The New Yorker- Full Edition

For the first time (or by mistake), the entire issue of the latest New Yorker is available online. Usually they leave more than a handful of articles off so's to encourage you to shell out the bucks at the newstand.

The New Yorker, September 8, 2008 edition.
I highly recommend the profile of Alec Baldwin by Ian Parker, titled "Why Me?"
My favorite 30-Rock clip below, which does justice to the genius of Alec Baldwin.

Me, myself and i

Why do we capitalize the word "I"?

There’s no grammatical reason for doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule “I” appears only in English.

Consider other languages: some, like Hebrew, Arabic and Devanagari-Hindi, have no capitalized letters, and others, like Japanese, make it possible to drop pronouns altogether. The supposedly snobbish French leave all personal pronouns in the unassuming lowercase, and Germans respectfully capitalize the formal form of “you” and even, occasionally, the informal form of “you,” but would never capitalize “I.” Yet in English, the solitary “I” towers above “he,” “she,” “it” and the royal “we.” Even a gathering that includes God might not be addressed with a capitalized “you.”

Fascinating. For nearly two decades now, my person writings have utilized an uncapitalized "i".

e. e. cummings

i carry your heart

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in

my heart) i am never without it (anywhere

i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done

by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear

no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want

no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you


here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows

higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart


i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)