Jon Huntsman is the sort of dad who would console his teenage daughter’s boyfriend when he crushes the boy’s father in an election. This the most recent development from a fascinating profile of the Republican candidate’s daughters– particularly Lizzy Huntsman, the one with Saturday Night Live aspirations– and the tension within the Huntsman campaign about their comedic recklessness.

“I love you.” “I want to be like you.” “You’re awesome,” is how nearly every woman prefaced their question (and it was mainly women doing the asking) for Amy Poehler’s conversation with Ariel Levy this past weekend at the New Yorker Festival.

Poehler is smart, funny, warm, confident, and knows what she wants. The child of two public school teachers, Poehler grew up loving school and was a self-proclaimed “good kid.” It might sound like I’m describing your best friend, your sister, or even you — and perhaps that’s the best part of Amy Poehler. What sets her apart from the rest of us is one thing: her main goal is to make us laugh.

One takeaway from this week’s GOP debate, co-sponsored by CNN and Tea Party Express, is that Texas Governor Rick Perry — who had, it seemed, been lumped together with Michele Bachmann in terms of catering particularly to the sort of religious, very socially conservative segment of the party’s primary voters — differs greatly from Bachmann, if not the other candidates in general, when it comes to a few rather contentious issues. Earlier today, we took a look at how Perry’s attitude towards and legislation concerning the children of illegal immigrants sets him apart from many his colleagues. Perry always raised eyebrows for his stance on the HPV vaccine.

A handful of Church of Scientology members spent their morning milling in front of the 40 Times Square, handing out free copies of a Eustace Tilley-riffing issue of their church’s magazine, Freedom, to entering Condé Naste reporters.

Did you know GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann made a movie? It’s true! Back in 2002, when she was making a name for herself as an education activist with the Maple River Education Coalition, Bachmann collaborated with a man named Michael Chapman to make a film called (rather delightfully) Guinea Pig Kids II. At the time, Chapman, described in this document as a “historian and education researcher,” had warned that state and federal education reforms were putting the United States on the path toward its very own Holocaust, turning impressionable school children into “global citizens.” Together, Bachmann and Chapman traveled throughout Minnesota with their warning, their efforts eventually culminating in Guinea Pig Kids II (not to be confused with this Guinea Pig Kids), which, besides informing mostly church-going Minnesotans that their children were at risk of becoming cogs in the government’s terrible machine, hoped to raise funds for the MREC.

You might remember Monday’s post drawing attention to a fascinating New Yorker piece about the capture of Osama Bin Laden. The article offered many details about the meticulous planning leading up to the raid on Bin Laden’s compound in suburban Pakistan, including the fact that the ultimate goal of the mission had always been to [...]

On May 1st, a Sunday night here in the U.S., the world learned from President Barack Obama that terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden had tracked, found and ultimately killed by an elite force known as “Team Six.” In the months following that announcement, more details about the mission to locate bin Laden have slowly, gradually trickled out into the public.

Now, a fascinating piece published in the New Yorker provides further insight into the planning — and steel nerves — required to capture a terrorist mastermind.

An issue of the New Yorker may be long and densely packed, but at least one only comes every seven days. It’s possible that the incarcerated manage to read every issue. I am skeptical of anyone else who makes that claim.

What happens, subscribers know, is that you build a pile of New Yorkers that you mean to get to. At some point, you get a new issue in the mail while you’re still working through the previous week’s. You’ve read about up to the film reviews, maybe, but the fresh new issue is hard to resist. So you put the unfinished one aside. A week later, that once-fresh issue joins it – maybe this time you skipped the fiction or the theater review. Then two months have passed and you have a stack of nearly ten magazines. You’re drowning, surfacing to suck in the new Talk of the Town with ragged gasps, desperate for the one-week reprieve that follows a double issue.

In an analysis of the evolution of President Obama‘s foreign policy, specifically in Libya, The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza suggests the uprisings and revolution that have swept the Middle East in 2011 may ultimately lead to a new “Obama Doctrine,” though one that may not look great on a bumper sticker. “One of his advisers described the President’s actions in Libya as ‘leading from behind.’ That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding.”

Representative John Boehner is having a good few weeks: now that Republicans have won control of the House of Representatives, he’s poised to become the next Speaker of the House. And the media are covering Boehner relentlessly–in the first two weeks of November, he has been featured on the cover of three major weekly magazines.

This past weekend, Mediaite contributor Jasmine Moy took in the New Yorker Festival, one of the city’s hottest cultural tickets every fall, usually featuring very smart people sitting in chairs on stage, talking thoughtfully about smart things, for longer than five minutes and without interruption. Why is there so little of that on the telly? It even had its share of naughtiness: “They were small breasts, in keeping with the understated nature of the magazine.” If you want to find out the context for that remark, you’ll have to read on.

The New Yorker is now available on the iPad. If you are reading this and are already the owner of an iPad you likely know this. Perhaps you’re even watching the instructional film starring Jason Schwartzman and directed by Roman Coppola. But I think it’s worth noting the news for two reasons.

Leave it to Malcolm Gladwell to come up with a reason why journalism – particularly magazine writing – will survive. Gladwell believes that even if a tiny percentage of people in the world value and subscribe to publications like the New Yorker then that actually translates into a large enough number to sustain the industry. But Gladwell also warned in his chat with his friend, colleague, and debating partner Adam Gopnik that it’s not often that his theories get substantiated by subsequent events.

Last Monday, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, wrote a piece on Andrew Sullivan, staff writer at The Atlantic, maître d’ of The Daily Dish, and all-around nabob of web journalism. It was not a very nice piece. Most of it is assigned to an insidious strain of anti-Semitism to which Sullivan, wittingly or not, is supposed to have fallen prey . . .

Esquire, Fortune, Playboy, Vanity Fair, New York: End the War on Christmas Magazine Covers! Who knows, magazines might even increase those newsstand sell-through numbers that are all doing so terribly if they just get back into the holiday spirit. To make a case, we’ve collected the Top 20 Christmas Magazine Covers of All Time.

Several months back, I attended an all-female panel assembled to discuss why women don’t typically participate on media panels. I noted in my review that “the goal was to demonstrate to future conference planners and columnists that women offer a unique voice and belong on the panelist circuit.” As these issues take great deals of [...]

Before the White House vs. Fox News entirely took over the media it looked like Cass Sunstein, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, was set to be Glenn Beck’s next ‘czar’ target post-Van Jones. The question remains why? Turns out a great deal of what Sunstein preaches may explain why Glenn Beck is so popular.

A “Talk of the Town” item in this week’s New Yorker uses the extortion case involving Dave Letterman and CBS producer Robert Halderman — which keeps getting weirder and weirder, and doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon — as a jumping-off point for a closer look at blackmail.

You’ve got to hand it to Gawker for turning the process of writing blog posts into fun and profit for all. They’ve complained in the past that the photo of Finke to the left is the only one available on the Web. Rather than resign themselves to that fact, they’ve made a contest of it: the first person to bring them a recent photo of Nikki Finke wins $1000.

Over at Webdesigner Depot, Angela West has put together an excellent list of 30 of the most controversial magazine covers of all time. A) we wish we had thought of it first, and B) we urge our readers to check it out.

It might just be wishful thinking on his part, but here’s what Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter had to say to the New York Observer at a book party last night about. A good attitude can get you far in life, you know.

I can’t say I started crying during the opening credits of the upcoming HBO documentary By The People: The Election of Barack Obama, but only because I got to the theater five minutes late. The film — which will air on November 3 on HBO — begins in Iowa in 2007, eight months before the caucuses and light years before today, and spends nearly half of its two-hours focusing on the state and the young supporters populating its campaign headquarters.

• NYTimes.com designer Khoi Vinh discusses his ‘90s design education. (ZT) • My roommate started singing this SNL Digital Short song last night, and I went to listen on Hulu only to find it not there. Strange. But it’s amazing. (SK) • “Moldovan accused of murdering 1800-year-old.” Oh, Russia Today, you never fail to impress. (RQ) • Why [...]

Where is the Hispanic New Yorker? What would a Latino-oriented equivalent look like? Questions like these have haunted me ever since I started working for a local Spanish TV station four years ago. And while I am aware that “a Hispanic New Yorker” could be an oxymoron —it can be seen as a product of a white-dominated world— the idea may be useful to try to explain the lack of sophisticated national outlets for the largest minority in the country.

Perennially insightful Malcolm Gladwell outdoes himself in this week’s New Yorker, positing that overconfidence might have played a role in the collapse of Bear Stearns and, on a larger scale, the Wall Street meltdown. I repeat: Malcolm says the bankers were too cocky.