Sub-Saharan Africa had between 1.4 and 2.4 million new HIV infections in the last year, according to the most recent UNAIDS report—back in 2001, new infections were higher, between 1.7 and 2.7 million. HIV prevalence in adults is estimated at 5% in sub-Saharan Africa, down from its almost-6% estimate in 2000. That's one reason why there's something really, really odd about the conclusion of Michael Specter's fascinating piece on viruses in the New Yorker.

The mostly-Canadian collective Arcade Fire, reacting to a New Yorker article by Sasha Frere-Jones in which he claimed that "If there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical," has actually assembled an mp3 of bits that they have taken from the music of the blacks! It's sort of the most awesome thing they've ever done, though by our lights that isn't saying much.

"The loss of my school-related stuff was huge, but a lot of my personal life was also archived on that laptop. I had all my photos, calendars and contact lists on that computer as well as a bunch of more quirky and obsessive things that helped me feel like I had a life and an existence (a record of every menstrual cycle for the last seven years, every love letter I'd ever written, an outline for a cheesy romance novel, an ongoing list of essay ideas I could use when I was finally done with graduate school hell and could pursue my passion, writing humor).
—"Since You Asked", Salon.com

New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross as career case study for the youngsters: "Ross started writing freelance reviews for Fanfare, a classical music magazine, which paid him $2 for each review.... Eventually, Mr. Ross says, he got a piece in The New Republic.... [TNR literary editor Leon] Wieseltier helped Ross get hired by The New York Times in 1992 as a 24-year-old stringer, writing about classical music for the culture desk. He was paid $80 for each piece (and people complain about The Times' stinginess today!). 'Of course, I was only paying $675 a month in rent,' he said. While at The Times, Mr. Ross got his first piece in The New Yorker. 'Louis Menand and Adam Gopnik were culture editors at the time, and they had been reading my pieces in The Times,' he explained. 'I wrote one piece a year for four years'—including the obituary for Kurt Cobain, because the magazine didn't have a popular music critic on staff. He was hired as the magazine's classical music critic in 1996."

Way way WAY more detail on things New Yorker-related than you could ever need in the latest interview with that magazine's librarians. And yet, totally fascinating: "The magazine's Tables for Two department was originally called When Nights Are Bold, and it included reviews of nightclubs and speakeasies as well as restaurants. Charles Baskerville wrote the column, under the pseudonym Tophat, until July 18, 1925, when Lois Long took over, writing under the pen name Lipstick. The column was renamed Tables for Two in the September 12, 1925, issue. Long, a former Vanity Fair reporter, brought a lively and effervescent tone to the column, which typically ran to two or three pages." [EmDashes]

Floridian disc jockey Diplo played on Friday night at Hiro for the annual New Yorker Dance Party. If you wanted to see Adam Gopnik shake his strangely wide ass, you'd have been disappointed. But who are the New Yorker readers who appreciate both the sternness of Hendrik Hertzberg and dancing to a song whose refrain is "Put your panties on/Put your pussy away"? We sent photographer Kathy Lo to find out.

"The Rest Is Noise," New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross's history of the 20th century, is now all printed up. (The book will be released on October 16th.) And what's this we see on the back cover? Blurbs from the likes of lit critic Louis Menand and the author of The Oxford History of Western Music and... BJORK?! Not to be a geek-nerd-spaz, but you probably couldn't win more points in the Great Blurb Competition that is our modern age if Nina Simone had blurbed the book from beyond the grave.

Who is Bobby Egan? He's a Hackensack restaurateur with a bizarre connection to the North Korean government. He's also, apparently, a fascinating subject to the people of 4 Times Square, with two different Conde Nast publications putting out extremely similar features about him in the same week.

Good stories we've heard: "At Jeffrey Toobin's book party the other night, I watched David Remnick ball up a piece of fried shrimp in a napkin and throw it on the floor. He's totally over it."

Crazy-haired poet and rock star Paul Muldoon has shown up for work at the New Yorker—he recently replaced longtime poetry editor Alice Quinn. Says some anonymous blogger: "I just introduced myself to Paul Muldoon in the elevator and can report that the new poetry editor of The New Yorker is not much taller than the old one, Alice Quinn, but he wears long pants. The era of knickers is over! He was carrying an alarmingly slim volume that was the in-house archival scrapbook of verse that has run in The New Yorker since 1967—forty years of three poems a week. Anyway, he looked like he was just dying to publish a poem about a broken plate and a dirty shirt." As long as there are no more hideous Joni Mitchell poems and he can keep the junior staffers out of the magazine, that's fine by us. We'll just keep happily not really reading the poems like everyone else!

New Yorker festival! October 5! Tickets go on sale September 15! Here's the whole schedule. Now is your moment: David Denby, Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow, all within sniper range. (Just kidding, Judd, I heart you!) Diplo is DJing Sasha Frere-Jones' dance party, so, yes please on that. And here's the real crazy meat in the crazy pie: "THE NEW YORKER DEBATE. Resolved: The Ivy League Should Be Abolished With Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik. Chaired by Simon Schama." Are you people for real? Great: one-and-a-half Canadians and a Brit Columbia prof are going to tell us all about it. [Emdashes]

It was in the marbled thinking chamber that we were reading both Playboy and the New Yorker at once. A theory resulted: That the rate of humor found in New Yorker cartoons is the exact same as naturally occurring humor in the world. That is to say, in the case of any decent drawing set-up, one could pair a drawing with any caption and reasonably expect to laugh the same amount. We decided to test our theory of stochastic humor by mashing-up Playboy cartoons with New Yorker captions and vice versa.

New Yorker writer George Packer has turned his magazine piece on Iraqi translators into a play, which will debut early next year. [WWD]

Harvard reject David Remnick clearly has no beef with that university, because this week's New Yorker is chock-full of Harvard kids! Of course there's '07 Simon "son of Frank" Rich's Shouts 'n' Murmurs. There's also Louisa Thomas (Harvard 04!), who's the daughter of Newsweek's Evan Thomas (he's Harvard '70-something!)—she just completed a stint as Remnick's assistant, and got a Talk of the Town published this week. But there's more! Zach Kanin, has a cartoon this week—he's on staff now, and he was president of the Harvard Lampoon the year before Simon Rich was. That's so neato.

The Hawaiian Tropic Zone restaurant is apparently a safe place for women! Owner Dennis Riese tells the New Yorker that he likes the ladies, and in a good, gyno-positive Naomi Wolf way.

"You may have heard something about the iPhone in the media," writes New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross on his blog. No, we have not! What is this "iPhone"? Okay truth be told, I stopped by the iStore on iFifth Avenue on Tuesday and half-heartedly tried to iBuy one but there were all these grimy tourists touching the iPhones, a mob scene of all colors and creeds and also all colors and creeds of fannypacks, sort of like as if "It's A Small World" had come to life and exploded in gross technolust and I was so turned off that I had to run out of the store. Anhyoo, Mr. Ross is embarking on a brave experiment: he is leaving for Munich this week without his iPod or his iBook or his non-iCellphone, with only his iPhone to keep him in communication and also iEntertained. Dollars to donuts that this ends up in some kind of tears, right? Also, his address book ranges from "Abramovich to Zalewski." Hmm. Daniel Zalewski, New Yorker editor, sure: but who is this "Abramovich"?

The New Yorker picks up New Republic senior editor Ryan Lizza as its Washington correspondent, replacing Jeffrey Goldberg, who went to the Atlantic. Meanwhile, New York associate editor Ben Wasserstein (son of NYM owner Bruce) will head to the New Republic as its online editor. (Confidential to Ben: Please put an end to those painful Frank Foer videos. Thanks!) [WWD]

On the first of this month, genial New Yorker writer Dan Baum quietly finished his New Orleans Journal for the magazine's website, and announced that he and his wife, writer Margaret Knox—with whom he collaborates on nearly all of his written work—would be leaving the city and returning home to Denver. What Baum didn't announce was that these may be the last words he'll be writing for the New Yorker, as David Remnick has decided not to renew his contract.

On Friday night, the players of the publishing industry escaped the sweltering heat of the BookExpo's home in the Javits Center and found their way to the annual New Yorker Book Party at the well-air-conditioned Chinatown Brasserie. Poet Paul Muldoon and David Remnick chatted in a corner, while Jeffrey Eugenides and Joshua Ferris took their conversation to a more central locale. Rebecca Mead made a few passes around the room and Larry Doyle took refuge in the downstairs lounge. As the night wore on and the drinks flowed more freely, the awkward milling gave way to a genuinely fun (and boozy!) party. Our photographer Brad Walsh documents the gentle debauchery.

Alert! Sasha Frere-Jones, the New Yorker's resident Justin Timberlake and Mariah Carey enthusiast, is also an amateur photographer, which you may know if you ever visit his website, where you will see photographs of such things as purple tulips, turkey sandwiches with a side of orange, and graffiti. But Sasha would like your help, for his external hard drive has failed, and he has lost "every photo taken between October 2003 and December 2005." To retrieve these photos, he needs $5,000. That's where you come in!