IVANKA is storming through the West Wing like Skyler from Breaking Bad if she had her own series. Her children are trailing her. HOPE HICKS, SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS and KELLYANNE CONWAY are all talking about each other with each other. GENERAL KELLY is writing an email to OMAROSA that the address of the White House has changed, and GENERAL MATTIS is fixing himself a bowl of Grape Nuts to manipulate his blood sugar levels. No one knows or cares where JARED is.

GENERAL KELLY [beseechingly]: Ivanka, I wanted to talk to you about the White House hiring your daughter.

IVANKA [irritated]: For the last fucking time, General, we don’t pay ourselves. [She steps over a pile of briefing books, educational toys, and hummus-and-pretzel cups.]

GENERAL KELLY: Her book report on Song of Solomon was stunning. Analogizing Toni Morrison writing a place for herself in the canon to Richard Nixon’s and then Hillary’s multiple runs at the Presidency? [GENERAL KELLY kisses his fingertips.] She exhibits an aptitude for understanding the American experiment that I haven’t observed since I first met General Mattis.

[GENERAL MATTIS stands at attention, fibrous cereal dribbling down his jowls, and salutes KUSHNER DAUGHTER for her impeccable reading of an American masterpiece. IVANKA mumbles something about how her father shouldn’t have promoted generals into roles typically occupied by civilians. Though she’s correct, it is an accident. She’s just jealous of her daughter.]

GENERAL MATTIS [truthfully]: If it weren’t generals, it’d be cops and sheriffs.

[IVANKA screams silently. HOPE HICKS, SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, and KELLYANNE CONWAY follow her, as if they’ve been summoned. They’re murmuring “Helter Skelter” and trying to make “fetch” happen.]

It is, rather remarkably, Friday. I don’t know how we got here but I’ve learned to not ask too many questions at this point. Let’s just enjoy it before it’s gone, which it most assuredly will be before we’ve really had the chance to fully appreciate it. Speaking of things to appreciate, here is a sound so beautiful you’ll wish you could live in it all the time. Enjoy.

★ It was raining or it wasn’t or it looked like it wasn’t but little drops were falling toward the nearly dry pavement. At the surface on Union Square there was a moment of dead calm, then a gust with a single drop on it. A real rain came down for a while and left everything wet and chillier. The afternoon was dark, with a wintry look to the darkness as evening came. A new, pattering rain came for the commute, and the wind got behind it. Uptown, there was just enough rain lurking for one of the two boys to use his umbrella.

According to your tweets, Graydon Carter and Vanity Fair magazine have both died—my deepest condolences to the Waverly Inn. Just kidding! Some stuff is happening at Condé Nast, which is never not the case, and Graydon Carter has just announced his “garden leave,” which is the second-most Graydon Carter thing about Graydon Carter besides his hair.

• Janice Min

Her name “has repeatedly circulated over the last three years” as the leading candidate, according to WWD. She essentially turned The Hollywood Reporter from a trade rag into West Coast Vanity Fair, so how’s that for qualifications? She’s also the woman who made US Weekly, your favorite magazine (don’t lie).

• Susan Morrison

Articles editor of The New Yorker, ex-Spy magazine executive editor and former editor of the now-unrecognizable Observer, is my personal pick. She has years of invaluable service, championing the wide world of entertainment in the hallowed halls of America’s stuffiest literary magazine, all the while having a wicked sense of humor (she edited Shouts & Murmurs until Emma Allen recently took over). She’s currently working on a book about Lorne Michaels.

• Dodai Stewart

The current editor-in-chief of Fusion and former Jezebel staffer is one of the strongest non-white non-male voices in media, which strikes me as exactly the kind of infusion a magazine perennially obsessed with dead people might need if they want to survive in the actual twenty-first century, and not the aspirational one. My favorite Wikipedia fact about Dodai is that her page says she moved to New York at the age of seven, which makes her sound like she came all alone with nothing but a wad of gum, a notebook, and the will to tell great stories. Plus, this is the woman who brought us LOLVogue, one of the greatest features of the early Jezebel era.

9/7 8:30 ET At New England -9 Kansas City

Tom Brady will be
banned by Goodell for the Red
Sox Apple Watch thing  

PICK: CHIEFS

9/10 1:00 ET At Buffalo -8 NY Jets

In the fight for last
There are no winners only
Falling lotus schmoo

PICK: JETS

1:00 ET Atlanta -7 At Chicago

After choking in
The Super Bowl expect the
Dirty Birds to re-choke

PICK: BEARS

Poster art: the odious AfD

The 2017 German federal election, or Bundestagswahl (BOOND-us-toggs-vall) is on Sept. 24, and and so you know what that means: The Wahlkampf (VOLL-komf, literally “vote fight”) is in full bloom, and German airwaves offer little more than an increasingly absurd escalation of attack ads narrated by the Doom Voice Narrator. Psych! There are no attack ads in Germany—indeed, election campaign financing is government funded, meager, and as strictly regulated as the shopping-cart deposit process at Aldi (hence: VERY STRICT), so all Germans get during the six-week (!!!!) campaign season is a single 90-second spot from every party, run a handful of times—like, ever, not during the same episode of  “HouseHunters”—and, oh yeah, a shit-ton of posters. So, so, so goddamned many posters.

German Wahlplakate (VOLL-plah-kott-uh) presently cover every available surface in every place in the Federal Republic that humans live, drive, bicycle, walk by, or might glance at from a moving train for four seconds. And since the posters are for all intents and purposes all the parties have, each poster’s slogan is agonized over, since it will be the primary subject of voter discussion until election day. (Germans vote for a party, and the leader of the party with the most votes—pronounced ONG-uh-luh MUR-kul—becomes Chancellor, and every party with at least 5 percent of the vote gets representation in the Bundestag, or national parliament).

As such, this year’s placards are subject to pointed discussion, and not just because Germans will pointedly discuss the toe-room in their shoes for two hours if you let them. This year, at least one party hired an outside firm from the U.S. to come up with their slogans (I will let you guess which; JK it will be painfully obvious), and at least one party is making headlines because its Nazi-bashing jokes went too far.

Let’s take a look at some of the major parties’ efforts to win the loyalty of Johannes Sechser-Pack, shall we?

I don’t know if this baby will be the best thing about your day or just a good part of it but either way it can’t hurt. Enjoy.

★★ What came through the window was too damp to do much about the stuffiness. Clouds clotted together for a while but the brightness came through. Come lunchtime, facing south, there was no way to be sure whether any thin clouds were left or if there was just the column of haze thickening up into the glare. Even in the shade, the breeze felt like an old damp sponge dragged over the skin. Hot fumes seethed in the more pleasant-looking cross streets. The sky dimmed faster than the oncoming evening. A big blue cloud headed upriver, rearing up a little, and a gull flew strenuously the other way. The wind began keening under the door, louder and louder, till it was time to shut the windows against the oncoming rain.

via GIPHY

Like many writers, I fell in love with the image of a writer before anything else. Would I have aspired instead to the law, or gardening, or, I don’t know, witchcraft, if Graham Greene and Lawrence Durrell and Paul Bowles had written novels about glamorously dissolute lawyers and greenthumbs and wiccans? Sort of moot now. The writers I loved all wrote about writers—often failed artists, hacking away at some form of journalism or another to make rent, disheveled drunkards, many of them, but with a kind of seductive world view, a seen-it-all wisdom that naif-ish little me believed to be the highest ideal: if what I felt most pressingly was my own ignorance, in the mysterious workings of the world, and the dark arts of human behavior, the extreme knowingness of these fictional protagonists seemed to me the ultimate corrective.

Maybe the worst culprit in my eventual corruption unto print was La Dolce Vita. Beneath all the customary cynicism and world-weariness of the journalist type, Fellini gave us an impossibly elegant Marcello Mastroianni shrugging through ‘50s Rome in his dark suits and droopy Persols to project ourselves onto, and I projected. Never mind that he was miserable, that the point of the movie is that his work as a celebrity journalist was soul-crushing, and that even his milieu of jet-set scenesters found their lives to be worthless—look how cool he looked! Sure, his friends were driven to murder-suicide by ennui, but in between cruising the chic night clubs and writing about celebrities, Marcello was also sleeping with his famous subjects. Sold.