"Crybabies."

Slipping standards at the New Yorker, people. Slipping standards.

Gotta pick it up.

But people been singing this song for years, ever since Ross went and off and died.

It doesn't make it any the less true.

Do you remember when S.J. Perelman descried the decline of the magazine in the writing of Donald Barthelme? He said Barthelme should be "nailed to the nearest sour apple tree"? It sounds almost quaint now. Perelman is dead and so is Donald Barthelme.

But for me the straw that broke the bee's knee was a review for a film, I forget which, in the current number, in which it is said with complete seriousness of Jennifer Lopez that in her role as "a Realtor", she "gets to strut her considerable charisma."

This is, amazingly, not the same reviewer as the one who said that the guy who plays The King of Queens was a "comic genius."

It is hardly surprising then that Nussbaum, who reviews TV this week, says in her not-strictly-excoriating review of Girls that the ultra-dull HBO comedy Enlightened "makes me cry more than any comedy I've seen."

Always a good recommendation for a comedy: aptitude to make you cry.

I am reminded of those characters, the Asian-American blogger (nearly wrote "bilger") and his wife, who sat through The Royal Tennenbaums "openly weeping tearfully" the while.

Their tears make me laugh aloud!

I said to my wife, "Why are so many people, in positions of relative responsibility mind you, crying willy-nilly, and then making public proclamations thereof?" Bad enough that ostensibly intelligent people are sitting about bleating like wookies. It is, I find, a shortcoming in a writer's abilities when they can no longer praise an object except by howling aloud.

This willingness to cry and then brag about it must come from watching too many Andy Cohen shows. On Bravo channel reality shows, when the "cheftstants" come across anything the least bit challenging to their various projects and machinations, their first recourse is to "go feral" like Wolverine; that is, to lash out wildly with lachrymosity, often invoking childhood traumas or ancestor worship.

All well and good in a cheftestant on America's Next Top Model, whose ghetto tough-guy shtick has been sharply shut down by another character more ghetto than thou, but writers for the New Yorker are supposed to be better than that. Like Harvey Keitel says in Mean Streets, "They're supposed to be guys."

[...]

This issue also features fiction by Zadie Smith.