Louis Menand, in The New Republic (Feb. 26, 1990), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

Ask any long-time reader of the New
Yorker which articles he likes best and there is a good chance that he will delight- edly confess (whether it is true or not) that he does not read the thing, he just looks at the cartoons.
That, says Menand, a professor of Eng- lish at Queens College, is typical of the New Yorker style itself: self-effacing and unpretentious on the surface, sometimes a bit snob...