Talk of the Clown

I can hardly add to Saint James of Ocicat's note on smut, such as smut is, but he mentions The New Yorker, and I would like to say this about that:

Can you recall anything that you've read there that wasn't authored by Seymour Hersh in the last five centuries or so? I think I recall seeing an essay by Adam Gopnik, but the wistful fog was so thick that I initially mistook him for John Updike, adpoting a pugilist's stance at the retirement castle. House fiction is scarcely less lamentable, hewing as it does to the McEwan school of No Knocks. Had there been no attacks on 9/11/2001, the magazine's decline might have been reversible. Alas, alack, The New Yorker seems actually to have believed all that shit about the New Seriousness and the End of Irony, which may be read as a cautionary tale in Taking Yourself Too Seriously. Spiegelman's black-on-black tower's might have been read as twin tombstone's for the rag's sense of humor and sense of self-proportion. The continued practice of laying an umlaut over the second O in words like "coöperate" is too precious by three-and-a-half. Is it meant to indicate the elision of a hyphen? What is Hendrik Hertzberg? Why is David Denby?