New Yorker magazine alert thread

she just kind of falls flat when she's writing/on talk shows/basically anything where she doesn't have a bigger cast to support her?

Read the article about Elmhurst Hospital in New York, and by the end I felt it was about three or four different subjects, none of which were quite written about to fruition. Frustrating.

Yeah, i got the sense it was a promise the author made to herself more than an essay

I think LD already proved that not everyone who creates buzzed about tv shows is necessarily going to be good at writing NYer articles

― mimicking regular benevloent (sic) users' names (President Keyes), Thursday, May 16, 2013 4:18 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

i liked her dog article!

woody allen and steve martin proved that about tv writers well before dunham, odenkirk, and kaling got in the game

I actually liked most of the Style issue--Dapper Dan, the crazy billionaire aussie lady, the punk fashion article had some Richard Hell stuff, even the Lena Dunham, though way beneath NYer's standards, did have a circle of puppies sucking each other's dicks.

― gentle german fatherly voice (President Keyes), Tuesday, March 19, 2013 4:50 PM (1 month ago)

the Kaling piece better have a cat orgy

woody allen and steve martin proved that about tv writers well before dunham, odenkirk, and kaling got in the game

― balls, Thursday, May 16, 2013 6:07 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark'

woody allen wrote some amazingly hilarious stuff for the nyer back in the day

was gonna say. martin wasn't too shabby either... and labeling either of them as "tv writers" suggests that those balls are surrounded by a touch of grey

oh god forks

I was pretty neutral on Mindy Kaling before reading her NYer piece. Normally I would feel like "hey, kudos, it must be pretty cool to be published in the NYer!" But mostly I feel embarrassed for her. Like this is something she is going to regret in the morning.

Because it is really bad.

tbf the margaret atwood inventions piece is shitty too and she's margaret atwood

i think the concept for those pieces was just bad overall

i will get by

Cyber espionage piece is A+, if not something I should be reading first thing in the morning.

"We're completely fucked."

a lot of times people who do good work try something a lil out of their wheelhouse and maybe dont care so much and it comes out bad

anyone ever read David Mamet on politics and life my god

Cyber espionage piece is A+, if not something I should be reading first thing in the morning.

― Beatrix Kiddo (Raymond Cummings), Friday, May 17, 2013 5:56 AM (3 hours ago)

is this in the newest one?

yerp

Looking forward to getting my hopes up and ultimately quashed with the fungus plastic and the renewable turbine energy articles.

i noticed two different articles commented on the number of piercings the person being profiled has

Finally got an ipad subscription after usually buying loose issues. Will start with the cyber crime one first (in the evening)

for what it's worth i think the mobile experience is going to drastically improve soon - i interviewed for a mobile app developer job at the nyer a couple months ago and some of the stuff in the pipeline is pretty cool. for one thing, they're moving the ipad version from adobe's proprietary platform to html5 - aka the reason it's normally about six times the filesize of the iphone version. it sounds like conde nast is finally investing pretty heavily in .com and the mobile division, which is long overdue imo

good to hear

Oh wow that is good to hear! I understand now why a single issue is 200+ mb, which is... steep. Five issues are 1gb. With my 16gb ipad that can become a problem quite soon.

The app itself is very clear and reader-friendly, but it's also clunky, and not very intuitive. For one, you can't even pinch and zoom in on the text (not that's not big enough, but I like adjusting it to how I want it to be).

Looking forward to the update.

hey so i'm totally about to board this plane. should be p cool. see u later

haha wrong thread

Haha, order your subscription NOW arby's!

they're moving the ipad version from adobe's proprietary platform to html5

oh god i hope this doesn't require an active connection (i assume not)

nope - it'll function identically to the iphone version, which is already html5-based. each page of the ipad version, iirc, literally gets rendered as a bitmap

iphone issues are too big too tho ~40mb

so i read that mindy kaling article, it wasn't great but neither were any of the other ones in that pretty dumb recurring feature... really dont see why hers deserved calling out or why its like PROOF she's untalented or something

nope - it'll function identically to the iphone version, which is already html5-based. each page of the ipad version, iirc, literally gets rendered as a bitmap

oh ace

lagϚn: 40 mb isn't too bad given the images, but i agree that 10 mb would be preferable

theres no way the the v few images for such a small screen should add up to 40mb, still some weird shit going on there, i mean 40mb for the iphone screen is m/l the same thing as 200 for the ipad

"I asked if he or Gavin knew anything about fungi, and he said, 'Not that much. I told him that I felt the universe had been directing me to change my life. Skidmore had cut fungi out of the curriculum, and at a Dreaming with the Dead workshop in '05, I had received a message: 'Life is mushrooming.' I was testing him to see how he would react. I told him what had happened the night before--I had seen a milk snake doing a dance of death beside a road near my house, and when I checked again the snake was curled in the shape of a heart. This was a sign that I should do what I loved. Even listened, and totally got what I was saying. That's when I knew I could work with him. I asked him, 'Can we get married?'"

From the plastic fungus piece.

yeah i love the way the author just kind of drops the superwoowoo lady into that piece

i stopped reading that a page or so in because i was like i'm not even sold on this being a thing yet, do i really need to know all about these guys' extended family history, but should i go back?

try reading it backwards

I unno, I didn't mind the family history tbh! Anyway it kind of pays off quickly in that it explains the initial eureka moment, and maybe how they were able to get their startup off the ground (still reading it atm).

i stopped reading that a page or so in because i was like i'm not even sold on this being a thing yet, do i really need to know all about these guys' extended family history, but should i go back?

― we're up all night to get (s1ocki), Saturday, May 18, 2013 4:34 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

very frequently feel this way about new yorker articles

yeah they could def stand to leave out the background info from time to time

u mad that's what i read nyer for

its sometimes illuminating but sometime not and like im just sayin feel free to switch up the format occasionally

a nyer story: zoom in, zoom out, childhood, factoids, factoids, think abt it

ya that was def something that i really loved about it when i first got into the mag, all the character profiles & the way they'd humanize the most obscure or even evil ppl... but sometimes i find it tiresome, idk like it's stretching out to cover up for less thorough reporting, describing in minute detail what the person was wearing to cover up for the short & shallow interview they're using

I wish I were a humanities grad student and could make a thesis out of analyzing all NYer writing, ever, and determine what percentage of pieces had a physical description of someone and/or his/her attire as the second sentence.

they don't print many photos; physical discriptions are important

they famously didn't print any photos until somewhat recently. for some reason 'no photos' was a point of pride for a certain class of publication - nyer, new republic, wall st journal.

the whole thing of setting up a story and then about 1/5 of the way in going "klaus dingeldore was born in a placid rhineland village in 1972. his father was a monkey keeper" is 100% just part of the structure of its profile pieces but i didnt really think the mushroom thing was going to be a profile piece but more of a science/product thing i guess. i guess i was less interested in hearing about the family history of a 28-year-old cool dude who has an exciting new form of styrofoam.