The Atlantic

Another thing that bugs me about the cartoon is that the magazine is so good in so many ways. This current issue, from front to back, is as good as anything published today.

Mark Steyn on Sam Phillips, "The Man Who Invented Elvis"

A brief on the the Census Bureau's recent report on "shacking up". (The accompanying county by county map looks a lot like the 2000 electoral map-- Bush Country is marriage country).

A short discussion of a paper by a UTexas professor on income and sexual orientation (gay men earn 22% less than straight men, but lesbians earn 30% more than straight women).

Mark Bowden on "The Dark Art of Interrogation".

Benjamin Schwarz on Joan Didion--"A self-important ennui infected too many of the pieces; her rhetoric too often drifted from the stylized to the mannered; and her embrace of her brittleness got on one's nerves, as did her penchant for investing too many things-- paying the phone bill, spending the night in a motel-- with a portentousness that approached the apocalyptic."

And that is just a sample-- there are plenty of other good pieces.

So why did they screw it up with a cartoon Polish joke?