New Yorker

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.

Nicholas King was an actor and an assistant to renowned Hollywood photographer Bob Willoughby in the late 1950s when a close friend of Willoughby stopped by his home with intriguing news. The friend, film editor William Cartwright, had visited the famed Watts Towers for the first time and was surprised by what he saw. The unique work of folk art, created over 33 years by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia, had been abandoned since he moved away in 1954. His former house had burned down, the gates to the walled property were open and unguarded, and the grounds were littered with refuse left by unwanted visitors.

I liked your May 11 article on The New Yorker, which I have read for 40 years or more as a subscriber. I was surprised to see mention that (copy editor) Eleanor Gould was still there, because one of the things I have noticed with the new regime was that this area seems to have gotten sloppy. The real zinger hit me in a "Talk" item which reported the woes of the Museum of the City of New York, with the comment that the collection "might have to be disbursed." I rubbed my eyes, thinking it might be a deliberate pun, but no. There it was, like a puppy's indiscretion right in the middle of the rug. I decided that one era of the New Yorker was indeed over.

Most New York City voters support the release of public school teachers' rankings, but nearly half of all voters and a majority of pupils' parents agree with teachers that the evaluation system is flawed, according to a new poll released Wednesday. The Quinnipiac University poll indicates that parents of public school students, and the general public, agree that it was right to make the evaluations public, as New York City's Department of Education did last month after losing a court battle to keep them from public view.

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.

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 New Yorker is raising eyebrows again--with a cover showing two male sailors locked in a passionate kiss in Times Square. The sketch is a lampoon of the famous Life magazine photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, who shot a euphoric World War II sailor kissing a nurse in the square on V-J Day.

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

Shortly before Tina Brown stunned her boss and the publishing industry last week by announcing her exit from the New Yorker, the magazine sent to my home a subscription offer promising "the world's best cartoons" and the best magazine "with Tina Brown as editor." All for $19.98 a year, a savings of more than $124 off the cover price. That steep discount goes a long way to illustrate the financial problems plaguing a magazine that lost an estimated $11 million last year. The $19.

A New York hedge fund manager's plan to demolish an eye-catching steel-and-glass home in Malibu and build a two-story California Mission-style residence has neighbors in a lather over the potential loss of ocean views and what some decry as the waste of a perfectly good house. Once described as among the most significant new structures in Malibu, the building slated for destruction was designed by architect Bart Prince and hugs the slope in a neighborhood of private tennis courts, swimming pools and lush lawns.

The Age of Movies The Selected Writings of Pauline Kael Edited by Sanford Schwartz Library of America, $40 Witty, entertaining and often exhilarating, this wide-ranging collection of pieces captures the film critic at her best. Alice James A Biography Jean Strouse, preface by Colm Tóibín New York Review Books, $17.95 paper The acclaimed biographer of financier J.P. Morgan chronicles the brief but brilliant life of the younger sister of William and Henry James.

In 1989, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm published her famous essay, "The Journalist and the Murderer," with its notoriously overheated opening sentence: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. " This was back in the era when the New Yorker specialized in overheated and overhyped essays, including "The Fate of the Earth" by Jonathan Schell, which argued that all normal life must cease until we eliminate nuclear weapons.

In 1904, just a year after the World Series debuted, a proofreader for the New York Telegram newspaper lugged his Graflex single-lens camera to the ballpark for the first time. Thus began Charles M. Conlon's nearly 40-year career as the pioneering documentarian of the national pastime. Season after season Conlon returned to New York City's baseball cathedrals. He shot gritty, intimate portraits of the legends (Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Joe DiMaggio), the obscure players with evocative names (Buzz McWeeny, Pinky Pittenger, Gabbo Gabler)

Days of tributes and memorials to the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 may have taken their toll, a surplus of sadness pooling like the waterfalls at the new New York memorial. At least most of the stories showed a merciful precision. Most in the media heaped praise on the right figures -- the Goldman Sachs official who died helping co-workers to safety, the firefighter who led a perilous rescue. That restraint didn't extend, unfortunately, to one media giant's communications. In a video memorializing its $5-million contribution to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, the Walt Disney Co. put the focus squarely on that unknown 9/11 hero, CEO Robert Iger.

A family from the Midwest formed a crescent around the posted menu outside an Italian restaurant on Mulberry Street, the main (and only) drag of Manhattan's shrinking Little Italy. It didn't take long for the Latino restaurant barker - the guys who stand on the sidewalk trying to lure in the indecisive and hungry - to pounce: " Ciao, bellas ," he said, using the Spanish plural of the Italian noun. "Come in and eat," he added, motioning with a sweep of his arm toward the open door.

She's not dull. She's not shy. She sees the potential in porn stars and sluggers on steroids and murderers' mistresses. Judith Regan's announcement that she's moving her publishing company to the West Coast has New Yorkers aghast and Angelenos dreading her vow to inflict yet another "salon" upon us, but we've gotta say: For a New Yorker, she already appears to be fitting right in here in Los Angeles.

God and country Re " Politics and religion can mix ," Opinion, Aug. 28 Because the flaws in this article are too numerous to list, I'll comment on just one. When a religion accepts the generous gift of tax-free status from our secular government, it breaks the contract if it continues to tell the country how it ought to live according to any particular religion. For example: How to vote, a woman's right to choose, stem cell research, creationism in place of science, denial of settled science on global warming, evolution, who will be allowed to marry, eye-for-an-eye death penalties or which God to pray to as a plan to solve real problems.

Michele Bachmann botched Elvis' birth date (oops, she singled out the day the King died) this week, after previously confusing the birthplace of a movie icon (John Wayne) with that of a serial killer (John Wayne Gacy). And the news played big, on the Web and cable TV. Significantly less play went to a few other morsels that turned up: The Minnesota congresswoman has lauded an evangelical thinker who speculated the U.S. might control citizens with psychotropic drugs. And she once gave a "Must Read" rating to a historical biography that said slaves and masters in the Old South lived in a state of "mutual esteem," "unity and companionship.