Friday's Perfect Thing: The Complete New Yorker

Suggesting once again why we should never, ever enter the business world and expect to leave it wearing anything but a potato sack, we recently saw an advertisement for the "complete New Yorker" on DVD containing "4109 issues. Half a million pages." Now this, we thought, was nearly too good to believe. Our relationship with the New Yorker is like our relationship with Philip Glass, in that there is only a relationship very occasionally, but we wish more often, because we feel so much smarter, worldly, sophisticated, and un-stupid when that relationship exists. Like, once every six or seven months, we'll say something like, "I was just reading about the Hittites in the new issue of the New Yorker ...." And we'll feel so smart, so fleetingly. This DVD set could offer us nothing short of permanent Hittite-y references.

Getting back to the anti-business world evidence: Such a collection, we thought. How much could something like that cost? 4,109 issues? Well, perhaps, we thought $3,000. Like an encyclopedia, or Flemish tapestries. It does not, in fact, cost $3,000. Sadly, but also auspiciously, it costs $49.95. This means we can afford it. This also means, however, that we will never be titans of industry. We consider it a draw. The Complete New Yorker, available, predictably, at the New Yorker store.