Yorker

I got to teach Episcopal Sunday school last week, a rare privilege, and it was in a New York church so the kids had plenty to say. Teenagers, and if you expect them to sit in rapt silence as you tick off points of theology, you're in the wrong place. They made plenty of noise, and not much of it about religion. Some of them seemed to be on a faith journey that was heading away from the Nicene Creed toward something cooler and jokier, some form of animism perhaps, the worship of cougars and badgers.

WHO WOULD benefit [from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's run for the presidency]? "New York, for starters. Or, at least, the glittering constellation of news and entertainment companies, Wall Street firms, political consultants, civic boosters, paid gossips, columnists, pundits and publicists ... who feed ... the impression that unless something happens in New York, it doesn't happen." So says the New Yorker. Women's world Depressing but fascinating story in Newsweek about female stars.

WHITNEY BALLIETT, 80 Magazine jazz critic Whitney Balliett, a jazz critic for The New Yorker, died Thursday at his home in Manhattan. A graduate of Cornell University, Mr. Balliett joined The New Yorker in 1951. He retired in 1998.

NEW YORK -- New Yorkers had a few choice words yesterday for the Department of Homeland Security, after news that the city's anti-terrorism funding is being sharply reduced. "A knife in the back" and "declaring war on New York," politicians here called it. A congressman said the department "doesn't know its rear end from its elbow." Using a new risk-based allotment, Homeland Security officials increased the number of cities eligible for anti-terrorism grants this year and bolstered funding for such cities as Charlotte, N.C.; Omaha, Neb.; and Louisville, Ky. The grants to New York and Washington - the targets on Sept.

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.

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.

HELLERTOWN, Pa. -- By the time Stephanie Fiscella dropped off her husband, Lou, at the park-and-ride lot here near Allentown at 6:15 on an icy Wednesday morning, all 100 parking spaces were filled. Several cars sat in unmarked slots or stopped on a snow bank. Some commuters left handbags and briefcases on the curb to mark their places on the bus line while they huddled inside their cars. Fiscella has been making the two-hour commute to Manhattan for the three years since his family moved from Staten Island to the Lehigh Valley.

NEW YORK -- A man loping down Fifth Avenue in a furry jackalope costume the weekend after Halloween usually wouldn't turn a head in New York. But curious police stopped the hybrid mascot that Saturday night, and underneath the antlers found A.J. Ortiz Jr., 16, who was late for a scavenger hunt. "They let me go after a while," he said. "But you know what's worse? I had to sign up to be the school mascot to get the costume. I have to wear it for the rest of the year." Ortiz is part of a loose network of hundreds of New Yorkers who meet through the Internet to play games every week in the city's streets: capture the flag, manhunt - a glorified version of tag - and, most recently, the scavenger hunt.

NEW YORK--"That's Molly Ringwald in the red dress." Where? "There! Right next to the table." Indeed, the red-headed star of The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles was standing outside an auditorium in midtown Manhattan, waiting to get into one of the premier events of the New Yorker Festival. Wow, some in line no doubt were thinking: Molly Ringwald -- seminal '80s teen star -- loved the New Yorker magazine as much as they did. Some 17,000 people -- not all of them famous -- attended the magazine's weekend-long arts festival.

So, two dinosaurs are merrily munching citizens of some metropolis. Gobbling people like microwave popcorn, and one dinosaur says to the other ... Well, what does it say? So, there's a business meeting being held in a New York City subway car and the one CEO says to the others ... OK, this is hard. One more. A woman meets a man on the street. He's carrying a briefcase. He's shaped like the number 6. Smiling, he says to her ... Maybe it's not so easy writing witty captions to New Yorker cartoons.