Something amazing happened yesterday, and

I'm not talking about politics. The featured review in The New Yorker -- the last of our upscale magazines with any claim to mass attention -- is about Jack Reacher!

Well, no, of course it isn't about the indomitable Reacher himself. This is TNY, after all! Instead, what we get is eight columns of type and a garish color illustration about the British author who invented this American on steroids, our turn-of-the-21st-century equivalent of Lew Wetzel, Natty Bumpo, the Lone Ranger, and The Man With No Name. And there's a reference in the second line to Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief," just to reassure us that this essay is serious stuff and not about lad lit at all.

So my secret vice has been validated. Reacher rules! (And no, he doesn't look anything at all like Tom Cruise.)