On Tuesday, Vanity Fair's Power & Politics blog posted a satire of The New Yorker's now legendary Barry Blitt cover of Barack and Michelle Obama as flag-burning, Osama bin Laden-honoring terrorists. In VF's version, drawn by illustrator Tim Bower, John and Cindy McCain are portrayed as their own worst caricatures: The presumptive Republican nominee for president is seen hunched over a walker, while his wife is juggling various prescription pills. On the wall is a painting of George W. Bush; in the fireplace, the Constitution.

But to several commenters—you know, those scourges of civilization—on VF.com, the cartoon was a little too similar to one by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's David Horsey that ran a week earlier. In it, the McCain's appear on the cover of The National Review, he's drooling in a wheelchair (mumbling to himself, "Bomb, bomb, bomb—bomb, bomb Iran"), she's pouring prescription pills into her hand. On the wall is a painting of Dick Cheney; in the fireplace, the Constitution.  read more »

Slate's Christopher Beam has something to get off his chest.

In a post last night, Mr. Beam, who writes the website's 'Trailhead' blog, confessed that he may have accidentally set off the ridiculous Barack and Michelle Obama "terrorist fist-bump" meme that found its way into this week's New Yorker's cover illustration by Observer contributor Barry Blitt. That cover has spawned more op-eds, blog posts, news segments, and articles than, frankly, Media Mob is willing to link to, making it the most talked about magazine moment in history since Miley Cyrus bared her back in Vanity Fair, lo, two months ago.

According to Mr.  read more »

THE BOTTOM OF THE HARBOR
By Joseph Mitchell
Pantheon, 293 pages, $23

Since almost as far back as the last World War, magazine writers in New York have been trying to sound like Joseph Mitchell, who would have been 100 years old this year. In honor of his centennial, Pantheon is releasing a new edition of The Bottom of the Harbor, a collection of Mitchell’s New Yorker pieces from the 1940s and ’50s that are all, in the words of the book’s author’s note, "connected in one way or another with the waterfront of New York City."

Mr. Mitchell writes about a restaurant in the old Fulton Fish Market, and its encyclopedic menu of things like shad roe and herring roe and mackerel roe and cod cheeks, and its proprietor, Louis Morino, and Morino’s hometown of Recco, Italy, and Morino’s reluctance to enter the disused upper stories of his restaurant building.  read more »

Music critic. Blogger. Photographer. Composer... Advice columnist?

That's the newest gig The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones can add to his C.V. after appearing in Jezebel's popular "Pot Psychologist" video advice feature this week.

Mr. Frere-Jones appears alongside the usual Pot Psychologists, Tracie "Slut Machine" Egan and Four Four's Richard Juzwiak, answering questions about sex, dating, ailments, and the difference between ambivalence and ambiguity. (Don't even ask about ambidextrousness.)

It's unclear if Mr. Frere-Jones properly prepared himself for the role of Pot Psychologist (he's seen enjoying a large glass of red wine at one point and admiring Ms. Egan's Ikea bedspread), but as always, the video comes with a warning to kids to stay away from drugs.

"It's really easy to get killed in Iraq," says Phillip Robertson, a freelancer who covered the war for Salon and wrote the introduction to the book Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq.

"They want to kill you. All you have to do is give them a chance and somebody will kill you or kidnap you." Mr. Robertson had his own near-kidnap experience, but he managed to get away. His driver's car was totaled, but Salon paid for a replacement. "No one has ever been killed because of me," he says. "And I'm very, very proud of that. There have been repercussions because of my stories but I can look you in the eye and say no one has been seriously hurt because of me."  read more »

A little after 6 p.m. at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, Condé Nast president Richard Beckman was sharing a drink—vodka, olives—with Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend. The two were discussing the same thing everyone in the lobby of Jazz at Lincoln Center at the Time Warner Center was talking about: What the National Magazine Awards can do, or not do, for a magazine.  read more »

On a recent Monday morning David Carey, group president of Condé Nast since early January, welcomed Off the Record to his spacious and spare 18th-floor corner office at 4 Times Square with his hand extended. “Want a smoothie?” he asked, gesturing to a table full of fruit and yogurt parfaits.

The auburn-haired Mr. Carey, 46, is of formidable height—6-foot-1—but has a dad’s slouched, somewhat recessive posture. Grabbing a plate of cantaloupe, he spoke about life in Scarsdale, which he shares with four kids—two pairs of fraternal, mixed-sex twins—and his wife, Lauri, who used to work in special events at the Metropolitan Opera but is now a homemaker. “It’s been fascinating to see all these high-rise towers going up in White Plains and they just opened a Ritz-Carlton, too,” he said, between chomps. “Not just a hotel. But beautiful residences. They have all these condos, and they sold out very quickly.”  read more »

New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh is leaving the newspaper to become a staff writer at The New Yorker, according to an internal memo distributed yesterday. (Radar had reported a rumor to this effect.)

Also heading over to 4 Times Square is New York Magazine contributing editor and writer Ariel Levy, who has already posted the news to her personal web site.

David Remnick wrote in an email to Media Mob that they are both expected to "write reported pieces."  read more »

The Times recently taught those of us who didn’t already know that playing squash can help one’s chances of getting into an Ivy League school. (FYI: Rowing and Latin are similarly good options!) And in this week’s New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten writes an amusing Talk of the Town about this week’s Bear Stearns Tournament of Champions, which will be held in a glass box in Grand Central Terminal.

Last Wednesday, two Egyptians—Mohamed Reda and Badr Aziz—played at the New York Athletic Club to qualify for the tournament. Watching them race around the court was a rapt woman who is hosting the two visiting players, in addition to another Egyptian pair, in her home in Bronxville, a spectacularly wealthy square-mile in Westchester. (The squash pro at a Bronxville club, who is also Egyptian, had arranged with the athletic quad to stay with the local woman, who, along with her son, has apparently grown quite attached to the guests.)

Before their big game, Reda and Aziz slept in, according to the piece, and munched on a breakfast prepared by their host’s housekeeper. A little while later, they went into the village for lunch, where they encountered what was presumably the players’ first encounter with the area’s more skittish residents. As the foreign squash pros walked back home behind a young boy, they noticed him looking back at them nervously. “He ran into the bushes,” Aziz recalled to Mr. Paumgarten, laughing. “Strange Arabs! Terrorists! Ha!”

Kudos to Jeff Bercovici from Portfolio's Mixed Media blog for noticing this amusing correction from The New Yorker's end of the year fiction issue, regarding Malcolm Gladwell's Dec. 17 piece "None of the Above":

CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, "None of the Above," Malcolm Gladwell states that Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their 1994 book "The Bell Curve," proposed that Americans with low I.Q.s be "sequestered in a 'high-tech' version of an Indian reservation." In fact, Herrnstein and Murray deplored the prospect of such "custodialism" and recommended that steps be taken to avert it. We regret the error.

For more on The New Yorker's history with corrections, click here and scroll about halfway down to the second item.