Via the Fireball that is Daring, Heather Powazek Champ of Flickr offers her technique for reading the New Yorker. She skips around a lot; I'm a straight-through cover-to-cover type myself. Lately I've had to force myself to start skipping some articles so I have time to read books. I also still skip the fiction, unless the author is one of a certain few, and usually the Dance critic. The most idiosyncratic part of my technique is that I don't read any of the cartoons on a pair of facing pages until I am just about to turn the page. This is a form of my slightly obsessive tendency to 'save the best for last.' It's a bit odd though, because I don't enjoy most of the cartoons that much at all, especially compared to the articles. Maybe it's not so much that they are the 'best,' but that they are cognitively restful, or a visual break from the dense language.

Last week's article about the UN mission in Iraq was one of the most heartbreaking articles I've read about the conflict.

Lastly, I've been noticing ever since this year's Fashion issue that the magazine has gotten a lot more liberal with illustrations and photos accompanying articles. It's now not at all uncommon for an article to have more than one, and a political article from a few months back, for the first time that I've seen, had a map of the country and the locations discussed.