New Yorker magazine alert thread

I did like his Personal History about hitchhiking around the world as a teenager in the '70s.

people putting themselves in uncomfortable & inadvisable situations

this one was really good:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/29/the-woman-who-spent-five-hundred-days-in-a-cave

Yes exactly right, a perfect example of the form.

I wouldn’t worry about this too much. he’s in his mid-50s, is 6 foot 8 and overweight, has heart failure, and already had a stroke

― brony james (k3vin k.), Tuesday, June 25, 2024 2:42 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

also, a terrible driver

― A So-Called Pulitzer price winner (President Keyes),

otm

Back when I subscribed - I dropped off last fall because it got too expensive and I wasn’t reading enough for it to be worth it - was largely about the movie reviews, the music blurbs, the book reviews, the occasional big feature. The poetry sometimes, the fiction less often, when it was a fiction writer I was into.

What I pretty much always read and was always reliably delighted by: Peter Schjeldahl, the GOAT.

Same.

I sometimes skip long features about international subjects (sorry, Jon Lee Anderson!)

this is crazy! who else is doing what he’s doing? I’d pay for a quarterly with a single 30 page JLA feature per issue

he really is one of the best

I'm more likely to read him if I'm keeping up with the magazine week to week, as opposed to trying to get through a stack of back issues.

I try to read as much as I can online.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/02/lucy-letby-found-guilty-of-trying-to-kill-two-hour-old-baby

I read it through my local library via Libby app.

Shocking case, defence were negligible in not challenging more robustly the statistics used to convict her.

― Dan Worsley, Wednesday, May 15, 2024 4:17 AM bookmarkflaglink

Same. It's free with a lot of local library cards. https://libbyapp.com/

Now Letby is proper locked up for lifetimes we have opening of restrictions:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/09/lucy-letby-evidence-experts-question

if we're going to discuss her it should be in a new thread.

I posted as an aftermath of the discussion here. Fell there is not much left to say but sure if anyone wants to.

How about that Last Rave book excerpt though, yeesh, sure makes you feel great about your own life choices and judgements of character huh.

It got Bruce a NYer shoutout though -
Thread of Bruce

was in london last week & none of my friends there think she's innocent, all mostly think that americans getting their info from the new yorker article don't really understand the situation etc. was interesting to hear, as well as somewhat surprising

I don’t have any british friends apart from the lovely posters on this board but it does seem like a peculiar situation, like a culture of normal people you might go to the pub with or catch a soccer match, but also they consume news like north koreans

Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?
Not all messages are displayed: show all messages (10185 of them)

Why I hate the Daily Mail, as distilled into one edition
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like a culture of normal people you might go to the pub with or catch a soccer match, but also they consume news like north koreans

― brony james (k3vin k.), Tuesday, 9 July 2024 bookmarkflaglink

That's right

had any of them actually read the new yorker article (getting around the geoblocking) or were they just dismissing it out of hand?

There's a long piece today in the Daily Telegraph, of all places, so the doubting experts are finally getting a hearing. Regardless of her guilt or innocence the conviction is clearly unsafe, although the molasses-like pace of British justice means it'll probably be overturned sometime in the 2040s.

the telegraph article: https://archive.fo/Sooys

seems really conclusive

excellent timing

it’s a bit mind bending where you this high minded idea of not wanting to bias the jury but then when you think about it it the jury is british people reading british journalists, it’s hard to predict how things might hypothetically shake out if there was a more normal situation going on with regard to basic press freedoms and things of that nature

it would for sure be a bit of a blind leading the blind type of deal but I’m not convinced it would be worse, we should run an experiment on them though for sure

you can tell I’m very for sure about my last post for sure

Really enjoying these "If I was a member of Britisher jury at the Lucy Letby trial" stand up comedy routine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/magazine/russell-lee-maze-murder-conviction-dna.html

this story felt like an American counterpart to Lucy Letby, with innocent people sentenced to life in prison because of a sick infant.

There's a thread about it by the writer here:

I want to tell you a story about what happened when an assistant DA, Sunny Eaton, tried to undo a decades-old conviction—one that her own office had prosecuted.

The conviction rested on a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.

An appeals court recently called SBS “junk science.”🧵 pic.twitter.com/tMIVsUHUqd

— Pamela Colloff (@pamelacolloff) July 20, 2024

pirate article in the new issue was a fun and interesting read

arrr

That Russell Maze article is sickening and infuriating. Nothing like a miscarriage of justice to make a horrible situation even worse.

yeah I can't even imagine how the Mazes could feel

that article is so heartbreaking, and yeah, has a lot in common with the letby case. feel awful for the mazes. and I’d love to run into that “child abuse specialist” POS dr starling one day

speaking of letby, seems the new yorker is once again turning its gaze toward the british (in)justice system in this week’s issue…

I do not understand how French cancer lady was horny through chemotherapy.

the book Health and Safety by Emily Witt, from which that NYer story The Last Rave was excerpted, is out this week

I’ll probably have a lot of thoughts, although I’m not sure I’ll be able to articulate them well. Probably why I didn’t post about TLR when I read it sometime last month. There were a lot of segments that felt like they described a life parallel to my own, or paths I could have taken at different times. Turns out I’m the same age as the writer.

I liked that excerpt and am interested to read the book.

did I forget to link the interview? I did!

https://www.thecut.com/article/interview-emily-witt-health-and-safety-book.html

Really like Emily, at least those pieces about dating (pre- NYer gig) felt very open and truthful, she has away of letting it be on the page that's satisfying.

Good interview. Hope the book does well.

Wow, I thought that excerpt showed a pretty extreme lack of self-awareness and reminded me of people I know who continue to make awful choices for themselves, who I've had to draw hard boundaries with. It was sort of compelling in a trashy way but I can't imagine reading the whole book. To give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe she did a great job of recapturing her mindset from that period of her life and the rest of the book is "what the hell was I thinking?"

The interview makes her seem unpleasant and solipsistic. Haven't read the book excerpt.

Instead, she started out writing an elegy for the Bushwick-based rave-culture scene,

I'm out.

i liked the book excerpt as personal memoir — i also lived 5 mins from bossa for many years, have been to all the same parties etc so there was something of personal interest there. i liked that her prose is clear-eyed and direct tho

i will say that gould’s implication that there is something profoundly dissonant about the experience of protesting by day and partying by night feels pretty ignorant of how politics and clubbing have functioned symbiotically for decades now. it’s fair to say witt isn’t writing a cultural history — and it’s obv where gould is connecting with it based on her own recent writing — but i think probing her experience with BLM protests & the brooklyn club scene of that time w/in a historical context would’ve been a lot more interesting as an interview topic than framing it in a way where witt is like “um yeah my friends were kinda older so they didn’t get the party scene and then i found younger friends” … not exactly hugely revelatory. but anyway

I definitely think that if this book about covering Trump rallies and doing massive amounts of drugs with younger people was written by a guy we would all be rightly telling him to go fuck off

writing about drugs didn’t feature very prominently in the excerpt, that feels like a red herring to me. the book (from all appearances) is about her encouraging her boyfriend’s political activity post george floyd which leads to them going to a protest together, him getting assaulted and arrested and then spiraling out mentally, which leads to them breaking up etc. the partying is context for that, it’s how they met, but i think your description is a bit of a caricature

Probably. Mostly basing my feeling on the interview’s description:

In Health and Safety, Witt has created a historical record of a moment in time that feels real and human in addition to containing a virtuosically detailed depiction of what a night out on LSD, ketamine, MDMA, cocaine, weed, and alcohol feels like.

This is paywalled now but I remember it being very eye-rolly.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n14/emily-witt/diary

I did think it was funny how the best version of the boyfriend (before going full psycho) was stoned all the time and a "music producer" who never seemed to make anything, and somehow (gee I wonder how) didn't have to work for a living. Would love his soundcloud url.