New Yorker

A previously unpublished story by F. Scott Fitzgerald appears in this week's issue of the New Yorker. The magazine had originally rejected the 1936 story, "Thank You for the Light," when it was submitted by the author. " Thank You For the Light " is a tiny, short story about Mrs. Hanson, "a pretty, somewhat faded woman of forty, who sold corsets and girdles. " When she's transferred to a new territory, her smoking habit is frowned upon, and all she wants is to have a cigarette.

The Securities and Exchange Commission may have booted Henry Blodget off Wall Street, but the former Merrill Lynch & Co. Internet analyst has attracted some big fans for Business Insider Inc., which he co-founded in 2007.  A major endorsement for the online news site landed this week in the form of $5 million -- venture capital rounded up by Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos.  “Jeff's leadership, vision and philosophy at...

Eighty years ago Friday, young Eudora Welty sent a letter to the New Yorker seeking employment. This was four decades before she would win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel "The Optimist's Daughter" and five decades before "The Collected Works of Eudora Welty" won a National Book Award -- but she showed tremendous promise, writerly skill and lighthearted charm. Here's a portion: "I am 23 years old, six weeks on the loose in N.Y. However, I was a New Yorker for a whole year in 1930-31 while attending advertising classes in Columbia's School of Business.

NEW YORK -- How much should employers pay the people who serve up your french fries and ring up your tacos? It's an issue that's being raised for the second time in six months as hundreds of fast food workers in New York City walked out on the job Thursday to demand higher wages. An estimated 400 workers from 60 restaurants in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Harlem participated, organizers say. The campaign, organized in part by the group Fast Food Forward, is asking for wages to be raised to $15 an hour, which in some cases would double the pay of some workers, raising their pay to around what a substitute teacher makes, or an emergency medical technician, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Long known for being genteel and charmingly indifferent to headline news, the New Yorker in recent years has earned a reputation of skewering political and cultural figures with its cover art. Barry Blitt's infamous 2008 Barack and Michelle Obama fist bump cover poking fun at the perception of the then-presidential candidate, for instance, spawned countless satiric imitations. With "Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See" (Abrams), art director Françoise Mouly gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the selection process.

A New Yorker magazine profile of Mitt Romney out this week depicts the Republican presidential candidate as an earnest public servant, but one who is too steeped in the world of finance and private investment to communicate effectively with average voters. “He talks to voters businessman to businessman, on the assumption that everybody either runs a business or wants to start one,” writes Nicholas Lemann. “Romney believes that if you drop the name of someone who has built a very successful company - Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, or Ray Kroc, of McDonald's - it will have the same effect as mentioning a sports hero.

"The Talk of The Town" by Bob Sipchen (May 11) belongs more properly in the obituary section. As one of very few survivors who can boast of having cut his literary teeth on Harold Ross' first edition of a once-noble institution, I mourn its passing. Publisher S. I. Newhouse and (Editor) Tina Brown have killed the New Yorker and converted the corpse to the Journal of the Middle Finger Generation. I shall not renew my subscription, which follows that of my parents for almost 70 years continuity.

I disagree completely with Garrison Keillor's comments (April 4) about the New Yorker and his response to the Annie Leibovitz photographs in the April 3 issue. I was mildly outraged when I heard she was in town "shooting the Simpson trial." I was annoyed when I saw "The faces of the Simpson trial" in the index of the magazine. But the series says more about what has been going on here than 14 pages of text could have--the chosen shots and how they are arranged are a sad but accurate commentary on a society, the media and a legal system run a muck.

A woman holding a martini turns to a garishly dressed man in a bar and says, "I thought I'd never laugh again. Then I saw your jacket. " Through that cartoon ? the first published by the New Yorker in the grim weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks ? Leo Cullum gently gave the magazine's readers permission to laugh again. His role "was to tell us that laughter was not only permissible but necessary," Robert Mankoff, the New Yorker's cartoon editor, told The Times in an e-mail.

The New Yorker, for 60 years a showcase for such talents as J. D. Salinger, John Updike and Dorothy Parker, became the property of publishing magnate S. I. Newhouse Jr. at a stockholders' meeting punctuated by protests. The $168-million sale was ratified by a vote of about 632,517 shares to "slightly under 6,000 shares," publisher J. Kennard Bosee announced at the meeting, adding that "the New Yorker clearly will not be a public company after today."

The American Society of Magazine Editors on Monday announced the finalists for its 2013 awards . The National Magazine Awards -- known as the Ellies for the Alexander Calder "Elephant" that winners receive -- will be presented at a luncheon in New York on May 2. Many of the usual suspects appear on the finalists list: GQ and the New Yorker are perennial favorites, and National Geographic, with a total of seven, received the most nominations....

The guitarist Rez Abbasi embodies the globally omnivorous state of modern jazz. Born in Pakistan, schooled in L.A. and now a New Yorker, he's interested in reinventing a huge swath of American jazz and South Asian classic music. In his hands, the globe's music feels relentlessly new and progressive. The Blue Whale, 123 Astronaut Onizuka St. Suite 301, L.A. 9 p.m. Sat. bluewhalemusic.com .

Eighty years ago Friday, young Eudora Welty sent a letter to the New Yorker seeking employment. This was four decades before she would win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel "The Optimist's Daughter" and five decades before "The Collected Works of Eudora Welty" won a National Book Award -- but she showed tremendous promise, writerly skill and lighthearted charm. Here's a portion: "I am 23 years old, six weeks on the loose in N.Y. However, I was a New Yorker for a whole year in 1930-31 while attending advertising classes in Columbia's School of Business.

NEW YORK - To hear Wayne LaPierre of the NRA tell it, southern Brooklyn was a horrifying scene of looters gone wild in the days after Hurricane Sandy plunged much of New York City into darkness and sent the sea washing through the streets. To hear the New York police department's version, LaPierre was shooting from the hip when he made his claims in a Daily Caller column aimed at revving up gun owners to join the National Rifle Assn. and prepare for battle with hordes of rioters, terrorists, gangs and lone criminals.

Am I the only one who feels bad for Jonah Lehrer? The disgraced science writer, who lost his staff writer job at the New Yorker - and, quite possibly, his career - last summer after it was revealed that he had made up quotes (by Bob Dylan, of all people) in his book “Imagine,” was back in the news this week after giving a talk at the Knight Foundation's Media Learning Seminar; for the 3,500 word lecture, he received a payment of $20,000. Reaction has been uniformly negative, with pointed posts in the New York Times , Forbes and Los Angeles Magazine . But while I don't necessarily disagree with such commentary, I also think it misses the point.

Joseph Mitchell had more than a little in common with his great subject Joe Gould. Like Gould -- a legendary between-the-wars bohemian about whom he wrote two profiles for the New Yorker, later collected in the book “Joe Gould's Secret” -- Mitchell was an iconoclast, who liked to linger on the fringes, to seek out the unexplored territories of urban life. Even more, he was a writer who, in the end, was overmatched by his material, laboring for decades on a project that, in a very real sense, could be said not to exist.

Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue and Glamour magazines is attempting a takeover of the New Yorker, offering $180 a share, the Securities and Exchange Commission said today. Board members at the New Yorker immediately went into a meeting after learning that Advance Publications Inc., owner of Conde Nast, had announced the takeover bid.

That old line from the past, "Too hep, gotta go," ran through my mind as I canceled my subscription to the New Yorker recently. Ads were too hep, some of the writing too hep, but the cartoons remained priceless. I sought the cartoon books. And perhaps it was time for the too-hep Tina Brown to go ["Tina Brown Unexpectedly Resigns as New Yorker Editor," July 9]. Did she ever live up to the magazine's serious reputation? Or is it that today's readers clamor for "hepness" above all? MARY MEYER Pasadena

Poet and journalist Dana Goodyear perches on a swivel chair in the second-floor writing studio behind her Venice home, the windows cranked open to a gentle ocean breeze. Low rooftops and tall palm trees stretch to the horizon, and Goodyear points to an anomaly just across the alley - a faded surfboard tossed up and forgotten atop a neighbor's single-story house. Such juxtapositions appeal to Goodyear, a New Yorker magazine staff writer. And while the misplaced surfboard doesn't make an appearance in her new book of poems, "The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard" (Norton, $25.95)

NEW YORK - As police continued searching Friday for a woman who witnesses say sent a man to his death by pushing him into an oncoming subway train in Queens, anxious New Yorkers spoke with a mix of shock, horror and nonchalance as they grappled with the second such death in a month along the city's massive transit system. Police identified the victim in Thursday night's incident as Sunando Sen, a 46-year-old Queens resident and native of India who worked at a printing business. Police said the woman - described as a heavyset Latina and approximately 5 feet 5 - fled after the pushing.