It’s almost never a clean sweep in my weekly Penny Press – almost always, I’ve got to suffer through annoying garbage in order to enjoy the fine stuff (especially since I tend to read everything in every issue – sometimes on my first go-through I’ll skip around, but then the ol’ Irish Guilt kicks in and I go back to pick up the stragglers). This week was no exception, as two cases-in-point make clear.

In the New Yorker (the March 18th issue, the one with the cover drawn by a small child, showing a bunch of smudgy, stick-figure dogs playing in a park with a giant stack of pancakes in the background – very enterprising of the magazine to give a toddler such high-profile work; I’d say it boded well for that toddler’s future, except the cover makes it clear the child has no actual drawing talent … probably somebody’s niece …), for instance, I was treated to a stronger-than-average piece by Jill Lepore on torture in American history that has a lancingly insightful aside about the prisoners being held at “Camp X-Ray” in Cuba:

They weren’t called criminals, because criminals have to be charged with a crime. They weren’t called prisoners, because prisoners of war have rights. They were “unlawful combatants,” who were being “detained” in what the President called “a new kind of war,” although, really, it was very old.

And I got to enjoy the intelligent writing – if not the subject – of Margaret Talbot’s “About a Boy,” about a sixteen-year-old girl in Connecticut who’s already had several surgeries (with her parents’ full consent) to change her body’s gender to male. The article is yet another inadvertent example of the fact that an entire generation of parents is wholesale skipping the parenting part in favor of trying to win some kind of toleration-derby. I read it, appalled, until I got to pretty much the sole voice of reason in the whole piece, that of Alice Dreger, a bioethicist:

“These are not trivial medical interventions. You’re taking away fertility, in most cases. And how do you really know who you are before you’re sexual? No child, with gender dysmorphia or not, should have to decide who they are that early in life … I don’t mean to offend people who are truly transgender, but maybe a kid expresses a sense of being the opposite gender because cultural signals say girls don’t shoot arrows, or play rough, or wear boxers, or whatever. I’m concerned that we’re creating feedback loops in an attempt to be sympathetic. There was a child at my son’s preschool who, at the age of three, believed he was a train. Not that he liked trains – he was a train. None of us said, ‘Yes, you’re a train.’ We’d play along, but it was clear we were humoring him. After a couple of years, he decided that what he wanted to be was an engineer.”

The subject might sadden and infuriate me, but the article Talbot put together about that subject was first-rate reading material, something I’ll clip and save.

But there’s a price to be paid for such enjoyment, and in this issue – as in more than a few previous issues – it took the form of a pompous, tedious movie column by David Denby, this time reviewing “Oz the Great and Powerful” and “Jack the Giant Slayer” in a double bill that should have been fascinating.

You know it won’t be fascinating by Denby’s very first sentence: “Wicked witches and yellow bricks and Munchkins are back, but do we really need them?” And as if that weren’t a full enough abrogation of a movie reviewer’s core qualification, there’s the follow-up sentence: “Isn’t blessed memory ever enough?”

This is the whining credo of somebody who shouldn’t be going to the theater even for private recreation, much less to review his findings for an audience as large as the New Yorker‘s. When a movie critic starts bleating “Do we really need more movies? Can’t we just remember the ones we’ve already seen?” (which Denby’s been doing for virtually his entire career), he signals his own irrelevance. And things are only made worse by the fact that in this case the fix was so obviously in long before Denby set foot in theater: he takes these two movies – as near-identical in scope, tone, special effects, and execution as two movies can be – and pronounces diametrically opposite verdicts – “Oz the Great and Powerful” stinks, whereas “Jack the Giant Slayer” is wonderful (among other things, it apparently “honors a child’s desire for forts”). Denby at no point contemplates what his reaction to “Jack the Giant Slayer” might have been if Judy Garland had starred in “Jack and the Beanstalk” back in 1939 – but then, he doesn’t have to, does he?

Likewise over in the latest issue of Men’s Journal (the one with pea-brained slavering attention whore Gordon Ramsay on the cover): on the one hand, Stephen Rodrick turns in a great, atmospheric profile of shark-advocate and all-around great teacher Rachel Graham, an article that, again, deserves clipping out and saving. But on the other hand, two writers, Maria Fontoura and Kevin Gray, give us one of those unbelievably annoying little features that turn up semi-regularly in ‘lad mags’: features that treat dogs as just another gnarly fashion accessory young guys need help buying. This one is called “The Right Dog For You” and features a kind of flow-chart designed to help overmoneyed yuppies and hipsters pick the pet that best fits their lifestyle – “all more original than your standard Labrador retriever.”

It’s maddening, of course. Not only are dogs living, feeling fellow-beings who don’t have to have a “key function” in order to be worthwhile, but of the nine purebred breeds actually named in the piece – Newfoundlands, Manchester Terriers, Chinooks, Australian Shepherds, standard poodles, German Shorthaired Pointers, Entelbucher Mountain Dogs, Shiba Inus, and beagles – how many are ‘beginner’ breeds, the kind some young testosterone-pump reading Men’s Journal could buy and take home without any problems, ready to hit the hiking trails? None. Zero. All nine of those breeds – unlike those boring old Labs – are most emphatically not for casual owners; all nine require vast amounts of solo focus and specialized understanding. And if they don’t get it – especially as high-demand puppies – they’re miserable, and they make their new owners miserable as well. And we all know what happens to dogs who make their self-absorbed twentysomething owners miserable.

In a totally just world, Fontoura and Gray would have to feed and shelter every single dog bought and then abandoned because of their article, and it’s frustrating that they can use some small pulpit to urge callow idiots to go out and buy Entelbucher Mountain Dogs, for the love of Mike.

But then, such frustrations are part of the standard exchange in the Penny Press. I can always hope for better next week, or even later this week.