The new yorker

In a presidential campaign notable for its lack of substantive debate, a serious citizen needs to look far and wide to pierce Donald Trump’s blather and Kamala Harris’s bromides — or to find anything that might resemble real political information. So I quickly reached for my wallet last week when I happened upon the New Yorker’s newsstand edition. The first cover line and subhead caught my eye: “The Democrats’ Left Flank: in the swing state of Michigan, antiwar voters want a commitment from Kamala Harris on Gaza. Are their tactics a gift to Trump?” The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been top of mind in the campaign press corps all year.

The New Yorker has come to the profound revelation that crazy, evil people who carry out heinous crimes hold crazy, evil beliefs to justify their crimes. Such people, the New Yorker has apparently now realized, can be of different races. But no matter what, the most common motivating cause is white supremacy, regardless of the perp's race — and it’s all America’s fault. In his piece on “the rise of Latino white supremacy,” New Yorker columnist Geraldo Cadava writes about how Mauricio Garcia, the mass shooter who killed eight people at a mall in Allen, Texas, before being killed by an off-duty police officer, expressed white-supremacist views in a diary and online — and because of this, “many were shocked that he was Latino.

Jeffrey Toobin is a man much wronged. On Monday, the New Yorker writer was suspended by the magazine for which he’s written for two decades, and took a leave of absence from CNN, where’s he served as a legal affairs analyst since 2002. What possible sin could he have committed that forced these pillars of the media establishment to sideline a bonafide star with the presidential election less than two weeks away and Team Joe Biden needing every hand on deck? Toobin masturbated during a Zoom video conference in which he and his colleagues fantasized about forcibly removing Donald Trump from office and throwing him in jail. In other words, Toobin is being punished for having the precise response that the exercise was designed to elicit.

It's been a bad couple of years for Jeffreys... Veteran New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Toobin has been suspended from the magazine after he 'exposed himself during a Zoom call last week', according to VICE. Toobin, who also serves as a CNN legal analyst, must have been reaching for the tissues as he described the incident as an 'embarrassingly stupid mistake' and offered an apology to his 'wife, family, friends and co-workers' in a statement. Cockburn is perhaps most surprised that Toobin is the first significant figure to be caught out during a video-conference, seven months into the COVID pandemic. What took us? Naturally, Twitter users have been having a field day with the story: https://twitter.com/rysimmons/status/1318266346610765829 https://twitter.

The most recent issue of the New Yorker includes a 5,000-word feature on the police (summary: they are racist). In it, staff writer Jill Lepore drops this frightful fact to illustrate the barbarism of America’s uniformed enforcers:'One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 15 and 34 who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.'Cockburn started writing precisely to avoid ever doing math again, but even to him, this claim sounded like a howler. Two-thirds of all emergency room visits by American young adults were for police injuries?

A cartoon caption is a work of art. It is a sitcom in miniature — but whereas a situation comedy might take half an hour to reach its punchline, a cartoon caption has to do so in seconds. Cartoonists toil endlessly, revising and rephrasing, to perfect a caption. There are rules. The funniest word has to appear at the end. The caption has to be a balance between anticipation and delivery. The line has to be succinct and the rhythm has to be right — clumsy phrasing can ruin an otherwise strong comic idea. In 2006 a blogger called Charles Lavoie wrote that every New Yorker cartoon could be captioned ‘Christ, what an asshole!’ — a concise take on Jean-Paul Sartre’s view that ‘Hell is other people’.

Come on now, The New Yorker. Surely one of Conde Nast’s babies famous for their cartoons should be familiar with the other Nast. Thomas Nast was the father of American cartoon and the progenitor of the conspiratorial renditions of the feared papal insurrection. Nast’s nastiest cartoons were a passionate projection of his virulent anti-Catholic beliefs, hardly unusual in the 19th century among Protestants and ethnocentric nativists, until John F. Kennedy’s era ushered in an amnesia. The American River Ganges, Nast’s 1871 caricature of Catholic bishops as reptiles ominously wading and slithering to the New York shoreline, salivating with ravenous appetites to devour the Protestant schoolteacher and children, was published in Harper’s Weekly not once, but twice!

‘They hate my views on Donald Trump,’ Alan Dershowitz says of the New Yorker. ‘They hate my views on Benjamin Netanyahu, and they hate my views on Israel.’ This week, the New Yorker ran a long-awaited hit piece on Dershowitz by Connie Bruck. Dershowitz wrote an article anticipating the attack here. It’s not clear why Bruck took a year to write her story. Its most damaging claim has circulated for several years: that Dershowitz, the erstwhile friend and lawyer of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had sex with Virginia Roberts, a teenager procured by Epstein. This story failed to get to court, despite Roberts, now known as Virginia Giuffre, engaging David Boies as her lawyer.

The election of Donald Trump has pulled American debate away from objectivity and turned publications into actors in a political battle. After Donald Trump’s election, the New Yorker magazine lost no time nailing its colors to the anti-Trump mast. David Remnick, its editor, lamented that Obama – a 'man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit' – was being supplanted by 'vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader' who would 'set markets tumbling', 'strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak' etc. This set the tone for the magazine’s subsequent reporting. Those sympathetic to Trump are treated in the same way – as I have found out.