The New New Yorker

The first New Yorker of 2004 arrived in mailboxes today, sporting a massively redesigned "Goings On About Town" first page, which I think sets some kind of record for white space on an editorial page in the magazine. The "Talk of the Town" section is the same, however, and starts, as always, on a right-hand page with a long piece which continues verso.

The first Talk piece is often the only article in the magazine which you start reading without being able to see who wrote it; as such, it comes closest to representing the institutional point of view of the magazine. It was shocking, then, to read on that prime first Talk page the following:

The people who make these annual lists, the daily or weekly reviewers, have crossed the great sea of packaged amusement, pathos, and distraction for us, and they have emerged, clutching in their hands just ten plastic jewel cases. Here, they say; these are the best. We can imagine the nausea and entertainment fatigue they must have suffered during their twelve-month ordeal. We admire their grit and their pluck, and we salute them.

It's gotta be Greenman, right? After all, no one else at the New Yorker would be writing like this in trademarked Eggers High Ironic. But whomever it is, what on earth is the most venerable magazine in the world doing appropriating a prose style which was cool for about ten minutes in 1997?

It gets worse when we turn the page and find the byline: Louis Menand?!? Menand, of course, is a true grandee: it's scarcely believable that such a highbrow thinker would find himself writing in such a cheap manner. Those of us who love the New Yorker demand to know: What is going on here? Whither our favourite magazine? Please let this be a brief aberration, to be blamed on short-staffing over the holidays!