This week's New Yorker: Not so much "sexy" as "depressing"

This week we searched our New Yorker half-apprehensively, half-hopefully, for a sign of last week’s depravity. Sadly, there was none; you really can’t make Hamid Karzai’s presidency sexy, and even the promise of mounds-chronicler Rebecca Mead on that sassy Laura Bush turned into something, well, kinda depressing, invoking the Blackstone’s Commentaries definition of wife-as-chattel, without any of the fun “possession” implications. The poem on page 78 made me want to cry (“the insect emerges: fragile, distracted, it can’t even trace a straight line…” oh, my God AM I THE INSECT??), and my reaction to the piece on men of the cloth is, well, my own issue.