Last week, David Grann and I met in his office at The New Yorker, in midtown Manhattan. It is a glorious fire hazard because he doesn't throw anything away. Grann has been a staff writer at the magazine since 2003 and published two books, the enthralling The Lost City of Z, and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, a collection of his reportage. Stacks of papers related to finished stories ("That's Z, that's Cuba, that's Willingham…") line the walls, while the floor is devoted to a book-in-progress, as yet untitled, on the Osage Indian murders and the birth of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

For fans, a new [...]

I think I'm gonna buy myself a pair of those toe-sock-feet things, the shoes with toes in 'em? You know, like a glove for your foot, but it has a shoe part? Is that a fad? I don't want 'em if it's a fad, I mean, I want 'em, but if it's a fad, then I would wait for it to be over before I buy so I can get the Nice Price, you know? Sometimes with important stuff like this you need to drain all the emotion out of it.

I have pretty good feet, I think. If there were Photo Opportunities for feet, I bet I could totally [...]

"For a while, we tried faithfully to reproduce the backward 'R' in Toys 'ᴙ' Us, but it went rogue and ran loose on the page every time we turned our back." ——And that's why the New Yorker can't have nice things.

The New Yorker’s fact-checking department is singular. Unlike the few similar departments of other magazines, it’s got a bit of glam. People actually aspire to work there. And why not? How many fact-checking departments can claim to have been chronicled in the magazine’s own pages by John McPhee or depicted—for better or worse—in Bright Lights, Big City? It’s been at the top of the fact heap for years, at least in part for its absurd levels of rigor. As an editor noted not long ago, “Every quote, every detail, every attribution, every everything is checked for accuracy”—including the cartoons.

This obsessiveness, I can tell you from personal experience, extends [...]

Have you had shad for dinner in the past week? If not, you should do so tonight or tomorrow night. It is one of the most delicious fish in the universe, and incredibly easy to cook, and due to the same mild winter than has local flowers and, apparently, Republican primary voters, so confused, the American shad spawning season, which usually heralds spring in March or April, has arrived early this year.

There’s really no delicate way to put this: at this year’s New Yorker Festival, Jonathan Franzen said that David Foster Wallace fabricated at least part of—and potentially a large part of—his nonfiction pieces. I wasn’t there, but after reading Eric Alterman’s summary Friday, and finding no mention of the incident in any other coverage of the festival, I watched the conversation online.

Here's a rough transcript of the relevant exchange (with some “umms” and “uhhs” edited for reasons of intelligibility).

The notoriously thorough folks at the New Yorker have sorted through our collection of profanities and when they first appeared in that esteemed periodical, and have offered a few helpful correctives. Of special interest: Mary Gaitskill, not Tad Friend, was the first person to get the common usage for fellatio into the magazine, a mistake which the publication generously forgives by noting that, "This error is more understandable. Most people would search for 'blowjob,' whereas New Yorker style is two words: 'blow job.'"

David Denby wrote a mad-crazy review of Silver Linings Playbook in the New Yorker. Thankfully for his dignity, it was behind the paywall, and came after a lengthy review of that weird dead snoozer, Life of Pi (it's an effusive but cautious rave, but he does call Life of Pi "one of the great adventure films"). Here's a taste: "David O. Russell's 'Silver Linings Playbook' is pretty much a miscalculation from beginning to end," and he goes on to call it nothing more than an exercise for actors, that it "feels worked up." This is a point of view at least, if a wrong one, and artificiality is a [...]

Stop crucifying Jonah Lehrer! It's more important that good ideas get disseminated than that magazines keep exclusivity! @jonahlehrer

— Parag Khanna (@paragkhanna) June 21, 2012

No one who's going on about how everyone is "celebrating" Jonah Lehrer's trouble with repackaging works or "crucifying" him or expressing "schadenfreude" has ever cited anyone who's actually doing any of those things.

The May 7th issue of The New Yorker features a Mother's Day-themed cover by Chris Ware. The art editor who oversaw its creation is Françoise Mouly, who, since joining The New Yorker in 1993, has guided more than 950 of the magazine's covers, including some of the most iconic of recent years (including the September 11, 2001 black-on-black cover with Art Spiegelman, and Barry Blitt's "terrorist first bump" cover in 2008). In the new book Blown Covers, Mouly shares cover concepts that never made it on the magazine, with sketches from a roster of New Yorker artists with whom she works regularly.

In addition to her duties at [...]

Poor David Sedaris! The recent "truth in journalism" dust-ups—John D'Agata's bizarre book written with a former fact-checker, and the "This American Life" episode-long retraction of Mike Daisey's "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs"—has given everyone a chance to call Sedaris a liar. But it's okay that he is! Sometimes. Wait, is it? Not really. Let's see what everyone thinks about David Sedaris.

David: I need a haircut, Maria. I look like a duckling right now.

Maria: And a stiff drink, if you listened to that radio interview with Caitlin Flanagan, like we were supposed to. Evidently the women of America had calmed down too much since her last book, To Hell With All That, caused such a ruckus over what was widely perceived as the author's throwback and essentialist anti-feminist ideology. So not content to get people in a stir with Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker appearances, she's written a new one, Girl Land. Even the cover of which is pretty provoking.

All these moms are fine [...]

You should know that it's subscription-only at the New Yorker, but Janet Malcolm on the photographer Thomas Struth is really right-on: it winds eventually and carefully to the heart of his strangely warm photographs that should be cold. A wee excerpt, in the classic Malcolm style!

Famous story, here recounted by The Daily News:

Harold Brodkey used to tell the tale of how legendary New Yorker magazine editor William Shawn handled his use of a four-letter word: It's up to you, Shawn said, but would you rather be remembered for your story or the first use of that word in this magazine? Brodkey spiked the offending expletive.

Shawn was indeed vigilant against vulgarity. It's said that, being afraid of elevators, he used to carry a hatchet in his briefcase in case he was ever trapped inside one. But I like to think the weapon served also as a warning to staffers who did not get [...]

News that "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is being made into a big new movie starring Ben Stiller is somewhat worrying, and I say this as one whose favorite movie may well be Zoolander. Tad Friend's recent New Yorker profile of Stiller, "Funny is Money" (subscription-only) is full of disquieting (and fascinating) details about the project; apparently there's a comic shark attack involved. It's a mystery how Thurber's 1939 story of an ordinary man's daydreams, so small in scale, so evanescently brief (just 2,200 words), and so deceptively modest in its message, should have attracted the notice of so many producers of large and noisy entertainments. But it [...]

"If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the latest round in the supposed clash between 'prescriptivist' and 'descriptivist' theories of language. This pseudo-controversy, a staple of literary magazines for decades, was ginned up again this month by The New Yorker, which has something of a history with the bogus battle."

"My predecessor (and the former keeper of the comma shaker) told me that she used to pester the style editor, Hobie Weekes, who had been at the magazine since 1928, to get rid of the diaeresis. She found it fussy. She said that once, in the elevator, he told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died." —Will no one rid The New Yorker of the tiresome diaresis?

Jonathan Franzen is in my estimation America's best living novelist (OKAY?) and a substantial number of people get upset whenever he writes or says basically anything.  It's interesting to ask why! In part it's because his ideas about novels and what people respond to in them are provocative and controversial, and sometimes, as in his recent essay about Edith Wharton, he projects his own responses onto "us" in a way that can be irritating, if we disagree with him.  Our opinion about his writing is also affected by of how rich he is and his gender and what he looks like, and that's very hard to talk about.  But [...]

David Roth: Let's talk about how Adam Gopnik feels about French food.

Maria Bustillos: OMG HE REALLY LIKES IT.

DR: Which is perhaps the least surprising thing one could learn about Adam Gopnik. I guess if it were somehow to be revealed that he is blown away—to the point where he thinks you might also find it fascinating—by some things his kids said at the Museum of Natural History, that might be less surprising. But I'm kind of with him on this one, to a great extent. Who doesn't like food?

MB: Well, you! That is to say, I have noticed that awful food, at least, exerts a [...]

Today, Patricia Marx goes shopping with men in the New Yorker! (Yes, subscription-only, so, sadtrombone.wav.) The whole thing is a really quite largely useful guide for men who are baffled and scared, from Brooks Brothers to Bergdorf Mens' Store to 20 Peacocks (although just don't even go in that Ralph Lauren store, gross), and you should note that Ms. Marx's male friend really ought to have bought the blue Zegna suit at Bergdorfs, it's gorgeous. But here is the most relevant passage to our interests. The Tom Ford store on Madison Ave. is America's greatest shopping treature! I bet it was that haughty Russian shopboy Nikolai! No, but seriously: [...]