Article Gives Readers Behind-Scenes Look At New Yorker Editor

“She’s the most capricious editor I’ve ever worked with, in magazines and books, and I’ve worked in the underground press where there were cokeheads for editors.”

So says Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman, author of “Maus,” in Jay Stowe’s compelling Page 1 story in this week’s New York Observer about New Yorker editor Tina Brown, who continues to make more news than her magazine. Brown killed an O.J. cover that she insisted Spiegelman come up with at the last minute. Stowe writes that Harvard professor Henry Louis (Skip) Gates, the New Yorker black culture contributor, assisted on the kill when Brown faxed him Spiegelman’s image for the cover and he found it offensive. This isn’t the first time Spiegelman has been deemed offensive. Former cover art includes a Hassidic Jew smooching with a dreadlocked black woman for a Valentine’s Day issue in 1993 and Brown’s rejection of a Christmas cover illustration that showed Santa Claus urinating on a wall.

Spiegelman’s rough color sketch showed a playing card held by a bloody hand. On the card was a split image. On top is an LA police officer wearing a Ku Klux Klan bedsheet over his head and brandishing a bloody truncheon. Simpson’s on the bottom. He’s wearing a blood-spattered suit and tie with white-banded minstrel lips.

Spiegelman describes Brown’s reaction as like being “dragged into the DMZ one more time.” He’s not quitting, he says, but “I’m very glad to keep my distance for a time.”

Psychotherapy usually works. That is the word in this month’s Consumer Reports, which says that more than 50 million American adults suffer from a mental or addictive disorder at any given time.

The conclusions in this ground-breaking survey of CR subscribers is that people in therapy are satisfied and report progress whether seeing a social worker, psychologist or psychiatrist. You do better seeing a mental-health specialist than a family doctor, they say. Doctors are more inclined to recommend drugs, which are a mixed bag, considering their side effects.

Even though therapy is shown to be effective, private insurers stonewall coverage of mental disorders and substance abuse by building in limits or by interposing a case manager between you and your benefit.

The American Scholar’s autumn issue has a piece on suspect editing practices. John Halberstadt reviews three books that he says demonstrate the editorial depredations committed upon literary enfant terrible Thomas Wolfe’s classic novels “Look Homeward, Angel” and “Of Time and the River.” Halberstadt describes legendary editor Maxwell Perkins’ “surgery” on the novels. He cut about 300 pages from the first of Wolfe’s “passionately lyrical autobiographical works” and made “still more (drastic)” cuts in the second.

Quickly: Gore Vidal is everywhere as he touts his new memoir, including Nov. 2 New York Review of Books (essay on his elite childhood), Oct. 31 Advocate (his sexual preferences and lack of sex with longtime male companion) and November Vanity Fair (at home in Italy). Vanity Fair has a neat piece of Americana, tracking the final days and sordid finale of David Begelman, a successful and very deceitful Hollywood producer.

The Nov. 6 Forbes is strong on the fierce battling among local and long-distance phone companies in an increasingly deregulated environment, focusing on the seemingly adroit repositioning and tactical stalling by Chicago-based Ameritech, the big Midwest “Baby Bell.”