Monday mornings! They are a bloggers' delight of two deliciously stuff-filled magazines' worth of "content" to "harvest." (Isn't the new media economy ridiculous?) The New Yorker and New York consistently bring two totally different types of reading pleasure (and sometimes unhappiness): the former more unexpected, lengthier, more guided by native interest and long study; the latter more packaged, more "of the moment," more trend-based, more magaziney. But something quite odd has happened this particular Monday, in comparing today's New Yorker with the current issue of New York on stands. And now how will we know what the way we live now is supposed to be?

Fresh trends, future-friendly, and incredibly be-nut-graf'd—in the New Yorker:

Why will Kranking be huge? Because, for a start, Johnny G invented it. The last fitness program he invented was Spinning® (stationary bicycling in a group, basically). Spinning went beyond platinum, worldwide, and Johnny G, né Goldberg, rode the craze, which is still going, for all it was worth. He registered every Spinning-related trademark you can think of, did a licensing deal with Schwinn, and then sold it all, along with the instructor-certification program (a hundred and fifty thousand instructors in eighty countries), in 2005. Kranking is his comeback.

A counter-intuitive, rather peg-less, well-reported, and long exploration of former President Jimmy Carter.—in New York.

The world of Jimmy Carter is precision-tuned, filled with reports and meetings, notes and discussions, publications and schedules. Carter, it must be recalled, is not just a former president of the United States but a former Navy lieutenant and a former agribusiness executive (running the fabled family peanut farm in Plains). He is supremely self-confident, like a ship of the line cruising into harbor amid the locals' rowboats. "One thing we have to count on," he tells the Colombians and Ecuadorans, peering over his glasses, "is that I've never had to wait any time to get both presidents of your countries on the line. So if we have a question for them, it's not going to take more than two hours to talk to them both."

Old World trends reappear in Brooklyn! And are recounted in the New Yorker:

The once ubiquitous and bourgeois "Gift to Young Housewives" all but disappeared in Soviet times, but it resurfaced this summer in Red Hook. Valerie Stivers-Isakova, a young, American, and very pregnant housewife, received it as a gift from the mother of her Russian-born husband, Ivan. Inspired, Stivers-Isakova, a writer, decided to have a Molokhovets-themed dinner party.

An experiential treatment of a conceptual architecture design exhibition ... in New York.

A couple of weeks ago, I ate takeout Chinese in the middle of an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Barry Bergdoll, MoMA's chief architecture curator, and Peter Christensen, an assistant, joined me at a table in the lot next to the museum. Around us the five houses at the core of "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling" posed in various stages of incompletion. Each handcrafted structure had been at least partly assembled in the controlled environment of a factory or mill. As workers put the pieces together, we dug into handcrafted Asian salads that had been assembled in the controlled environment of a restaurant kitchen. The museum's collection of sort-of-prefab houses struggled to match the efficiency and excellence of the prefab food. You can order in a splendid meal, and consume it the moment it arrives. Getting an architecturally distinguished home delivered and ready by dinnertime remains a lovely dream.

Not only does this thing look like that thing, it also looks like the other thing as well.