At the urgings of the [Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviewer](http://lazybookreviews.tumblr.com/post/3169147541/wait-shut-up-this-entire-issue-of-the-new-yorker), I checked out the February 14, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. She’s right. It’s amazing.
Lawrence Wright’s piece on Paul Haggis and Scientology is so long I suspected it was some kind of Möbius strip. Through it all, I kept thinking, *Jesus, if this is what could make it past legal and fact-checking, what got cut? Moon bases? Re-animation of the dead?*
Rebecca Mead’s celebration of George Eliot was great even though I’ve never read Middlemarch. Now I will.
Malcolm Gladwell has sort of made a career of pointing out the obvious — I enjoy this snarky [Gladwell book generator](http://www.malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com/) — but I agree with him that college rankings like you find in U.S. News and World Report are largely useless. For most students, the character of the school is a better decision factor than its selectivity. Some students flourish at giant public universities, while others need the community of a small school in the hinterlands. Comparing those experiences on a numeric scale to figure out which is “best” is pointless daturbation.
For screenwriters, the prizewinner has to be Tina Fey’s essay about trying to decide whether to have another kid, knowing how it will mess up 30 Rock and other aspects of her career.
> I can’t possibly take time off for a second baby, unless I *do*, in which case that is nobody’s business and I’ll never regret it for a moment unless it ruins my life.
> To hell with everybody! Maybe I’ll just wait until I’m fifty and give birth to a ball of fingers! “Merry Christmas from Tina, Jeff, Alice, and Ball of Fingers,” the card will say. (“Happy Holidays” on the ones I send to my agents.)
It’s the first New Yorker in which I barely looked at the cartoons.