New Yorker magazine alert thread

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/04/09/120409crbo_books_kolbert

I've always found so-called ethical arguments against having children to be the height of philosophical silliness, and I don't feel any differently here, but an interesting read nonetheless.

I thought her essay/review was really funny, the way it kept trying to balance all these sort of fascinating paradoxes (like the right of people who don't exist, or how a life 99% good and 1% bad is worse than never having lived at all). She seemed to relish the sophistry.

Exxon piece was sort of scary, like reading about some shadow agency that runs the world. Which it sort of does.

yeah actually there might have been more intentional bemusement than I was reading into it now that you mention it

For sure. Like how she notes the infinite number of people who have never been born, and how they've never complained?

She still ends with this, though:

The decision to have a child, or one more child, or yet another child may seem to be a personal one—a choice about how many diapers you want to change in the short term versus how many Mother’s Day cards you hope to receive later on. But to see it in these terms alone is to be, as Caplan points out on the cover of his book, selfish. Whatever you may think of Overall’s and Benatar’s conclusions, it’s hard to argue with their insistence that the decision to have a child is an ethical one. When we set the size of our families, we are, each in our own small way, determining how the world of the future will look. And we’re doing this not just for ourselves and our own children; we’re doing it for everyone else’s children, too.

which I guess is technically true, although I find it to be kind of an irrelevant conclusion, and also a typically (for the New Yorker set) self-important one. Most of the audience for an article like this is starting families late and having zero to maybe three children at most. And two factors make a much bigger difference to their impact than the number of children they have: (1) the distance between generations and (2) the consumptive patterns of each child. Well-off western families are going to continue to have small families with spread out generations, irrespective of ethical concerns, but that consume like 10x as much as the people in other parts of the world having 8 kids starting at age 16. Fretting about the "ethics" of having children (or an extra child) is pointless. Supporting policies that favor family planning, education for women and reduced consumption might actually make a difference.

I found that last paragraph out of step with the rest of the piece -- as if a large section was edited out. She really didn't say much about ethical reasoning as much as philosophical, at least as far as ethics is framed in the last two sentences.

gopnik piece on camus/sartre is p terrible

haha you literally could not formulate a piece i would have less interest in reading

otm

otm again i skipped that in a heartbeat

Actually the NYer does formulate pieces I have less interest in reading every week, but they are usually either the non-lead talk of the town pieces, shouts & murmurs, or one of those weird shopping survey articles that that one lady does every so often.

would rather read 100 patricia marx articles than gopnik on sartre

feel like I should read it and report back now

would rather burn my entire face off than read even a single word of adam gopnik about sartre

wld rather die in an unexpected car crash

wld rather die in an EXPECTED car crash

its a p good piece tho srs u guys j/k issue just finished dling

lol the don draper of existentialism is this 4 real

bahahahaha

I hope the other of the two (whichever it is) is the Sterling Cooper

uh I mean Roger Sterling sorry

the french novelist and philosopher albert camus was a terrifically good looking guy whom women fell for helplessly - the don draper of existentialism.

irl opening sentence of this article^

terrifically

I thought Mad Men kind of made Don Draper out to be the Don Draper of existentialism

camus, the don draper of don draper

camus on a cone

the pete campbell of nihilism

haha the whole article is full of these self-satisfied bromides that dont make any sense. i mean i do admire camus but gopniks piece is so wrong-headed its just like '...'

the 1st part re the social dynamic between attractives and nerds is so 'things adam gopnik has thought a lil too much abt'

Is the new Gopnik article another excuse for him to talk about himself?

Article about Karl May is COMPLETELY FUCKING BONKERS. I knew about Schubert adoring James Fenimore Cooper but i had no IDEA about this.

Also yeah took about 1.5 seconds to decide on skipping gopnick/sartre

Patricia Marx on couch-surfing was enjoyable enough and made me want to couch surf.

someone should find a way to combine couch-surfing, crowd-surfing, and crowd-sourcing and call it couch-sourcing.

mailman dropped off new issue and i read it in 3 minutes.

couch-surfing, mecca, russian cooking, croatian party town, zzzzz.

i'm usually so easily entertained.

travel issue is always the worst. who the fuck wants to read about someone else's vacation?

croatoan party town

yeah I have been known to skip travel issue in its entirety

that and the style issue

oh and the titanic zzzzzzz...

Every article in the style issue is "Fashion Designer X is an artist and not just a guy who makes expensive clothes, no really"

i like to read about other people's vacations! if they're good writers

i don't mind travel stuff if the pictures are nice. or yeah good writers.

The fact that they rebranded the travel issue as "Journeys" is even worse.

i love how the couch surfing article painstakingly catalogs all of the rejected surfing opportunities that actually would have made for an interesting article - Marx starts by winnowing out profiles that include the word "party", and then proceeds to reject "a 'lovertarian' who grew up in Doylestown, Pennsylvania", a Hawaiian describing himself as "just a guy who has three acres of land, living in a shipping container house", a warlord from Kabul, and someone who has the had the hiccups every day for the past five years - before settling on Mrs. Boring McBorringster, a grad student from the University of Iowa.

I like my travel stories bland. reaaaaal bland

I didn't mind Gopnick's Camus article so much but I wanted more aphorisms from Camus' notebooks crowing about how hot he was.