The most striking thing about this week’s New Yorker is the cover — a black-on-black rendition of the World Trade Center by Art Spiegelman in which the twin towers are just barely visible. It’s elegant, respectful of the 5000 people who presumably died there, and chilling, all at once.

Just about every major weekly magazine is weighing in on the terrorist attacks, but there’s something special about the New Yorker. For one thing, though most national magazines are based in Manhattan, the New Yorker is an unusual hybrid of local and national. The current editor, David Remnick, has modestly boosted local coverage since taking over for his volatile predecessor, Tina Brown, in 1998 — returning, ever so slightly, to founder Harold Ross’s original vision. Last week’s horror presents a unique opportunity for the magazine to explain its hometown to the world. Then, too, the New Yorker enjoys a well-deserved reputation as our best magazine. What it has to say about this unspeakable tragedy is by definition more important than, for instance, anything you’ll find in this week’s U.S. News & World Report.

But though the New Yorker’s memorial edition is tasteful, even admirable, it nevertheless falls victim to the immediacy of the moment. After a week of nonstop drama and horror on television and in daily newspapers, too much of the New Yorker simply feels like little more than a well-executed version of more of the same. It’s too soon to offer much in the way of perspective and analysis, but too late to tell us of terrible events that we’ve already seen, over and over, with our own eyes.

To be sure, there are some notable touches. There is just one cartoon, a mournful George Booth drawing. The back page is given over to a stunningly perfect piece by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski called " Try To Praise the Mutilated World. " The lengthy narrative and accompanying photo essay, simply titled " September 11, 2001, " rise to the level of literature and art, telling the story simply, from ground zero in Lower Manhattan to the mountains of Afghanistan.

" The Talk of the Town, " though, never quite jells, despite the presence of such notable writers as John Updike, Aharon Appelfeld, and Rebecca Mead. Hendrik Hertzberg opens the section by repeating an oft-heard accusation of dubious accuracy: that, earlier this year, " the United States gave the Taliban a forty-three-million-dollar grant for banning poppy cultivation. " (In fact, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in announcing the grant last May, said, " Our aid bypasses the Taliban, who have done little to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people, and indeed, have done much to exacerbate it. " ) An anti-American rant by Susan Sontag fails to enlighten or inform.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s take on Mayor Rudy Giuliani in a time of crisis is smart but too short. Roger Angell’s article on the collapse of the Red Sox is fine, but suffers for having references to the tragedy grafted onto it at the last minute; the piece could have waited. Essays by architecture critic Paul Goldenberger on the World Trade Center and by movie critic Anthony Lane on the future of terrorism-inspired blockbusters are well-written but seem somehow inadequate to the moment.

A " New York Journal " by Adam Gopnik reads too much like what’s been in the Times and scores of other newspapers this past week, although he does have a knowing passage describing an art critic and a curator, in SoHo, who had watched the towers fall together. " Decades had passed in that neighborhood where people insisted that now everything was spectacle, nothing had meaning, " Gopnik writes. " Now there was a spectacle, and it meant. "

All in all, a solid and largely successful effort. If this week’s issue doesn’t always attain the loftiness of the New Yorker at its best, it nevertheless represents good, even noble, work performed under great stress.

• Rock bottom. Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard has fallen victim to maybe the worst-timed cover decision in the history of magazines. The cover shot: a forlorn Gilligan, with the Skipper screaming bloody murder at him. The headline: " Farewell to American Greatness. "

No, the Standard’s editors haven’t taken leave of their senses (not any more than usual, anyway). The issue was published just before the terrorist attacks. But it’s still on many newsstands, and my copy didn’t arrive in the mail until Monday of this week.

According to the Standard’s Web site, the new issue features a cover photo of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell above a line reading " A War Presidency. "

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Issue Date: September 18, 2001