Hendrick Hertzberg on the late Anthony Lewis:

Tony Lewis knew more about the Constitution and the laws, their history and meaning, than the vast majority of Supreme Court Justices, let alone lawyers. In 1956, James Reston, the Times’s legendary Washington bureau chief, had sent Lewis back to Cambridge for a year’s study at Harvard Law School on a Nieman fellowship. He learned well. Justice Felix Frankfurter would tell Reston that “there are not two Justices of this Court who have such a grasp of these cases.” And Lewis, unlike all but a few Justices, could write. He was occasionally cited in the Court’s opinions, but think of the ones he might have written himself!

We paid tribute to Lewis, covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times in the 1950s and ’60s, on the show today by listening back to an interview Terry did with him in 1991. He died yesterday.

Image of the Supreme Court by aabernathy

Your afternoon photo break: the Westminster post we’ve been waiting for.

landonnordeman:

Slide Show: Portraits from Westminster Dog Show : The New Yorker

When twenty-one-year-old Tony, the working-class would-be jockey turned taxi-driver, declares to Apted, “All I understand is dogs, prices, girls, knowledge, roads, streets, squares, mum and dad, and love. That’s all I understand; that’s all I want to understand,” it doesn’t just sound a bit like Keats; it makes as much sense, in its own way.

— 

Rebecca Mead on the ‘7 Up’ series in the New Yorker.

Terry spoke with the series’ director, Michael Apted, last Tuesday.

By sending a video, I felt that I could encapsulate more of the emotions I was feeling. I tried to write out something to send to them. I probably made 25 drafts and deleted them all. It just seemed so odd to put on paper. I just didn’t know what to say really, and every time I would read what I just wrote, I thought that it sounded like something I would hate to read if I was them. So eventually I tried to video myself in hopes that it would better show them what I was feeling …

I introduced myself. I told them of the night that we met, and I told them I was sorry and that I had to speak to them if I could. I told them that they lived so close to me that I had to reach out. It was just too odd to me not to say hello and not to find out how they were doing, to see if I could help them really. I wanted to know if there was something I could do to make their life easier.

— Former Marine Lu Lobello on the video apology he sent to the Kachadoorians

Cartoon of the day by Paul Noth.

If you look at the two largest Super PACs on the Romney side, they have raised $122 million. By July they had, anyway. And in contrast, the two largest supporting Super PACs that are supporting Obama have raised only $30 million by that period, so it’s a very big differential. But it doesn’t begin to explain how much of a gap there is in money. There’s an even bigger gap in other kinds of outside groups that are not Super PACs — there are nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors and there the differential is just overwhelming. Obama is being completely out-raised in these secret donations which are piling in for Romney at this point.

— The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer on Fresh Air

npr:

thesmithian:

The New Yorker this week is publishing a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Thank You for the Light,” that it rejected three-quarters of a century ago.

more.

“‘Thank You for the Light,’ which Fitzgerald’s grandchildren discovered while going through his papers, is just a vignette — only a page long — almost fable-like, and written in a pared-down style that, at the end especially, seems more Hemingway than Fitzgerald,” says the NYT. 

Wow, definitely want to read this!
—Daisy 

The greatest failure is that we haven’t really built a state that holds the country together. There is a state. It’s a very flimsy, ramshackle, corrupt thing and most people recognize it and see it as such. And I guess the big question we all face, as the Americans and the rest of NATO draws down is: Is this ramshackle, hodgepodge thing that we’ve built called the Afghan state – is it going to hold together? Is it going to stand on its own when we leave? Boy, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’d put my money on that or for how long. That’s a very risky proposition.

— The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins, on the future of Afghanistan

Through his many New Yorker covers, Barry Blitt has become one of the preeminent satirical cartoonists of America’s recent presidents. He’s probably best known for his controversial 2008 cover of Michelle and Barack Obama, dressed as a Muslim and a militant with an AK-47, fist-bumping in the Oval Office.

Now Blitt has trained his eye and pen on the nation’s first president; he’s illustrated a new children’s book called George Washington’s Birthday. The book, written by Margaret McNamara, follows young George about his normal day: chopping down a cherry tree, fording a creek — and worrying that his family has forgotten his 7th birthday.

Upcoming Fresh Air Interviews

Monday: Cartoonist Barry Blitt talks about drawing some of his most famous New Yorker covers, including the one pictured above. He’ll also tell us how to get cartoons in The New Yorker and what it was like to illustrate a new children’s book about George Washington’s 7th birthday. Also, we play an extended cut of our Bret McKenzie interview.

Tuesday: an in-studio concert and interview with jazz singer Catherine Russell

On today’s show, How YouTube Plans To Take On Television (with both Fresh Air staff YouTube favorites and a hidden Rick Roll on our site.) Guest: New Yorker writer John Seabrook.

Also on tomorrow’s show: the rapid growth of YouTube and where the company is heading next. Guest: New Yorker writer John Seabrook

What the country is seeing is what looks like spontaneous combustion of far right-wing Tea Party politics, but behind that there are some very instrumental players who have great family fortunes, corporate fortunes — and who are coordinating to a certain extent.

— New Yorker writer Jane Mayer talks about conservative businessman Art Pope’s growing power, his connections to the Koch Brothers — and how his money may influence the 2012 presidential election.

Tomorrow: stories of grief and endurance from firefighters at Ground Zero.

Above: The New Yorker cover, this week.

For someone whose ideology is really defined by a strong dislike for government, if you look at the way she’s supported herself over the years, it’s mostly through the government. After law school, she works at the IRS, she’s there for four years, then in 1992 she starts taking in foster children and does that from 1992-1998 and is paid by the state to do that. She then works briefly for a local charter school and then she starts running for office and becomes first an employee of the state of Minnesota and then a congresswoman, an employee of the federal government. … Her husband is a psychologist [who] has two counseling clinics that like any other medical professional [clinic] takes lots of money from Medicare and Medicaid — and then on top of that, has received generous farm subsidies for a farm he owns in Wisconsin.

— On today’s Fresh Air, New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza on Michele Bachmann.