Hah. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter is upset about that New Yorker cover. Because he knows the power of images and of repeating smears, even for satirical or debunking purposes. Which is why, after he derides the cover, he then presents a list of every anti-Obama smear he can think of, all listed in bold text. Whoops! To help reverse the damage this column will cause, we present here another pro-Obama photoshop. In this one he is athletic and virile!

A reader is upset with Gawker for wholeheartedly embracing The New Yorker's terribly offensive cartoon about how Barack Obama is a terrorist. She writes:

New Yorker editor David Remnick went on The Situation Room today to answer to Wolf Blitzer about his magazine's ridiculous Obama cover. "There are gonna be a lot of people who aren't going to be sophisticated New Yorker readers," Wolf asserted, "who are going to look at this cover" and assume it is an accurate portrayal of reality. Remnick—typical hate-monger!—says this is condescending. In the attached clip, watch Wolf claim that the cover could've appeared on "a neo-Nazi magazine." Context is meaningless! No one gets anything anymore! Remnick says some crazy thing about being Colbert in Print, but no one gets jokes without studio audiences to explain what is supposed to be funny. (After the jump, in a calmer setting, New Yorker political writer Hendrick Hertzberg holds up the cover and grins. He almost giggles!)

This is the problem with being an editor or publisher or writer or cartoonist or even blogger and having some small lingering trace of a sense of irony-sometimes you accidentally assume that the Vast and Mysterious "Audience" shares that subversive French sense. Thankfully, after what will presumably be a full week of Outrage and Demands for Apologies, David Remnick and his New Yorker will never make that mistake again. As you might've seen, the cover of that influential publication this week shows Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim, and he is Terrorist Fist-Bumping his aggrieved wife as a flag burns in the Oval Office. This obvious and heavy-handed satire has enraged Democrats and liberal media critics because now they are pretty sure this nation of child-like imbeciles will believe it to be an un-retouched photograph from the FUTURE. New Yorker editor David Remnick defended the cover to the Huffington Post. Did you know that sometimes that magazine makes "jokes"?

This is the New Yorker's new cover, depicting Barack Obama and his wife Michelle in the Oval Office. It accompanies a big article about how Obama maybe was not always about CHANGE but in fact may have been a skilled Chicago politician at some point. The cover promises to become an election flashpoint, and the presumptive Democratic nominee's campaign has already called it "tasteless and offensive." The caricature, according to the Huffington Post, "combines every smeary right-wing stereotype imaginable" about Obama. Ha ha, as if. Sure, the stereotypes about Obama being a flag-burning terrorist muslim and Michelle being an ashamed-of-America black power revolutionary are all there, but shouldn't Obama somehow also be an aloof Harvard elitist who hates "bitter" working-class whites? Instead, he's in rags and robes, with no jewelry or caviar or sociology texts and so forth. Anyway, the cartoonist said he's trying to mock the stereotypes, not perpetuate them:

Good news and bad news. The bad news: The New Yorker has made yet another cartoonist uncomfortable by running a cartoon eerily similar to his work. The good news: This time the culprit is not Harry Bliss! Bliss, you'll recall, is the New Yorker cartoonist who came under fire twice in May, once for an uncredited "homage" to comic book illustrator Jack Kirby, duplicated for the magazine's caption contest, and once for a near-perfect facsimile of a cartoon by John Rau. The cartoon above and to the right is also for the New Yorker's caption contest, drawn by Paul Noth. The Wall Street Journal's health blog noticed it looks just like a Cleveland Plain Dealer cartoon from more than two years ago, above and to the left. Here's what the cartoonist had to say:

Malcolm Gladwell, blogger, New Yorker contributor, and poofy haired airport bookstore genius-in-residence, is finishing up his latest book just in time for the nascent backlash against him to reach full force. Gladwell's book The Tipping Point introduced his now-famous style: gleefully retold anecdotes arranged and analyzed to support some slightly unlikely sounding thesis. Blink took this style even further, presenting even more disparate stories manipulated to 'prove' some pseudo-scientific CEO self-help method for improving your decision-making skills. But both books sold zillions of copies and even embittered east coast writerly types still seemed to like him. Now, on the eve of his next book's publication, the cracks are starting to show.

In this week's New Yorker, Ben McGrath profiles Mayhill Fowler, the woman who became famous for fifteen minutes after crashing the private party at which Obama let slip his infamous "bitter" comment about angry white proles with guns (but she supports him!). She then doubled-down for a full half hour after she stealthily taped Bill Clinton calling Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum a "scumbag." All in a day's work for a plucky citizen journalist, "who is sixty-one, with frosted gray hair and gold jewelry, spent the previous three decades as an aspiring writer and the stay-at-home mother of two daughters." Three decades as an aspiring writer, you don't say. Well, tenacity's a dying virtue, as is full disclosure in business practices. A reader at TPM Cafe muckrakes the muckraker:

Would you like to hear New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones sing the hits of Kelly Clarkson? Sure, we all would! Thankfully, The New Yorker has us covered. Sasha wrote an entertaining piece on auto-tune (the software that corrects pitch problems and can also be used to make wacky robot vocals), and then went to Hoboken with a sound crew to get auto-tuned himself. Attached, a clip of Sasha singing "Since U Been Gone." Click through to the whole piece to hear him get all T-Pained out. [New Yorker]

Now that the rules for stealing news stories have been revealed, people are seeing stolen stories everywhere! At the National Review, they're accusing the New Yorker's Jeff Toobin of ripping off the Weekly Standard's profile last year of Nixon-loving political hit man Roger Stone. We guess that's true, if you consider it plagiarism to quote the well-rehearsed quotes of a veteran quote whore:

While Sasha Frere-Jones sings worse than a season-premiere American Idol reject, the New Yorker music reviewer's voice sounds almost passable after plugging it into Auto-Tune, the standard industry post-production tool. According to Frere-Jones's interview with producer Tom Beaujour, pretty much every recording artist on the radio uses Auto-Tune in the studio. Of course rapper T-Pain cranked up the tuner to create a robotic vocal effect often misdubbed the "Vocoder." But without it he's just another flat-singing rapper, as shown by the YouTube video below.

Save for the use of the lame adjective "anti-sophisticated," Anthony Lane's New Yorker evisceration of Sex And The City is a schadenfreudian delight. Among the movie's crimes: Carrie whores herself out for a custom closet (women in the audience actually applauded); Carrie is more concerned about losing her access to nice clothes than about the disintegration of her marriage; and, apartment-hunting in a predominately Chinese neighborhood, Miranda, in a charming bit of racism, cries out, "White guy with a baby! Let's follow him." Lane says the film is often "pornographic—arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach" and suggests the subtitle "The Lying, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe." Yes, Lane's takedown is fun, but it's surprising to see the well-perched critic mock Sarah Jessica Parker with horse language reminiscent of, say, Gawker:

Roger Stone is a self-aggrandizing imbecile whose reputation for political dirty tricks is obviously patently exaggerated. This much we know. But he maybe had something to do with the downfall of Eliot Spitzer! It's still totally unclear, which is how Stone probably likes it. It's hard to tell if he acts like a buffoon because it throws people off the scent or simply because he is a buffoon. The New Yorker sent Jeffrey Toobin to investigate, but all he really uncovered was that Stone is a gross old pervert.

A University of Wisconsin professor believes the New Yorker ripped off famed comic book illustrator Jack Kirby with the cartoon on the right, which was used for the magazine's popular back-page caption contest. So the professor dug out the Kirby comic on the left and started complaining. The New Yorker said its cartoon was intended as "an overt reference... not an attempt to plagiarize... a tribute," and added an online credit to Kirby, but that wasn't good enough for the prof. So he rang up the Post and complained that Kirby "never got proper credit then, and isn't getting proper credit now." Well, then. The similarity is so great it's hard to imagine the New Yorker cartoonist, Harry Bliss, actually thought he was going to pull a fast one. And the cover is kind of perfect for a caption contest. But if this particular comic book is super obscure, that makes the "it's an homage" explanation much less plausible. Comic book geeks, your services are at last required! How obscure is this Tales To Astonish? (If you can't find our comments section or email addresses, then you're almost certainly not a comic book nerd.) [Post]

This week, Joan Acocella tackles hangovers in the New Yorker! We wonder: does the New Yorker's core audience even truly know about hangovers—other than the red wine-hangover, which is a completely different species from the, say, Long Island Iced Tea hangover, or the PBR-plus-gin variety? Anywho. Like many a New Yorker article, it painstakingly explains the mechanics and history of the subject of hand for way too long. However, it answers all the questions we need to know: does the hair of the dog cure really work? And what's up with Red Bull?

Jason Polan, the wacky kid who wants to sketch everybody in New York, once had a cartoon published in the New Yorker! Here it is (click to enlarge). See, he's not just a lone nut. But he definitely wasted precious extra minutes shading those hamsters. [Cartoon Bank via Emdashes]

The aftermath of last week's Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" photo retouching scandal remains unclear. It all started with retoucher Pascal Dangin telling the New Yorker that he had cleaned up photos for the campaign featuring ostensibly "Real" women, which would be a hugely hypocritical move. Dove, their ad agency, and celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz all denied it, saying they did nothing to the pictures except "to remove dust and do color correction." Today, Ad Age tries to decide whether or not the fiasco will hurt Dove—and the company is still stonewalling, while the New Yorker is standing by (most of) its story.

Fresh off its intellectualization of The Hills, the New Yorker has turned its attention to this American Idol phenomenon that is so big with the kids (and their parents... and their grandparents). And, hey, guess what America? You can stop text-messaging your votes to the show because it doesn't really matter who wins! What matters is that Americans are learning very important things about music. For example, wrote New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, Idol contestant David Archuleta's awful rendition of "Sweet Caroline" taught us to finally respect singer-songwriter Neil Diamond:

Hey, New Yorker? We all—every single one of us—have a stack of unread New Yorkers that we feel guilty about not having read yet. So just chill on the whole Twitter thing, mmkay? Especially if you Twitter things like, "Rahm Emanuel, undecided superdelegate, said that Obama is the 'presumptive nominee' during a conversation at The New Yorker Conference." Dorks. [New Yorker Dot Com]

Beauty product purveyor Dove has finally responded to allegations, first reported in a New Yorker story, that the company retouched photos of the "Real" women in its "Campaign for Real Beauty" ads. Which would make them big hypocrites. But according to a statement from Dove this morning (via its PR agency, Edelman), the New Yorker was wrong. The company even got a quotable refutation from controversy-courting celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz! Their full denial is after the jump.