Top 10 New Yorker Moments, 03-04

In case you are extremely bored today, I'm listing off my favorite New Yorker articles from the past year – I had to renew today and, while determining whether or not it was worth it I realized I had read a lot of great stuff from them. Here is some of it.

10 Holden at Fifty. Ok much older than a year, but it's so good it deserves to get included. After thinking about it, I was surprised by how much I read Catcher in the Rye the same way these days as I did when I was 15 (like, forgetting that Holden is in mourning and such). This is definitely a different way to approach a lot of the Salinger catalogue.

9 Lunch with the Chairman. It's all about Richard Perle meeting with investors from Saudia Arabia and the possibility of him being linked to a company that is making a lot of money off the war. Just to give you an idea about how intense it was, Perle immediately went on CNN and accused the author Hersh of being a terrorist.

8 The Thin Envelope. Louis Menand covers why college admissions have been such a horrid process over the past decade, and blows some strong holes in the theory of meritocracy.

7 Review of An End to Evil. The first couple of paragraphs puts a nice view on the days leading into the Iraq war in the U.N. and how we couldn't even get Guinea and Angola to back us on a resolution. The reviewer also does a great job handling Perle's book (which was read as the main source material for neocon bingo).

6 Torture at Abu Ghraib, The Grey Zone, Chain of Command The stories that helped break the Abu Ghraib scandal.

5 Faith, Hope and Clarity Again older than a year, but it blows everything else out of the water. Menand covers books concerning September 11th, and points out what should be obvious – the attack has been used by everyone to argue for what they already believed. He gives critical (for a magazine anyway) reviews of Chomsky, Baudrillard, Zizek, D'Souza and Bennett, among others.

4 Big and Bad (link not from newyorker.com). A history of the rise of the SUV. Getting to hear some of the things people say in auto focus groups is amazing. Here's my favorite thing one person said about why they bought an SUV: "If the vehicle is up high, it's easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it.
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" Is this a problem for most people? People lurking under their cars?

3 Kingdom of Silence. A seasoned US newspaper editor takes over at a newspaper in Saudi Arabia for several months. The culture shock he writes about is stunning.
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Women who weren't allowed to leave a burning building because their burqa's had fallen off while they were running (they were told to go back and get them) – sullen, out of work, young men (one of them notably a graduate-level library science student) wanting to become suicide bombers, and the country becoming even more extreme and closed off. A father from the country puts it best: " 'My kid is in the fifth grade…Out of twelve subjects, seven are pure religion.'…The religious establishment, however, wants education to become even more Islamic."

2 Jumpers. A story about the large number of suicides that occur at the Golden Gate Bridge every year. It's quite harrowing to hear from the few survivors that were interviewed for the article, and it's mind-numbing to watch the debate between those who want to install nets to save lives and those who don't want to impact the aesthetic of the bridge itself.

1 What Comes Naturally. I've never felt sorry for a book after getting a negative review, but I almost feel pity after Menand tears this book, about genetics and "the way people really are", a new one. He dismantles current personality theories, and shreds the book's take on everything from Darwin to modern literature. I hope the book was at least bought dinner beforehand.

I can't find a link to the Jonathan Franzen profile of Dennis Hastert, which I wanted to give a special award to as the worst thing I've read in the New Yorker last year. It's possibly the worst thing I've read in any magazine, and I read a lot of trashy magazines. Just to imagine Franzen getting in a fight with the oldest son of Hastert over who is a bigger Mekons fan is surreal. I really like Frazen, but as his recent collection of essays show, when he isn't all that interested in writing about something man is it horrible.

This list was obviously biased in favor of Louis Menand, who is a hero to ginandtacos.com, and someday soon we'll have a mini-page up about him where we will catalogue his stuff and encourage him to come to Chicago and eat tacos and drink gin and sleep on our couch.