New Yorker magazine alert thread

remember that like, spectrum of gayness one a month or two back? what the hell was that

ya agree re: the romney 1; it was trillin i think, & more brief than usual, i think i smirked or something, home run for s&m

haha i was reading that on the train today, it wasnt funny but it managed 'amusing'.

gopnik's piece on histories of the spanish inquisition is both bizarrely high-handed and scattershot. its somewhat of a feat to have the worst piece in an issue w/ an on and off the ave article

Yknow what the romney thing WAS kinda funny

I'm not sure how amenable you all are to old article alerts but this one about North Korea:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/07/12/100712fa_fact_demick

Written by Barbara Demick, who also wrote an incredible book about North Korea a couple of years ago. This article is 18 months old, but it throws up an interesting perspective of Kim Jong-eun, and of course it's beautifully written.

v amenable to old article alerts btw, the never particularly active 'what should i read in the nyer archives' thread was a goldmine

i have the demick book sat on my shelf, maybe i should read my way into it via the article

You must. The book is more a series of narratives based on factual accounts, but every bit as absorbing.

btw this week's youtube piece is everything we already know about youtube, but packaged concisely and within the context of a changing broadcast industry. I hate the end of that last sentence but got sick of trying to reword it so

utube piece was ok, can't wait to see how awful all the shows turn out

The Jay-Z lifestyle station! Shaq TV!

utube piece was ok, can't wait to see how awful all the shows turn out

― lag∞n, Sunday, 15 January 2012 04:56 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

If recent Google initiatives are any indication, this is otm

the shows are gonna be awful no doubt but considering what awful stuff is popular on youtube it still might 'succeed'

for the little chunk of change they dropped (in google terms), they just need like one annoying orange success to make this thing worthwhile

hahahahaha yes

something like the creative success of "autotune the news"

i dunno how paid the gregory brothers are but it's clearly doing well enough for them that they don't need a day job

youtube piece really annoyed me, using "they're turning away from user-generated content!" as bait and then not really backing it up. it's not like people aren't going to be able to post cat videos.

cat videos are illegal under SOPA fyi

any rebroadcast, reproduction or other use of this content without the express written consent of cats is prohibited

i'm actually still half a page away from finishing it but the elif batuman piece on the hunter gatherer monuments, from the last double issue, is amazing, huh

talk of the town david cross piece is super bizarre

David cross is sort of disturbing

All I know is that the issue with a whopping four pieces I read was followed by an issue where barely anything appealed to me: youtube, on and off the avenue, Remnick review, S F-J stupid essay ... is the LA mogul piece any good? Egyptian novelist?

I liked the la mogul piece

next issue is out on the ipad

next issue is an ipad

free ipad

those shoplifting charges are bogus its true

Huh, I thought the L.A. mogul piece was a bit boilerplate, perhaps inevitable given its subject hasn't sat down for an interview in decades. Still, I'm always fascinated/scared by these powerful behind the scenes players whose money/influence literally permeates nearly every facet of society.

main thing i learned from the gingrich article this week: his first wife was his high school geometry teacher!?!?

It was so Ron Swanson.

LA Mogul is the AEG guy?

Wow the Don Bosco article is a tour de force. I'm still not done with it, but I don't think an article has ever made me feel such a potent mixture of admiration and utter horror.

xpost Yeah, AEG guy, who doesn't do interviews and is a conservative Christian. For some reason it just felt like a story I've read several times over the course of the past few years.

got all geared up for a bitchy hatchet job on callista gingrich but that article illustrated what happens when you have a non-cooperative (and essentially boring) subject

shouldve just been 10 full pages of portraits of he frozen real doll face

I want to say the current issue is at least the second and maybe the third in recent memory to feature an author overview that focuses on the writing of explicit sex scenes. In other words, this is two issues in a row that I'd consider a bust, unless the piece about the guy trying to save a breed of endangered turtle is worthwhile.

i agree, i skipped most of the articles in the last couple of issues. although oddly shouts & murmurs was again at least amusing this week - your basic outsourcing/foreigners jokes but by gary shteyngart who at least is a little weird and funny.

sorry i said at least so many times

main thing i learned from the gingrich article this week: his first wife was his high school geometry teacher!?!?

I thought I had totally missed this detail until I got the magazine last night and realized that you were talking about the Gingrich article in this week's issue (focusing on Callista), rather than the one from two weeks ago (focusing on Newt).

(Anyone think that the New Yorker jumped the gun about six weeks ago, when Newt was leading the polls, and assigned both of those pieces with the assumption that his campaign would be doing better than it is?)

kinda, but newt is p much a fascinating topic anytime

True!

plus newt is on the rebound now

http://www.peteykins.com/sparklepics5/CallistaNewYorker.jpg

in real life she looks like an animatronic figure designed by ralph steadman

just read that article, yeah holy wow @ that illustration

i'm gonna crosspost this here just in case we have any harper's readers who check this thread:

i'm halfway through this article and it's totally fascinating: http://harpers.org/archive/2012/02/0083789

story of peru's largest prison, so overcrowded and understaffed that the inmates essentially are able to live normal lives within its confines: it basically has its own economy (inmates own and run restaurants and shops inside the prison) run on contraband brought by visitors; its inmates' (drastically disparate) living conditions are determined by their wealth, much like the outside world; and in one literally walled-off community they even hold local elections. the story follows some of the delegado candidates in the days leading up to the big election

― tebow gotti (k3vin k.)

there was a similar piece abt a brazilian prison in the times a while ago, so nuts

Donald Hall's essay on growing old was great

oh alright i gotta read that, it seemed interesting but then i forgot about it

steve coll's piece on mullah omar and the relationship between the US, afghanistan, and pakistan (& the taliban and al qaeda) was a good read too, especially if you haven't read much about omar

yah it was p sweet