Cartoon by Mick Stevens. For more from this issue: http://nyr.kr/Z7x5WK

  ”When I was a child, my greatest dream was to find a box full of puppies. And every shoebox, every discarded Manhattan Mini Storage vessel had the potential to change my life…”

In this week’s issue, Lena Dunham reflects on her childhood longing for a dog, and her recent experience adopting her pet mutt, Lamby: http://nyr.kr/YuDNGa

Photograph by Robin Schwartz.

(Source: newyorker.com)

“Do you know someone who adores dogs? Silly question. Even if you yourself are not a member of the Church of Canis Lupus Familiaris, you probably know many congregants. So, hallelujah and amen! “The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs” is available at fine bookstores everywhere. Go and get one. They’re going fast… You’ll find many great essays, articles, and stories packed in these three hundred and eighty-four pages, and, of course, lots of cartoons. How could there not be? Man’s best friend is also the cartoonist’s favorite animal…”

Bob Mankoff on The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs, and dog cartoons: http://nyr.kr/XrIkxO

Cartoon by Jack Ziegler. For more cartoons from the issue: http://nyr.kr/VYi5yb

Cartoon of the day by Jack Ziegler. For more cartoons: http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons

What Presidents Talk About When They Talk About Dogs

If a politician can’t talk about dogs without sounding slightly deranged, what hope does he have? The crude familiarity in the way L.B.J. made a spectacle of himself with his dogs—the ear incident occurred when he was displaying them to the press—was shocking, but slightly mesmerizing, an echo of the way he used to bully and cajole legislators, and sometimes undermine himself. They also reveal an element of self-aggrandizement: one of the dogs was named Little Beagle Johnson. The demand for a pet-based normalcy test has since been ritualized, in tiresome but necessary rituals like books by or addressed to Millie, Socks, and their ilk. Obama seems to know what he’s doing with Bo, but there are lapses; was it necessary to put rabbit ears on him?

That is why the political dogs for the ages are not necessarily the most loved, but the ones that have been used most effectively as makers of points or diffusers of scandal. The touchstones here are Checkers and his more magnificent predecessor, Murray the Outlaw of Falahill, better known as Fala.