New Yorker magazine alert thread

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.

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), Monday, 16 September 2024 bookmarkflaglink

But its also truthful about that class...maybe it needed someone who wasn't a guy to serve this up but most people will more than survive another Trump presidency. They will go to parties and have a good time. Like if Harris wins people will do the same.

The people who find their life difficult and a struggle will also find little change on that score.

That interview had a bit more awareness: she knows she is walking away, that her journalism won't change anything that much, that the private matter in her life may not turn out at all the way it should for someone like her. And she is v otm on COVID, its not talked above it anymore, it has been completely been a thing that happened, that we have 'moved on' from.

Its not a book I am keen on reading though idk if it will be that bad.

I found the NY'er excerpt to be both interesting and emotive on one level but also sort of hilarious on another level. Like I feel bad laughing at a real story with such darkness in it (hey, I did't invent the creative non-fiction industrial complex) but some of it felt so voguish and was accidentally funny as a result, just the way it seems to obliviously yet perfectly capture people stuck in a very particular modern milieu. Including the author herself.

*didn't ffs

I think that’s fair. I also have some gripes with the interview and its framing. I think Gould’s emphasis on certain aspects of the NYer story aren’t inappropriate per se, but definitely push her own preconceptions to the front.

and kate’s right to draw the comparison to the other short story we’ve mentioned on here, albeit in another thread, lately. I think using phrasing like “a little more queer” does come from the sort of liberal mindset other works attempt to satirize but Gould’s not going to ask about that because of where she’s situated! So the interview concentrates on where she saw herself in the story she did read, and the bit that’s outside of her experience.

I wish the interview delved into more of the book. kind of a so-so interview.

i read "the last rave".

even last night, even as i posted it, i felt bad writing the thing i did, my thoughts about that interview. when someone writes a memoir, they're making themselves extremely vulnerable to the judgements of others. others who see them not as who they are, but through the lens of their own preconceptions. i believe that when someone writes about themselves, even if it's mediocre writing, even if it's _bad_ writing, a lot of different things come out, and we don't always know what they are, and we choose which ones to focus on.

and i do that, i think, more than most. i have a tendency to make people's writing about me that's not about me. i try really hard to avoid that. not always totally successfully.

i've read a lot of "new york" writing, and it annoys me to no end. "new york" writing seems so convinced of the specialness of new york, the uniqueness of new york, but what comes out is empty references, name-drops of places i've never been to.

the thing about "the last rave" is this terrible transformation that takes place within it. it starts out as banal and irritating as the writing of any self-absorbed new yorker. well, really, it's just journaling. it's how i started journaling, privately. "i went to x restaurant and ate x food with x person". it's actually good, i think, to write like that privately. to be aware of the facts, what happened and when. because we forget, all of us.

i dated someone briefly who wrote down everything someone said to her, in a notebook. i understand why she did it. she needed to know what was real and what wasn't. what someone had said and what someone hadn't. because of the way one of her exes had treated her. because she had been abused.

the later part of the excerpt i skimmed, but not for the reasons i skimmed the later part of _the feminist_. i don't know if witt's writing is good writing or bad writing. maybe it is like her writing on _new york_, references, not explanations. i just... i know the territory she's describing. i've wanted to write about it, but i don't know how. so much of it can seem banal. so much of it leaves her open to judgement. "you were upset with him for _smoking pot_?" "jesus, you _kicked down the door to his room_?" it's hard to say because she's heard it - she talks about it - she's heard it from andrew, over and over again, how _she's_ the abuser, _she's_ gaslighting him, he doesn't _appreciate_ how she's going around town calling him an "abuser".

and one internalizes that. god knows, over and over again i have to tell this story to myself, to convince myself that i'm not the person that person i loved, that person i trusted, that person i lived with - i'm not the person that other person said i was. that it's not my _fault_, what they did, even if i kicked down a door or punched a wall.

i'm afraid to talk about it because i never know when my ex could be reading, because of the ways they could argue, the things they might say about me. this is the only place i talk about it in public, the only place they _could_ say anything, and they haven't, but it's still so terrifying, every time. i'm terrified of them. i'm terrified that they might have been _right_. like if it's not inappropriate, i'm legit proud of witt, for opening up the way she does, for saying the things she does, even things that make her look superficial and banal. just because i know the territory.

covid was me trapped alone in a house with that person, and seeing them _change_. seeing what isolation did to them, seeing them act differently towards me, say things, do things, and just... not understanding why. i still don't understand why. i was in the phase where i was hanging out with younger people, where i was wanting to party, where i was wanting to live an exciting life and do lots of drugs. i didn't, and in retrospect i don't regret that. i'm trying to live some semblance of a normal life, like i have so many times before, and it's not going to take, i know it. but god, those people, that scene, is so fucked up. i don't want to live there. i don't know where else to go. i can't actually stay here, though.

i'm glad witt isn't afraid now in the way she was back in '20. i'm glad she's been able to find peace, confidence, strength. i'm glad she can speak up, even if she comes off as banal, irritating, entitled at times. i thought often during covid that i couldn't be the only one. i couldn't be the only one who was left trapped, isolated, with someone who'd changed, someone who'd turned terrifying. she's the first person i've seen who talked about having a similar experience to mine. there have to be lots of us, but it's so hard to write about. i'm glad she wrote about it and that she comes from a background that gave her the opportunity to get published, to tell her story. covid enabled a lot of fucked up shit, a lot of abuse. covid was scary for everyone, but it was, i think, scary for me in a way that it wasn't for a lot of people. i haven't seen a lot of people talking about those sorts of experiences. if anybody is gonna talk about that, it's gotta be someone who was affected by it. someone who was a victim.

reading ganz's book on US politics in the 90s (good so far) and delighted / unstartled to see current NYer editor david remnick quoted saying something v smugly vacuous abt h. ross perot lol

lol I bracketed that bit too.

I'm curious what you think of the book when you finish it.

I am blissfully unaware of most of what appears in the NYer, but I honestly don’t give a fuck what any rich white person has to say about partying or raving. At least she isn’t trying to do theory like that abysmal Wark book from a few years back, which was astonishingly embarrassing to read.

(I mainly follow this thread in case anything actually good comes up— once or twice a year, it happens!)

is Emily Witt rich?

I mean maybe not, sort of seems like it tho. I also just assume that anyone who has been able to “support”
themselves writing articles and has an obvious PR machine behind them has some amount of wealth