Okay, so maybe they're not quite invading, but there sure seem to be a lot of them in this week's issue. First there's Dana Goodyear on page 28 with a short piece on Liza Dalby's East Wind Melts the Ice. Then Louisa Thomas, who appears to be an editorial assistant to David Remnick, chimes in six pages later on Cristina Garcia's A Handbook to Luck. Finally, Harvard Med School professor/New Yorker medicine man Jerome Groopman closes out the issue with a back-page essay about how doctors should be reading Tolstoy, Turgenev, Philip Roth, and Rhonda Byrne.

Is it just us or does three New Yorker affiliates in seven pages seem a little high? Might these be ringers, brought in from outside by the populist Sam Tanenhaus in an attempt to raise the NYTBR's brow? Maybe! For what it's worth, Jascha Hoffman from the New York Review of Books is here too writing about some foreign novel or other. Then again, so is Park Slope ladykiller Ned Vizzini, author of Be More Chill and "It's Kind of a Funny Story.—LEON