century, elevating comic illustration to fine art, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan.