The Colby Echo

Issue date: 3/9/07 Section: Opinions

When I was an undergraduate way back in the 1950s, I never seemed to have time to read newspapers or magazines. There was always a George Eliot novel to finish or a paper to write (or a party to go to), and so I especially couldn't read ephemera like magazines. Now in my mid-seventies and retired, I can always stay up 'til three finishing an article that I like.

My favorite magazine is The New Yorker, whose contents are unfailingly interesting and whose cartoons are worth the dollar-an-issue subscription price.

I used to think that The New Yorker was only for East Coast snobs, my South Dakota provincialism keeping me New Yorker-less for years. But for the past three decades or so, I have come to depend on the delivery of the Tuesday magazine for the week to be complete.

Sure, there's all the local New York stuff in the opening pages, so I tend to skim announcements (except movie reviews) and go on to "The Talk of the Town," a feature that is pretty New York, but not exclusively so. One can find political commentary (The New Yorker is liberal), but short pieces on odd things in the City and elsewhere-computers, chatrooms concocted by bored college students at Ivy League universities, a fight over the N.Y. Time's restaurant critic, etc.

But the high point for me is always the cartoons, never-failingly good for several laughs aloud. Consider the Mar. 5, 2007 issue: signed Bliss, the cartoon depicts two people side by side in bed, each with a book. The caption from the woman, "Could you stop making that breathing sound?" Or Dd's courtroom, woman judge, woman examiner, woman witness speaking: "This book club isn't fun anymore."

But my favorite this week: Mankoff's couple seated across a desk from a "professional" kind of man, so designated by a diploma announcing "Marriage Counselor" on the wall. The caption: "True, you have irreconcilable differences, but they're mainly about flossing." That could have been me and my dental technician!

Other cartoons are also equally funny, but the features kept me up late again this week: A first-person essay by the mother of a child movie star and life in New York, Sundance, and Hollywood. A long piece on Iraq by the distinguished reporter Seymour M. Hersh. Shorter articles on the chief of police of Miami and a woman who crawls around buildings looking for poisonous spiders. Movie features, opera features, book reviews. Fascinating.

So a word of advice: finish the George Eliot novel-or whatever-and pick up a New Yorker, Even if you're from the snowy Upper Midwest, you'll laugh at least thrice every issue. And Lord knows, you could use a couple of laughs after the George Eliot. Or the differential equations. Or the monograph on rural crime in Mississippi. I know I could.

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