Yorker

WASHINGTON - "Damn you and the likes of you to the bowels of hell, you ignorant racist bastard!" So wrote an outraged Muslim to political cartoonist Doug Marlette a few years ago after he drew a cartoon featuring the prophet Muhammad. Tens of thousands of Muslims bellowed, blogged and clogged until servers collapsed with hate mail and death threats. No cartoon - or cartoonist - would go unpunished. Here we go again. Similar passions are being expressed this week in response to another cartoon, this time on the cover of the liberal-leaning New Yorker magazine.

REMEMBER LAUGHTER: A LIFE OF JAMES THURBER. By Neil A. Grauer. University of Nebraska Press. Illustrated. Index. 204 pages. $20.SOME OF the very best American prose is the work of humorists who began as their careers as journalists -- the best, of course, is Mark Twain. Second or third on the list would have to be James Thurber, the subject of this exemplary little biography by Baltimore writer, Neil Grauer.Even devoted Thurber lovers who have read other biographies of him (the last one was published nearly 20 years ago)

THE FIRST time Adolf Hitler was mentioned in The Sun, it was 1923 and the Munich beerhall putsch had just failed. His name was given as Hitner.Well, many a German name does end in -ner. No worse, in any case, than the misspelling of his first name now current -- printing it as Adolph.Sunday will make it 50 years since his death; by now, Americans no longer mention Der Fuehrer very often. One sign of a healthy mind, after all, is not to dwell on evil.Evil, however, has a way of forcing you to notice.

Garry Wills is the Nixon aficionado's Nixon aficionado: the man who charted that 5 o'clock shadow down to its nubbiest bristle. A quarter of a century after its initial publication, Mr. Wills' "Nixon Agonistes" remains the best book written on the 37th president. Anyone wondering about Mr. Wills' hold on the franchise now that the Trickster has joined the Great Silent Majority in the sky need only turn to the July Esquire for reassurance."He contrived to die in the odor of statesmanship," Mr. Wills begins his assessment of the reaction to Nixon's passing.

I WOULD LIKE to join in throwing lovely nosegays the way of John "Johnny Delegate" Arnick for his efforts in Annapolis to ban the use of hand-held cell phones while we're driving. Too bad he can't do something about those extremely important people who pace through the crowded waiting areas at BWI and carry on loud cellular conversations so we all know about their vital roles in the American economy: "I told you to tell me if the order was incomplete and I would have called Jerry. This company did a million-and-a-half last year and I can't be giving them lobby space with that kind of cash flow!

GOV. ROBERT L. Ehrlich Jr.'s current round of redefinition accelerated dramatically last week. As expected, he struck down a three-part tax bill, a prelude to even splashier fiscal excitement due in the form of major budget reductions, cuts on the order of $500 million. The drama was in the number. Government tends to operate incrementally, adjusting and trimming and moving forward in ways that stabilize. A $500 million cut isn't necessary budget-wise. Definition-wise, it's necessary.

Sheppard Pratt seems to have found its target market: readers of The New Yorker. The Towson psychiatric hospital ran not one but two ads in the Nov. 3 issue. There's yet another in the Nov. 24 edition. Perhaps anyone who understands those one-panel cartoons should have his head examined. But is there something else that makes New Yorker readers likely consumers of psychiatric services? No one in the hospital's public affairs office responded to my calls, so no insight there. Jim Bready, the retired Evening Sun editorial writer who spotted the ads, thinks Sheppard Pratt might be fishing for newly despondent Wall Street types or the age-old reckless rich.

Caitlin Flanagan is the anti-feminist feminists hate to love. We can't believe we agree with her. The essayist, first for Atlantic Monthly and now for The New Yorker, causes us to laugh at ourselves, if somewhat ruefully, putting to lie the accusation that women's libbers have no sense of humor. Now she has put her essays together in a book titled To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife (Little, Brown). In it, this cross between Maureen Dowd and Phyllis Schlafly goes after the divided mind of the modern working mother with an acupuncturist's needle: She skewers us so well, we don't feel the pain.

Perhaps more than anything else, the coverage of the war in Iraq reflects the near-complete collapse of time. The marriage of 24-hour-a-day news channels with technology's new lightning pace has put immediacy within the media's grasp as never before. Courtesy of portable satellite disks, news networks in recent weeks flooded airwaves with footage of battles raging in remote reaches of Iraq -- as they were occurring. Newspapers presented in their pages reams of articles, analyses and photographs deconstructing the war's progress within hours, often updating the information on their Web sites, almost in real time.

You could hear the ambivalence in Aaron Brown's voice on April 18, and discern it in the words he chose as he spoke, at length, about the arrest of former actor Robert Blake. His nightly news program on CNN, along with the rest of the cable channel's programming after 8:41 p.m. that night, was being devoted almost exclusively to the arrest of the 65-year-old film and television actor on charges that he killed his wife last May. "As we sit here tonight, there's a ton and a half going on the world, and all of it is, in the larger scheme of things, really important," said Brown, anchor of CNN's NewsNight.