Television writer Paul Simms' piece "Attention, People of Earth" imagines the first extraterrestrial missive to Earth, if the extraterrestrials in question were the sorts of creatures who read The New Yorker and want to assure us that they don't intend to steal our vast reserves of gravel:

You may be wondering how we know your language. We are aware that there's a theory on your planet that we (or other alien species from the far reaches of the galaxy) have been able to learn your language from your television transmissions. This is not the case, because most of us don't really watch TV. Most of our knowledge about your Earth TV comes from reading Zeitgeisty think pieces by our resident intellectuals, who watch it not for fun but for ideas for their print articles about how Earth TV holds a mirror up to Earth society, and so on. We mean, we'll watch Earth TV sometimes-if it happens to be on already-but, generally, we prefer to read a good book or revive the lost art of conversation.

Sadly, Earth TV is like a vast wasteland, as the Earthling Newton Minow once said. But, for those of you who can understand things only in TV terms, just think of us as being very similar to Mork from Ork, in that he was a friendly, non-gravel-wanting alien who visited Earth just to find out what was there, and not to harvest gravel.

Attention, People of Earth [The New Yorker via Mental Floss]

Diamond's article in the New Yorker was called "Vengeance Is Ours," and described a young New Guinean man, called Wemp, and his violent quest for revenge after his uncle Soll was killed by another tribe. Diamond claimed Wemp was out to destroy a tribal leader called Isum, and that to do so he went on a murderous rampage, recruiting dozens of "soldiers" to aid him, and ultimately killing 17 people as well as injuring several others grievously. One of the injured was supposedly Isum (pictured, at far right), whom Diamond describes as being in a wheelchair.

Diamond used the men's story to illustrate a story from his own life, about how his father-in-law had the opportunity to kill the man responsible for murdering his family in a Polish prison camp during World War II. Instead of killing the man, Diamond's father-in-law turned him into police, who released him a year later. Apparently Diamond's father-in-law regretted for the rest of his life that he did not take violent revenge, and it weighed on his conscience.

But the New Guineans, Diamond claims, have no such neuroses because unlike civilized European guys they exact violent revenge on each other all the time.

The problem is that Diamond's notion of tribal culture is based on a fantasy of Diamond's own - one that was propagated by the New Yorker, which never fact-checked his story with the two men it featured as main characters. Wemp killed nobody, and Isum is not in a wheelchair - as you can see from the picture above. Indeed, the two men say they have never met and Isum has suffered no injuries at all. After the story went up online, Wemp suffered tremendously: He'd been accused of heinous crimes, which the men's lawsuit says he did not commit. Other mistakes Diamond made include extremely basic facts, such as which tribes the men are associated with.

If the men's allegations turn out to be correct, it seems that Diamond cobbled together Wemp's story out of several different tales he told while driving Diamond around when Diamond visited the island for the World Wildlife Fund. Essentially, Diamond took the stories his driver told him without ever asking permission, turned them into a lesson about his own life, and published them.

And now, say Wemp and Isum, they have to pay the price for Diamond's tidy little story.

According to StinkyJournalism, a watchdog site that investigated Diamond's New Yorker story:

Despite Diamond's claims, Wemp was no Handa tribal leader, nor was Henep Isum a violent leader of the Ombals. Isum isn't even an Ombal tribesman; he is a Henep, hence, his full name: Henep Isum Mandingo (tribal name, first name, last name) . . . Even though Diamond's article says the quotations by Wemp were made in 2001-2002, this was untrue. The several long and complex (and erudite) quotations attributed to Wemp-that Wemp vehemently denies saying-were apparently composited together by Diamond into a single narrative, along with bits and pieces of Wemp's stories Diamond remembered from years before . . . Diamond's many other errors range from mistakenly saying that two villages are tribes (Aralinja and Ungupi are villages) to creating an entire history of conflict between two tribes where only the smallest fragments of truth can be found and then traced back to the seeds of real events that actually took place . . . By Diamond connecting false assertions of crimes to real people-all sourced to Wemp-he has put [Wemp] in danger among tribes.

It turns out all the crimes that Diamond describes can be traced back to one outbreak of tribal violence in the early 1990s, when 4 men died. It was not an ongoing vengeance cycle, nor did it have anything to do with Wemp's uncle Soll.

It would seem that the person most interested in violent revenge is Diamond himself, on behalf of his father-in-law. Why did he need to exaggerate and fabricate a tale about tribal warfare in New Guinea to tell it?

via StinkyJournalism

Taking his role of "Official Intellectual Who Makes It Okay to Think About Comics" very seriously, Chabon's essay "Secret Skin" strips Superman and friends of their clothes piece by piece to consider just what's so powerful about the image of people in tights fighting crime:

So let's lose the cape. As for the boots—we are not married to the boots. After all, Iron Fist sports a pair of kung-fu slippers, the Spirit wears brown brogues, Zatanna works her magic in stiletto heels, and Beast, Ka-Zar, and Mantis wear no shoes at all. Perhaps, though, we had better hold on to our unitards, crafted of some nameless but readily available fabric that, like a thin matte layer, at once coats and divulges the splendor of our musculature. Assemble the collective, all-time memberships of the Justice League of America, the Justice Society of America, the Avengers, the Defenders, the Invaders, the X-Men, and the Legion of Super-Heroes (and let us not forget the Legion of Substitute Heroes), and you will probably find that almost all of them, from Nighthawk to the Chlorophyll Kid, arrive wearing some version of the classic leotard-tights ensemble. And yet—not everyone. Not Wonder Woman, in her star-spangled hot pants and eagle bustier; not the Incredible Hulk or Martian Manhunter or the Sub-Mariner.

Consideration of the last named leads us to cast a critical eye, finally, on our little swim trunks, typically worn with a belt, pioneered by Kit Walker (for the Ghost Who Walks), the Phantom of the old newspaper strip, and popularized by the super-trendsetter of Metropolis. The Sub-Mariner wears nothing but a Eurotrashy green Speedo, suggesting that, at least by the decency standards of the old Comics Code, this minimal garment marks the zero degree of superheroic attire. And yet, of course, the Flash, Green Lantern, and many others make do without trunks over their tights; the forgoing of trunks in favor of a continuous flow of fabric from legs to torso is frequently employed to lend a suggestion of speed, sleekness, a kind of uncluttered modernism. And the Hulk never goes around in anything but those tattered purple trousers.

Second Skin [New Yorker]

We surveyed the stories tagged "science fiction" in the New Yorker's archive, and the results are below. It's interesting to see the rise and fall of certain authors. Also, some themes seem to hold sway over the years: a high proportion of these science fiction stories are satires or parodies, including two cyberpunk parodies in a row. And there are two stories about insomnia and outsourcing sleep.

The New Yorker only published three science fiction stories prior to 1978, when it started flirting with the genre actively. Its main love object in the beginning? Polish satirist Stanislaw Lem.

Here's our complete history:

1978

The New Yorker goes on its first Stanislaw Lem kick, publishing three of his fictional book reviews within a four-month period. He reviews the non-existent books Gruppenfuhrer Louis XVII an SS novel by Alfred Zellerman; Non Serviam, a weird science book by James Dobb; and two books about how physics proves nothing can ever happen, by Cezar Kouska: De Impossibilitate Vivae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi. (All three reviews appear in the book A Perfect Vacuum.

1980

"Nana Hami Ba Reba" by Garrison Keillor. A satire. In the year 1984, everything in America has gone Metric, including Metric Time and a weird Metric language. The main character, responsible for this transformation, gets expelled from this perfect future and zapped back in time to the 1950s.

1981

Another Stanislaw Lem kick. The New Yorker publishes four of his satirical Ijon Tichy stories within a three-month period: "The Washing Machine Tragedy," "Phools," "Let Us Save The Universe" and "Project Genesis." These stories, collected in Memoirs of a Space Traveler, are more Earth-bound than earlier Tichy stories. They take out-of-control technology to its furthest extreme, including crazy washing machines and mind-controlling computers.

"Snorkeling" by Nicholson Baker. An executive "beats fatigue by employing drones to sleep on his behalf," says the Guardian.

1982

"Spoons In The Basement" by Ursula K. LeGuin. A woman comes across a set of valuable apostle spoons while cleaning her house. She accepts them as a gift from the house. Much later, she discovers a hidden "second basement" in the house, where three unmarried women live, along with an obnoxious middle-aged married couple. She lets the three women stay, but kicks out the married couple. After that, she can't find the spoons, and it seems the house has taken them back.

1984

"Offering" by Stainslaw Lem. The last gasp of the New Yorker's romance with Lem: a fake ad for the Extelopedia, a volume that contains information about the future.

1987

"Plan 10 From Zone R-3" by Polly Frost. A parody of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, despite the title referencing Plan Nine From Outer Space. A weird plague turns everybody in a town into a real-estate agent clutching a Filofax.

1988

"Worlds Of Love" by Jeffrey Shaffer. Satire, sort of. A series of funny personal ads with silly scifi themes, like "Star Warrior" and "Pardon my Polarity."

"Numeromancer" by Michael Caruso. A parody of William Gibson's Neuromancer, in which cyborgs play baseball.

1992

"Cyberprez" by Richard Liebmann-Smith. Another parody of Gibson's Neuromancer, this one touching on the fact that then-President Bush admitted taking tranquilizers.

"Offloading For Mrs. Schwartz" by George Saunders. A man who creates porno-horror holographic "modules" for people to experience grieves for his wife. He steals memories from a woman in a nursing home, then ends up selling his own memories. This story appeared in Tina Brown's first issue as editor, but a previous editor had bought it.

1994

"Several Birds" by David Foster Wallace. A homeless tranny junkie lives in 21st. century Massachusetts. The junkie steals a woman's artificial heart by mistake, gets involved in a Quebec-separatist assassination, kicks drugs, goes through withdrawal and hallucinates. A much different version of this piece appears as part of Infinite Jest, Wallace's mega-novel.

1995

"Paper Lantern" by Stuart Dybek. A researcher is building a time machine, but accidentally burns the lab down by leaving a bunsen burner going. A fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant warns him too late, and he realizes his ex-lover's nude photos are being burned up in that lab fire. (He'd falsely told the ex-lover he destroyed those nude photos already.)

1996

"Warm Dogs" by Paul Theroux. A widespread virus causes infertility in a future dystopia. A couple tries in vain to adopt a child, then winds up buying a mixed-race kid. But then they get nabbed by the police, along with their kid. The couple winds up in a warehouse, blindfolded and surrounded by children who poke them with spears. One child touches the woman and says, "This one is mine." She cries out.

1998

"Tough Girls Don't Dream" by Jeanette Winterson. Later retitled "Disappearance I." Takes place in a futuristic dystopia where sleep has become as much a taboo as kinky sex. But some people are paid to sleep so everyone else can spy on their dreams. (This is the second of the two New Yorker stories about lack of sleep, and outsourcing sleep, the first being Nicholson Baker's from 1981.)

"Sea Oak" by George Saunders. More weird satire. The main character's aunt dies, and comes back from the dead. Then she starts pimping out the main character, encouraging him to show his penis to random women for money.

"The Janitor On Mars" by Martin Amis. In 2049, a robot known as The Janitor On Mars suddenly contacts Earth, because humanity has just passed the point of no return: no matter what we do, we're doomed to extinction, thanks to changes in the environment. The robot relates the rise and fall of Martian civilization, while on Earth, a mentally disabled boy reveals the principal of his school raped him. (I read this story back when it appeared, and it remains my favorite thing ever to appear in the New Yorker.)

And then there's a gap of nearly five years before SF graces the New Yorker again. And it's only one story:

2003

"Jon" by George Saunders. In a weird future, a group of teenagers are trapped in a facility for assessing products, where they view ads and represent the teen demographic. The girls have velcro chastity-guards and everyone's encouraged to masturbate instead of having sex, but one girl, Carolyn, still manages to get pregnant.