Sorry, but this week you should really buy three copies of the New Yorker. It's that good. In reality, I can link you to two of the reasons, but I can't link you to the third - so you really will have to buy one.
Since he starts the magazine, I'll start with Hendrik Hertzberg. His brilliant "Disarray This" points out that the Democratic Part is in fact in an array. He also makes the argument that calling Democrats spineless and weak in the face of Feingold's publicity stunt last week, can only help the Republicans. (I tried, clearly unsuccessfully, to make this point with Glenn Greenwald last week. To see proof of my failure read the venom here.) He makes it clear that the problem is not that Bush doesn't deserve censure, for a wide variety of his actions, but that attacking other Democrats does not help the cause.
Nicholas Lemann, poor guy, actually understands Bill O'Reilly. "O'Reilly has been playing O'Reilly so successfully for so long, and has developed such a substantial libray of hooks, tics, and subplots, that he seems to be parodying himself, or parodying Colbert's parody of him." My pity for Mr Lemann is particularly intense as he is forced to delve into O'Reilly's fiction. After his career at CBS stalled over an incident in The Falkland Islands War, O'Reilly wrote a novel about a reporter who is fired after an incident in The Falkland Islands War. One by one, the fictional O'Reilly viciously, gruesomely, murders those he blames for his ill treatment. Lemann mentions that "Once, when Howard Stern was asked to explain his success, he said that he owed it to lesbians. O'Reilly owes his to child molesters." You have to read the whole article.
The reason that you have to go out and buy a copy is a piece that I cannot link to: Calvin Trillin writes of his late wife Alice, and it's a honest-to-god love story. Amazing
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