The New Yorker

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. 

Harry Mount is the author of a playful and, considering the historically staid subject matter, irreverent book on the principles of Latin, Amo, Amas, Amat…and All That (Short Books). New Yorker scribe Lauren Collins writes a fittingly playful, albeit not altogether irreverent, “Talk of the Town” on the 36-year-old journalist.

Strolling around the New Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum the other day, Mr. Mount, a self-described “Wanker,” began to wax on the etymology of the word “dick.” The subject, em, arose because he was standing before the very object that supposedly spawned the anatomical term. “It’s very useful, if you’ll forgive the vulgarity, to remember the word ‘dick.’ D-I-C-C, for Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. Ionic is a more feminine column. It’s always got the, as it were, twirly-whirly girls’ curls,” he told the magazine, before describing his London primary school’s policy, wherein Latin classes were required for boys but not girls, as “a hangover.”

Then, sitting to sup at a diner near the Met, the conversation turned decidedly juicy. “I was watching Henry V on the plane over—there’s an accepted period of laddish drunkenness in all cultures,” he said. “The Greeks were keen on wine and sexual misbehavior. There’s a great bit of Plato, often read at weddings, about two halves of the same soul being joined. They always neglect to read the part that says the greatest love of all is between two male halves.” (Mr. Mount maintains this homoerotic contention despite having been rolled down a hill in a Porta-Potty during his salad days at Oxford.) As an aside, The Daily Transom hopes to hear plenty more from said writer in the near future.  read more »

This week’s New Yorker, on newsstands today, contains a “Talk of the Town” that tells the bittersweet tale of someone named Cara Hannah. She is, according to the petit profile, currently suffering the brunt of both the Writers Guild strike and the collective towel-throw of Broadway stagehands. After all, Ms. Hannah is a wig stylist. And she not only powders pate-rugs for The Phantom of the Opera, but also for the funny folks at Saturday Night Live.

Because both productions have gone dark, she has been forced to trade in the glamour of eight-hour fittings for James Bond skits at 30 Rock for the bleak, lonely landscape of the classifieds. But after being snubbed by a wig shop and then Macy’s, Ms. Hannah started cutting hair in her bathroom, or, Chez Sullivan Salon, as her fiancé has billed the joint. In just two days, business was booming—she suddenly had more heads to cut and style in her loo than Frédéric Fekkai on a Friday. “I think my prices are attractive,” she told the magazine. “I take into consideration that, you know, I’m making people sit next to my john.”  read more »

Speaking of New Yorker editors, it sounds like Tina Brown has some suggestions for her sucessor at the magazine. She recently told an Indian paper: "I would probably redesign it again. I might make a shorter front of the book section."

We're sure David Remnick appreciates the advice.

And on that note: Happy Thanksgiving!  read more »

The way David Remnick became editor of The New Yorker is well-documented. A few weeks after Tina Brown had unexpectedly quit, S.I. Newhouse offered Michael Kinsley the job, then quickly withdrew his offer and gave it to Mr. Remnick.

Recently, Mr. Remnick gave a speech at Princeton and offered a tiny anecdote about how he won perhaps the most coveted job in magazine journalsim. The Daily Princetonian reports:

Recalling his rise to his current post, Remnick said he was "anointed by mistake." One weekend, he volunteered to write a memo on how to improve the magazine, and since the editor-in-chief position was empty at the time, his suggestions launched him into the job.

Maybe S.I. Newhouse saw the memo a day after he offered Mr. Kinsley the job?  read more »

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has 13 recordings of Richard Strauss’s opera, two cats, a husband and a new book.  read more »

On Friday night, Salman Rushdie was talking about Dorothy—that is, the Dorothy portrayed by Judy Garland in the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz.

Her mantra—“There’s noplace like home!”—is apparently not shared by the literary superstar whose 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, was banned in his native India and resulted in a fatwa against him.  read more »

Can Pamela Maffei McCarthy keep The New Yorker from display-copy repeats?  read more »