HANGING IT UP
The home telephone, whether rotary dial or push-button, is dying, but the memories associated with it prove infinitely more durable.
TURF WARS
He bought his childhood home, and suddenly the sight of beer cans thrown on his yard felt like a call to arms.
MESMERIZING
Joe McCarthy’s lieutenant, Donald Trump’s mouthpiece—Cohn was a human car crash that even 30 years after his death we can’t stop watching.
OBSOLETE
Had the venerable satirical magazine never existed, there might have been no SNL, no Letterman, no Stewart. But as its apt pupils went mainstream, MAD itself became redundant.
RELIC
The newsweekly’s Person of the Year feature, once a portentous signifier of national and even international import, has been a running joke for decades. Now it’s not even funny.
Elbow Bending
In an excerpt from Cast of Characters, his book about the golden age of The New Yorker, Thomas Vinciguerra guides us through the magazine’s preferred saloons.