As pornographic magazines go, the New Yorker leaves something to be desired. But as of the last few issues it’s getting much, much hotter.

Junot Diaz’s short story Alma in December’s “Fiction” issue (12/27) began the foreplay. I expected an innocent paean to one’s sweet love, the first line set me straight: “You have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans.”

With that we’re off on what’s mostly a recollection of searing sex. It’s a supple read; the detailed descriptions of Alma’s body and what she does with/to it are rich. This is a well-crafted relationship story, not simply an exile from Penthouse Forum, but a stranger to the normally chaste pages of the New Yorker.

I assumed it was an anomaly and that subsequent issues would leave pulses at their resting rate, but that’s when the topless photos began.

Accompanying their profile of artist and muse Lee Miller (Exposed, 01/21) was a full page Man Ray photograph of the subject sans chemise. Forget using your imagination to conjure up an image of “Alma,” this feast is one for the eyes. Quite a surprise, but not the last.

One week later Calvin Tomkins offered an in-depth look at painter John Currin (Lifting the Veil, 01/28) whose work combines classical painting and contemporary pornography.

Tomkins’s article leads off with an Elinor Carucci portrait of Currin standing before a work in progress; over his shoulder we get glimpse of the action. Three young women frolic in a classical boudoir in various states of disrobe. The main figure addresses the viewer, top off, nude from the waist down, the recipient of another woman’s tongue and fingers. Suffice it to say: yowza.

So what next? A recap of the latest swingers bash at Eustace Tilley’s Upper East Side townhouse? Perhaps music critic Sasha Frere-Jones will wax nostalgic on the golden age of slap bass and the porn that inspired it? Maybe the Shouts and Murmurs column will become Shudders and Moans?

Anything goes … this appears to be the new New Yorker.