New Yorker magazine alert thread

When I die it will be under a hoarders stack of those two plus damaged comics and GNs I take from work planning to read

have to say i wasn't really enthralled by the grann excerpt. will still buy the book tho obv

I liked the Paul LaFarge piece on the unusual and ultimately tragic life of H.P. Lovecraft's young protege Robert Barlow.

The simulation argument piece made me laugh at this casual aside "Many people have imagined this scenario over the years, of course, usually while high."

uh so apols for slight spam, but if any london ilxors are reading this, I have a ticket to see Grann introduce a screening of the film at the bfi tonight at 8.30 and have to stay in for the plumber. Ticket's at the box office. Reply to thread or paul dot clark at britisher yahoo

read the herbalife story

lol capitalism

we shd use this thread to just dispassionately audit the magazine contents in the hope of once in a while triggering discussion. this wk's ish is great i think; the marantz thing is just so devastating, kind of like the one-a-week talk spots chronicling descent into fascism in this somehow zippy & brutal register. the watch thing really endearing also.

also-also i think the last thing i would have mentioned if this thread was somewhere i habitually mentioned things was the zadie smith billie holiday thing, i never read the fiction but i thought it was like one of those kevin spacey mfa-southern aside to cameras in house of cards, like they could have had him read it for the fiction podcast.

i miss jack already. used to drink with him and my brother in new milford, ct during the grunge years and he was such a swell guy and so funny. and gary larson still owes him some money. rest in peace.

https://scontent.fbed1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/17629612_10158454090190298_4470249223408653381_n.jpg?oh=bf8902157c72b63fc861971ea5089fd8&oe=59534A4F

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/10/death-of-a-dystopian

v sad reading that and then going to watch the trailer and all the comments full of ppl caught in the same delusions

the trolls won when reagan did, in retrospect

That article was intense. Not one I'll forget anytime soon.

who is rod dreher and why is he trying to fill my neighborhood with catholics?!??!

he wishes they were eastern orthodox (for now, anyway)

I liked that profile b/c dude seems p obviously fucked up over his dad and his own lifestyle choices and w/e. Sounds like the religious community he's really looking for is charedi Jews.

sold for parts: exploitation and abuse at the chicken plant

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/08/exploitation-and-abuse-at-the-chicken-plant

I learned a few days ago that Dreher played a major hand in forming the Florida Film Critics Circle; he was apparently some ex officio member in the '90s.

this court case is really something else
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/22/what-makes-a-parent

i thought that story was interesting but their case seemed so unique i don't really get how it can really be a test case for anything. they were SO BAD at actually communicating or talking about the status of their relationship.

is it just me or does gunn really not seem to have a case at all?

and seems like an awful person

or that if she has a case it opens up a troubling precedent for all kinds of claims we'd consider dubious

it seemed like her case was that she had enough money to keep the case going and put financial pressure on the other woman

xp. that was a particularly terrible way of phrasing that as i don't have any idea whether she has a case under new york state family law, but i mean, from an intuitive point of view this woman is not the child's parent and shouldn't be able to prevent the parent from taking the child to the uk just because she has money

The quiddities and agonies rich person introduction doesn't help my feelings toward Gunn.

if anyone remembers his profile from a couple of years back, karl deissiroth, the stanford psychiatrist and neuroscientist, is speaking at my girlfriend's med school graduation.

just finished that parenthood legal battle case and gunn is basically a monster

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/19/how-st-augustine-invented-sex

I invented sex. You’re welcome, pals.

Well, for anyone that has been clamoring for a 20-page piece on Texas politics ...

thoughts?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-against-civilization

it's definitely an interesting piece but i found myself feeling v skeptical about its conclusions?

Me too, but I loved it and got tons of sparks off it. Really want to read the book about bushmen it cites.

James C. Scott is pretty good but you have to keep in mind his granaries-are-the-enemy-of-the-people thing goes back years and years and years.

Hunter-gatherers don't have pizza or beer so nah. Speaking of which I'm disappointed the piece doesn't even touch on the hypothesis that people went in for the Neolithic revolution because agriculture provides for a steady supply of booze.

'moral economy of the peasant' is the best Scott imo

whenever i come across this argument, wonder if they aren't idealizing the experience of tribal societies who happened to luckily live in abundance....for instance cabeza de vaca's account of living in pre-agricultural texas...no thanks.

i plan to read Scott's book though.

Lillian Ross has died at 99. One of my all-time favorites is her profile of Hemingway. https://t.co/v20xA6LkZM

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) September 20, 2017

god it's exhausting reading that. such a bloviating old gasbag that seems conjured, an antic fictional character. those constant sporting metaphors, the shadow-boxing. hemingway really was a pos.

clearly you are NOT AN AMERICAN

unbelievably controlled writing. the picture she builds up, piece by piece, the oppressiveness of his tics. devastating

there's something feminist about it, too.. she carefully records who does the unpacking, who keeps track of the toothbrush, who keeps the train on the tracks

from Adam Gopnick's sharp review of Chernow's U.S. Grant bio:

A student of American prose could hold up Adams’s Grant-bashing memoir against Grant’s own memoir to define the two furthest points of American recollection: one discursive, mordant, allusive, and hyperbolic—exaggeration of affect is the key to Adams’s “education”—the other pointed, reduced, and understated. (Lincoln’s speeches, Grant’s memoirs, and Stephen Crane’s stories are the triple pillars of American stoical prose to this day.) What the two old enemies have in common, significantly, is a natural taste for irony: Grant’s understatements, like Adams’s self-mortifications, are meant to make the narrator seem modest while showing that he sees through everything. Grant underplays savage battles to escape the pretensions of heroic rhetoric; Adams overdramatizes his internal “lessons” to mock the earnest pretensions of intellect to master the commercial world. Grant’s battles have no heroism; they just happen. Adams’s education keeps sending him back to Go.

Whenever I’m intimidated about how smart Gopnik is, I just have to remember the number of problems he’s solved.

This line of thinking might deserve its own thread.

Man I don’t know I almost always skip gopnick he is hella annoying

^

often annoying, but he's not always wrong (except about hockey)

this was otm

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-dangerous-acceptance-of-donald-trump

I find that there are very few New Yorker writers distinctive enough to be especially irritating. I've probably read dozens of Adam Gopnik pieces and I couldn't tell you a single thing about his writing.

heroic detachment ftw

Adam Gopkin said 9/11 Manhattan smelled like Mozarella cheese. That's what I remember about him.

That is inaccurate btw

France, the 70s, young man older woman, just making my way through it now.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1971/06/26/immortal-gatito?mbid=social_twitter