This is the New Republic's ad strategy from 1940. I wonder which Supreme Court justices were readers! I hope it was that dreamy and probably gay Frank Murphy, then just-confirmed!

Adjusted for inflation, by the way, $5 a year is $82.92 in 2013 money. Not terrible news: then it really was a weekly, and now it's 20 issues a year, for a subscription price of $34.97.

40 East 49th Street is 425 Madison Avenue, built in 1927. It has a lot of doctors and dentists, and it's where I get my eye exams. Also there's a Starbucks, go figure.

"[T]he reporter announces 'no considerable News, except that the Emperor of China, his Court, and a great Part of his Kingdom have embraced the Christian Religion; but this is too extraordinary to be believed without farther Confirmation.' It got me thinking about the media conversation in the wake of the Newtown shooting—about how, like during so many breaking stories, reporters were too quick to report details that turned out to be incorrect."

When Joe Biden and Zombie Ayn Rand Paul Ryan begin their televised debate Thursday night, hundreds of professional media employees will be "liveblogging" the proceedings for hundreds of topical websites, from the New York Times to (maybe?) PerezHilton.com. Millions of otherwise sane humans will turn on the television and then frantically reload the websites of their favorite bloggers while simultaneously making their own jokes on Twitter, Facebook and probably in the comments of the aforementioned websites. After digesting and processing thousands of one-liners and spot reactions and weird jokes about the candidates' genitalia, the now-informed electorate will "pick the best candidate," which is a fake Big Bird account on [...]

It’s easy to look at our media industrial complex and forget that its members were once young and hungry, that they had to hustle, grease sources and report stories within an inch of life. One can imagine these scrappers delirious just to see a byline buried on B4 or, God forbid, a sidebar. They sammy glicked their way through the newsroom. No one exited the womb a star.

Even so, these people seem to exist only in the ever-present. We see Juan Williams as Hannity’s graying foil—who sold out for the change in Roger Ailes' pocket—but not the guy who, in 1987, churned out a gorgeous profile of a [...]

Once upon a time there was a princess who lived in a castle before she ran away and married an ogre. Together they spawned Talk, a magazine sprinkled with synergy dust and celebrated across the land. It was so wonderful, it only lasted two years….

Here are some of the things you'd learn reading the June/July 2000 issue of current Newsweek/Daily Beast honcho Tina Brown's Talk: Now that he's 18, Prince William ("'Wills,' his mother called him") "needs a bride"; Erica Jong burned her prenup with husband, Ken Burrows; Gigi Levangie Grazer "lives in Pacific Palisades with her second husband, superproducer Brian Grazer"; "Amy Smart has played it like her [...]

There is never a bad time to enjoy the photography of Berenice Abbot. There's a nice collection here. See if you can spot Old Town.

Hey, it's April 20th, or "4/20." So you know what that means. That's right, Hitler's birthday and the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon spill and the Columbine massacre and the first pitch thrown at Fenway Park in Boston and also at Wrigley Field in Chicago and the sadly shuttered Tiger's Stadium in Detroit. And also of Billie Holiday recording "Strange Fruit." And the Bay of Pigs fiasco and of Russia's mistaken downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 902. And lots of other crazy stuff, most of which is entirely coincidental. Also, of course, it's Pot Day. So I'm sure all you potheads are so stoned right now that [...]

Pretty genius. In association with the exhibition at the New Museum, they've installed 5000 New York City pay phones with recorded messages about what was happening around you in 1993. Find a phone, call (855) FOR-1993, and suddenly Robin Byrd and James St. James (girrrlll!) are telling you about the good times.

"The evils of alcohol abuse have long been known and preached against by the more sober-minded, but for a period of about two hundred years imbibers had a particularly dire consequence to fear: that too much drinking would cause them to catch fire and be reduced to a small pile of greasy ash. "

Mitt Romney is poised to announce his VP nominee any day now, and speculation continues to swirl around his choice. The current favorites—from the media's perspective, at least—are Tim Pawlenty, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan and Rob Portman, but who knows? Presidential nominees have shocked the world with their VP choices more than once in the past, and maybe Romney will choose someone surprising and exciting (probably not). As we wait to see, let's take a look at ten of the more question-mark-worthy picks of recent memory.

This is a story—a true story—about Olympic highs and lows, triumphant wins and crushing defeats, the old and the new, and my grandmother and a horrible Dutch woman who leapt over her dreams like they were just another hurdle on her path to the gold.

The Olympic Games are coming to London this week, and with them will come crowded airports, crowded subways, crowded streets, and crowded stadiums—most built for the event and covered in corporate sponsor logos (which is better, aesthetically, than that heinous official Olympics logo or the terrifying mascot whose face is just one giant eyeball). British taxpayers will end up footing a bill of at least [...]

"Perhaps," Ezra Klein wrote last week, "the Supreme Court will surprise us on this one"—meaning the Court might not overturn the part of the Affordable Care Act that would require nearly all Americans to maintain at least some amount of healthcare insurance. "But if they don’t, I think the right question will be why so few in the legal academy saw it coming."

The list of constitutional law scholars who have stated publicly that the individual mandate is constitutional includes some of the most famous legal minds in the nation. Laurence Tribe. Kathleen Sullivan. Ronald Dworkin. Lawrence Lessig.

Chris Rovzar, editor of Vanity Fair's website, just found this delightful item in the VF archives, from February of 1997. (Ancient history? Or yesterday? YOU DECIDE. Either way, it was before irony died.) That year was the publication of the excellent collection of New York Observer columns, called Sex and the City. Some notable things about this picture:

1. The photo caption: "Candace Bushnell enjoys posing seductively to promote herself."

2. The photo itself: Man. There is a lot to talk about regarding how women memoirists are presented/allow themselves to be presented/are coerced into being presented in the book and magazine industry but this one really takes [...]

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 [...]

Aren't there any other black presidents who win historic elections against old white rich guys? No? Well then, Barack Obama is the Person of the Year, according to TIME, which is not even trying anymore now that Newsweek is gone. Obama was chosen because, let's see, "We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Barack Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America. In 2012, he found and forged a new majority, turned weakness into opportunity and sought, amid great adversity, to create a more perfect union."

If taking our guns away and taxing the Koch Brothers at [...]

Remember when "the equivalent of phone sex over e-mail" was called "cybersex"? RT @newyorkpost:nyp.st/TZrJyq (via @moorehn)

— Farrah Bostic (@farrahbostic) November 14, 2012

Well? Do you???

In the 1970s it was unusual to see wealthy families on television. The Jeffersons with their deluxe apartment in the sky, the occasional rich couple flitting over to "Fantasy Island" or booking a cruise on "The Love Boat"—these were the exceptions. But as the economy accelerated, mass culture was suddenly inundated with images of affluence. The wave hit around 1981, as the economy slowly recovered from the stagnant wages and inflation of the 1970s. Rabbit Angstrom, John Updike's scampering everyman, began to make serious money on his appreciating property and selling Toyotas on his father-in-law's lot in Rabbit is Rich; Joan Collins joined the cast of "Dynasty" as the splendid [...]

On June 28th, public officials, neighborhood civic leaders, parents and their eager toddlers, poured under the iconic vaulted archway of the McCarren Park Pool.

For the actual poolgoers, it was their first visit inside the building since at least 2008, when the Parks Department permitted a series of ticketed and free live shows in the pool's empty basin. For some, it was step all the way back into their childhood, when summer meant splashing around Greenpoint with thousands of their friends.

On Thursday, everyone saw what the outdoor pool had become, for $50 million, here were one million gallons of cerulean blue water with tufts of surf, a mirror to [...]

Just a few of Logan Marshall-Green's late-90s college newspaper clips were uploaded to the website of The Daily Beacon, the paper of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. What can we learn about him? Well he has taste, as we learn in this review of a newly opened music venue: "I was tempted to ask for a some [sic] matzo and kir but decided to go with a Miller Highlife instead…. There is also a free foosball table and the original arcade version of Asteroids. No that is not typo, FREE foosball." Right: and he was stoked about foosball. Reasonably.

And he has/had garbage taste in music, apparent in what [...]

THIS JUST IN, NEW YORK TIMES WEB FRONT PAGER: the bread at Le Bernardin could be better! As the new food critic reaffirms Le Bernardin's four stars, we must note that this is the first time that a complaint about the bread has been made. What a long trip it's been for the little fish shack on 51st street and its ever-present four stars. Let's look back!

Here is the 2007 four-star review; here is Ruth Reichl in 1995. Here is the 1989 revisiting. Here is the March, 1986 original review, when the restaurant was three months old. (Fun fact: Le Bernardin was mentioned in [...]