With another hectic M-to-F trough-slog in sight, the New Yorker—witty, urbane, perhaps a bit of a poseur—seems like the perfect companion for a lazy Sunday afternoon. This is false. The New Yorker is not a weekend read; it is a prelapsarian one. That is why it makes us so sad: its facts-to-words ratio suggests a positively Renaissance store of leisure time. Indeed, what purpose could the dieresis umlaut possibly serve other than as an aid for ancien regime heads of household, gaily reading aloud the Talk of the Town with the wives and children and servants gathered round? Our parents never read to us.