It's complicated, right? On the one hand, you want this library thing to be full of books--books you loved till they fell apart in your grasp, books you hated till they burst into flames, books that--in their capacity as books--matter. On the other hand, you love this idea of a project to catalogue alllll your reading, and it is undeniable that sometimes a mag piece or even a newspaper article--perhaps even a video game manual?--can make you laugh and cry just like, I dunno, Infinite Jest. But you are a follower of Aristotle's Golden Mean, for the moment at least, and you have this problem with treating newspaper articles like writing, man--they're not writing, right? they're typing. Isn't that what your dad always told you? Doesn't that information have to be worth something to justify his heartbreaking experience in the newspaper industry?


So for a while my middle ground has been this tetchy knife-edge of trying to catalogue major magazine articles or essays I read while sort of staying away from magazines in general, except when I find myself inexplicably bookless. It's really an unsatisfactory solution, because I want magazines to be a part of my life--like, they represent something settled and happy and beach-housey--the subscription, the linen pants--that books can't, simply because books are nonrepresentative, nonnegotiable, heart's blood itself. And the main reason I've been staying away from just cataloguing mags I read as mags, as issues, is I guess a combination of then feeling like I would have to do the same thing with comics, and then my LibraryThing would, of course, be drowning in comics and two hours later I'd be hungry again, and of not wanting it to be all bland and quotidian and "The New Yorker, March 1, 2010", and instead cataloguing individual articles with names like "Why women aren't funny" or "The 100 greatest conservative rock songs" (both of which currently rank high on my top reviews--if you're reading, lend a brother some thumbs, willya?)


But I am, of course, large and filled with multitudes, and I can have it both ways! So here it is: The New Yorker for March 1, 2010. And here are some of the highlights:


"Where's Chang? The chef who can't shake his followers", in Annals of Gastronomy, by Calvin Trillin. In Vancouver every Chinese restaurant has a brilliant should-be-celebrity Chinese chef, but it's good to know Virginia is feeling some love.


"The orange and the blue: After the revolution, a politics of disenchantment", Letter from Ukraine by Keith Gessen. Another great reason to catalogue mags. A book just can't tackle a story of this exact size at this exact level of detail at this exact length. And I learned a lot from this about Yushchenko and Yanukovych and Yulia and their eternal struggle.


"The deflationist: How Paul Krugman found politics", profile by Linda MacFarquhar. Turns out Paul Krugman specifically,and economists generally, =kind of cocks. Valuable intelligence!


"Head case: Can psychiatry be a science?", by Louis Menand, a review of some books on whether we are medicalizing/therapizing what should just be existential sadness into a pathological brokenness, and then, like, removing its meaning as well as not doing ourselves any good with our chosen treatments. Menand says yes; I say sometimes! ( )