New Yorker magazine alert thread

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
Not all messages are displayed: show all messages (2871 of them)

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.

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

I wont weigh in on that, but on a related note I thought the excerpt was a perfect example of the kind of story that, if it was exactly the same but took place in Pittsburgh or San Jose, it would not be a forthcoming Penguin memoir excerpted in the New Yorker. Not that shes not a very good prose stylist but being an NY story makes it inherently interesting to the solipsistic NY publishing world. Getting too old to party, breaking up, and coming into political consciousness are not exactly unexplored terrain, as good as her sentences are I didnt think she had anything interesting to say about the overgrown rich babies she was writing about

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

― There’s a Monster in my Vance (President Keyes)

maybe this is me drawing parallels where they aren't there, but i feel like if she was a guy she'd have a lot in common with the protag of "The Feminist" by Tony Tulathimutte

particularly the bit where - to paraphrase - the protag sleeps with a girl and then ghosts her because she's "crazy"

anyway i'm reading the article and god who came up with that headline? "the first great memoir of the trump years". you gotta ignore a lot of memoirs to say that.

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.

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.)

i think it's unintentionally revealing. it's dissonant for _her_, certainly. she goes to these parties and then she goes back to hang out with her "respectable" friends and write "respectable" articles about rittenhouse. and then, you know, she walks away. from kenosha, from the party scene. or tells herself she's walking away, at least.

this sentence strikes me:

So when I met Andrew, his friends were, compared to the writing scene, all a little younger, and a little bit more culturally diverse, and a little more queer, and definitely less patriarchal.

"a little more queer". like... how does one reconcile a statement like that with her saying:

When I came back to New York at the end of my 20s, I was hanging out mostly with writers. And I just didn’t find it to be that healthy of a place to be. I never got a real relationship out of it. I never got a romantic relationship. I definitely felt a lot of gender stuff there.

she felt a lot of "gender stuff" (what does that mean? i don't know what she means by that), she didn't think it was a healthy place to be, so what? she quits her wellbutrin and does all the drugs, molly, cocaine (not fent, of course, not fent) and goes and hangs out with queer people (though she herself doesn't seem to be queer) and dates a younger man who has a violent manic episode, because dating writers wasn't a _healthy place to be_?

the sense i get is that in her head, she was just taking a walk on the wild side, and when shit gets too real she goes back to her writer friends, who maybe aren't quite as respectable as she'd like to think them to be? she plays this role at work and i mean... really, _none_ of her co-workers have issues with substance abuse? _none_ of them could understand where she's coming from? the lady interviewing her is emily gould, "a novelist, critic, and features writer for new york magazine", and in her role as an interview... this idea of "respectability", when gould talks about herself in that interview, about her life, she's comparing herself - quite accurately, i'd say - to people in the party scene, people gould sort of relegates to the demimonde. not like _her_. not really.

there's this really revealing bit of the interview where emily gould, the interviewer, talks about her own mental health episode. she's reading about witt's boyfriend andrew's mental health crisis, asking her husband "was i that bad", and he says "yes". and i've had episodes like that, all my life, and they were that bad, and i try to deal with the reality of it. and gould asks, hey, do you think writing about andrew that way was maybe, you know, a little bit not cool? and witt answers:

This is how life is. I didn’t want to pretend like it was something else. And I guess I, as a reader, don’t like when things are hedged out of some idea of what’s polite or of propriety. It’s like, Why bother writing anything if it’s not going to be a true thing?

and the thing about memoirs, you know, is that one is writing about oneself. and perhaps she doesn't understand what it says about _her_.

there's a phrase that gets used in a queer context that's really interesting to me, and it's "dual-role". you pretend to be one thing for public acceptability, but in private, you're something else. it's not something that applies only in a queer sense. i have held, for a long time, a corporate job, performed respectability. and i've worked hard to bridge that gap. it's not feasible for me to pretend that the stuff i have had to deal with is something i can walk away from. being queer is part of it, sure, but emily gould does also deal with the reality of it. doesn't other those experiences the way witt does. being with someone who's behaving like andrew behaved - like gould apparently behaved, like i behaved - is fucking real, is fucking scary, will fuck a person up, in the long-term. and one has to learn to live with that. and i guess one way of doing that is treating it like a "phase".

thinking about it more, she doesn't come off as someone superficial. she comes off as someone in denial. she's telling herself, you know, my parents paid to have my eggs frozen, i can have a nice normal relationship and a family and a white picket fence and. girl. that's not who you are. that's not _ever_ who you were, that's not ever who your nice "respectable" writer co-workers are or were.

I still go to parties, and I sometimes do drugs, but more than that, they continue to be an intellectual interest.

an _intellectual interest_? fucking... really? "oh sure i still do cocaine and spend all night partying but it's just an intellectual interest, i can stop at any time."

when i think of memoirs about people who party and do drugs, the one i think of is "trans girl suicide museum" by hannah baer. it's complicated in a lot of ways but she does at deal with partying is desperate and maybe sometimse kind of fucked up. one's scared. one has to deal with that fear. and with witt, when she talks about fear, she does seem to have a complicated attitude.

Now, I think we’re all a little bit embarrassed about how scared we were during the pandemic, even though the fear was totally justified and so many people died. But when we remember all the scolding and stuff from that time, I think everybody’s a little embarrassed and doesn’t really want to think about it too much.

we aren't _all_ a little bit embarrassed of being scared. i'm still scared. i'm more scared. and witt, she talks in her memoir about being scared. gould quotes it to her:

A middle-aged solitude I had always been scared of was happening and I saw the loneliness of the years ahead and it terrified me. I was wrong about a lot of things at that time but I was right to be scared about that.

you know, is she _embarrassed_ about being scared? or is she, maybe, still more scared than she wants to let on, still trying to convince herself that she's _normal_, that she's not _like_ the people she parties with out of, uh, "intellectual interest".

thinking about it, she really doesn't have anything in common with the protag of _the feminist_. ultimately she _is_ a real person, at least.