The most recent issue of the New Yorker has various stuff to ponder:
Buckminster Fuller was an extraordinary whack job
Anthony Lane’s review of Sex and the City is fabulous. What other word could I choose but that? It’s vintage Lane – sharp and observant and hilarious – and spot on. The gals at Jezebel (language alert – I hate to have to do that, but you know, if I don’t, someone is going to write with a well-I-never..you should have warned me!)  are all over it, furious at the purported “sexism” of the review, but of course they’re ridiculous. What I keep thinking about in terms of the review and the Jezebel reaction are the shifting sands of perception and critique. Lane is basically saying that SATCTM embodies a pathetic materialistic narcissism.
…and it shows how corrupt the notion of “feminism” has become that critiquing fictional women for being narcissists is deemed as “sexist.”
(For the record, as long-time readers know, I had a tortured fascination with SATC. It infuriated me pretty consistently not just for reasons you might expect, but primarily because the images of consistently self-centered, materialistic, creepy narcissists who still ultimately believed their personal happiness was dependent on a particular type of relationship with a man  became, somehow, something that was either beyond critique by feminists who should be screaming the loudest about that impoverished sense of being a woman  or something that fell comfortably within the feminist gestalt because it’s all about freedom to be whoever or whatever. )
What is kind of shocking is the caricature that goes with the piece. Ouch.
Nancy Franklin’s review of the new CBS show Swingtown is just as good, if by “good” you mean “devastating evisceration.”
It’s the “summer fiction” issue, and I haven’t read all the stories. There’s a story about an Ethiopian adoption called “Don’t Cry” by Mary Gaitskill (not online) that I thought was sort of odd – a reflection, in a way of the SATC ethos, in that it’s about a woman who accompanies a friend to Ethiopia for an off-the-record adoption.  The whole experience is filtered through the first woman’s experience of her own marriage and her husband’s death.  That is, of course, how we experience life – we accompany others, but our own memories intrude and reflect and refract off of the now – but is still struck me as an exploration of narcissism, and I am pretty sure it was not supposed to be.
Most interesting is a subsection called “faith and doubt” in which several authors offer one-page pieces on the theme. I was assuming they were fiction, and most clearly are, but then again, I’m not sure. The most striking was called “Communion” by Uwen Akpan. Akpan is a Nigerian Jesuit who has just published a volume of short stories  – Say You’re One of Them – (my copy should be arriving today.)
Alan Cheuse recommended Akpan’s collection on something I recently heard – what was it – Fresh Air? I can’t remember. The piece features authors reading excerpts from their works, including Akpan, and I was very affected by hearing him in a way that surprised me.
For Fr. Akpan’s voice was very familiar. It sounded much like the other Nigerian priests I have listened to in church preaching and praying.  The same careful enunciation and crips consonants, the same enveloping vowels. I wondered if, as previous generations of American Catholics associate a different sort of accent – a brogue – with the experience of church, mine and those younger will hear an African or Indian cadence and feel a sense – as I did – of a warm and welcome sort of recognition of someone who speaks the same language – and I’m not talking about English.
Update:  John Farrell, in the comments, reminds us of the James Wood article on theodocy (via a look at Bart Ehrman’s new book).
Ross Douthat also has some thoughts inspired by the Wood article.