New Yorker magazine alert thread

I think that's the heart of the matter: if it was good then we might not even consider the part that wealth had to play in sustaining the writer.

― xyzzzz__

i think for me that is the heart of the matter! i haven't read the work in question by wark, so i guess my main consideration is witt - the new yorker excerpt and that interview. like, is witt's writing bad writing on a _moral level_. like, does she have an essential duty as a writer that she's failing to fulfill. table, that's kind of what i hear in what you're saying about witt's writing on dance music and drugs. if that is what you're saying, i accept that!

and at the same time i accept that as true, i also believe that in a different sense, her writing is _good_ on a moral level. i say that because i'm a woman and an abuse victim, and witt is a woman and an abuse victim writing about her experience as a woman and an abuse victim. none of that excuses or mitigates any ways in which her writing fails. i think her writing is _worthy_ of publication, though. i'm glad i had the opportunity to read it.

there are some people who... i think it's bad that they have a public voice. that they get paid to say the stuff they do. matt walsh, for instance. and i'd differentiate that from wark and witt. when they do erasure, it's important for that to be addressed. and i still think it's good that they can have careers as writers. i don't think that should be at the expense of other people's careers as writers, people who can write about the things they write about without being _bad_. but even if witt's writing is bad, even if she's a _bad writer_, i think it's good that she can make a living as a writer. because to me, she's also a good writer.

fwiw you can get a good sense of new yorker salaries at their jobs page https://www.newyorker.com/about/careers

seems like high five figures to low six figures is the norm

What a good Wark book to start with?

What a good Wark book to start with?

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

honestly i just know her as a journalist

her wikipedia article says this:

Both these studies grew out of Wark's experience as a public intellectual who participated in public controversies, mainly through her newspaper column in The Australian, a leading national daily. She developed an approach based on participant observation, but adapted to the media sphere.

i'm deeply skeptical of the figure of the "public intellectual". i mean nowadays that's called "discourse". she does "discourse". she was one of those, you know, wired magazine people in the '90s. i actually wouldn't defend any of her work. i more defend her as a person. she's a 61-year-old trans woman who transitioned later in life, just a little before i did. i mean me as a trans woman, a lot of the role models i have are shitty role models, in a lot of ways. being trans _is_ diy... i don't know if i mentioned it or if i took it out, but the piece of hers that had the most impact on me is her review of grace lavery's _please, miss_, where wark talks about autodidacticism as a "trans fetish". i think wark, for better or worse, does sort of embody the trans autodidact, someone who makes it up as she goes along despite having shitty role models. that one sentence of hers, it also resonates with me because it acknowledges that fetishism _does_ play a role in transness, just not the one people think it does, not in the way people think it does.

mostly, though, if you look at trans people, we're fucked up people in a lot of ways, fucked up people who do fucked up shit. i mean elagabalus is a trans role model but she was also a genuinely awful emperor, perhaps genuinely The Worst Emperor. reed erickson, a crucially important figure in trans history, was a literal fucking cult leader. trans people's work, _particularly_ white trans people's work, is just filled with really bad takes. julia serano's "whipping girl" is really influential on me, was really influential on a lot of trans people, but she _doesn't_ have a humanities background, she's a biologist, and the limitations of that are _very apparent_ in her work. whipping girl has a lot of bad takes. "whipping girl" erases non-binary identities, erases gender non-conformity out of the constructed category of "trans". i think that's a problem. i don't think that's an excusable problem, and at the same time i _do_ think whipping girl is worth reading, worth reading critically. on the other side of the equation, kate bornstein, her writing on gender treats non-binary identity like it's _better_ than "binary transness". i think that's bad too, and i still think her work is important.

to me, i think the best writer, the writer who i think has had the most positive influence on me, is someone like jules gill-peterson. i would recommend _a short history of trans misogyny_. i think it's best and least, uh, _problematic_ book on transfem theory i've read. it was also published this year, haha. _histories of the transgender child_ was published in '18, and i didn't hear about it, and the last time i tried to read it it wasn't intelligible to me. _a short history of trans misogyny_ is an academic book and as such it was hard for me to read, since i don't have an academic background, but it was worth it.

having said that, i mean, i don't think the entire weight of intersectional transness _should_ fall on people like gill-peterson. as a white trans person, i have tried to learn from gill-peterson, have tried to take on experiences outside the specific area of "trans woman". at the same time, "trans woman" is a culturally coherent and meaningful identifier, an identifier that carries with it a unique experience of marginalization, and so yes, speaking as a trans woman, the writing of other people who also describe themselves that way, belong to that group, has a unique importance to me.

unfortunately the way that it's often used, the shit that trans women, particularly white trans women, sometimes talk, what happens is that Discourse happens, systemically i think it's encouraged for marginalized groups to be put in situations where we're competing with each other. and i fucking hate that. for me, not doing that is hard fucking work. sometimes my interests as a member of a marginalized group _do_ conflict with the interests of people who are marginalized in different ways from me. those conflicts cause a _lot of trouble_.

the thing that vexes me the most, the thing that causes me the most trouble, is that Discourse often involves conflict between transfems and transmascs. this is on my mind because i was just playing this interactive fiction game, LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST ... by the way i'm only through act II but i'd recommend playing that game more than i'd recommend reading mckenzie wark. if you're ok with absolutely filthy writing with a transmasc protag. because, i mean, to really understand trans people, i feel like it helps a lot if to be willing and able engage with the absolute filthiest, kinkiest shit in a totally non-judgemental way. (it's even better if you engage with it and say "well shit this is super hot"). that loops back to wark because i do know that wark published her correspondence with kathy acker in 2015 as _i'm very into you_, and apparently there is a lot of sexual content in those letters. and personally LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST interests me more than those letters.

damn i wish i could deconstruct the walls of discourse between transmascs and transfems do the way valentine and artemis do. by which i mean laughing at how stupid it is and then doing kinky shit to each other. but instead, i start hanging around transmascs and i get super insecure, i get hung up on the stupid shit some transfems say and the stupid shit some transmascs say and gah.

but they're going to say stupid fucking shit. like it's an important part of it, trans people say stupid fucking shit sometimes and it doesn't invalidate the stuff we say that isn't stupid fucking shit. it's just, like. hard work. i don't know what i'm doing, most of us, i get the sense, don't really know what we're doing here.

so tl;dr, don't read wark, read jules gill-peterson's _a short history of trans misogyny_ and/or play the interactive fiction game LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST and recognize that a lot of us fuck up and we're trying not to.

fwiw you can get a good sense of new yorker salaries at their jobs page https://www.newyorker.com/about/careers

seems like high five figures to low six figures is the norm

― 龜, Tuesday, September 24, 2024 9:47 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

none of these are staff writer positions though

big dawg dunno what to tell you https://i.postimg.cc/tJdGXPgH/shrug2.gif

looks promising (is there a better thread?)

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/say-nothing-fx-first-look-awards-insider

loved the book

IN SOLIDARITY NEWS: 100 of our 101 New Yorker union members unanimously voted YES (one abstained) to authorize a strike should the bargaining committee deem it necessary

— “holden” “seidlitz” (@jock__derrida) October 3, 2024

Who was the one

This guy

https://newyorkerstateofmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/5179758-2011_02_14.jpg

no resistance libbo but if anyone is looking for something to maybe pull themselves out of post-election despair, i enjoyed reading alexei navalny's prison diaries that were published earlier this month. there is a lot in there about why people should continue to summon the energy to stand up to despotic leaders, if that's your bag today, but his writing on the purpose and methods of essentially choosing happiness even in the face of grave darkness (and he faced some of the gravest) really rang a chord w/ me, for reasons not related to politics, but today kinda works for those purposes too

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/alexei-navalny-patriot-memoir

the greg jackson short story this week strongly was reminding me of something that i couldnt place… until i did… the beginning of novel explosives by jim gauer.. very similar conceit of a man w/o memories trying to piece things together in a hotel / isolated setting

https::/twitter.com/parul_sehgal/status/1857464284462109039?s=46&t=XlsbhgknQH65_CH00_uPqw

this is a bummer for me — she’s probably my favorite popular literary critic

I am afraid to ask about this new Ideas Franchise

what’s this in reference to?

the thing that Sehgal is returning to the NYT for

The world does not need another Aspen Ideas festival. It does not need even need the one Aspen Ideas festival

it's not a festival. it's just the name of a weekly feature in the paper: https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/ideas

idk why they call it a "franchise."

Once again marveling at the fact that Calvin Tomkins is still publishing reported features in the magazine. (The latest is a profile of artist Rashid Johnson in the Dec. 16 issue.) He has been on staff since 1960 and turns 99 tomorrow.

yep everytime i see his byline im awed

I read the Rachel Aviv article about Alice Munro and her daughter’s sexual abuse. Phew. Great story, told with clarity and sensitivity. It can’t really answer its most urgent underlying questions, because it sees that there aren’t good answers to them, only bad ones, partial ones — and in a way, that becomes the answer. The first way to understand HOW this happened is to accept that it DID. (Which of course could be an insight from one of Munro’s own stories.)

I skipped it because, while I like aviv's work, I'm unfamiliar with munro's. silly reason and https://buttondown.com/lastweeksnewyorker/archive/last-weeks-new-yorker-review-december-30-january-6/ makes a good case that it's worth reading regardless.

Yeah, I'm not super-familiar with Munro's work (I've read maybe a couple of stories years ago), but the Aviv article is very good.

Some familiarity probably makes it hit harder, but I've probably only read a half-dozen stories myself. One thing that gave me a bit of a chill was the reference to her story about the woman going to visit in prison the man who killed her children, because she still feels connected to him. I remember reading that one in the New Yorker when it came out and being a little shook by it — my kids were quite young at the time, for one thing, and for another it felt so dark and strange. Now becomes clearer where it was coming from.

Netflix documentary forthcoming, in conjunction with the magazine's centennial: https://archive.ph/ZT9jT

What the world needs now is Gary Shteyngart going deep on capybaras

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/02/03/how-the-capybara-won-my-heart-and-almost-everyone-elses

knausgard piece in this one too

is the capybara article supposed to be bad

is the author doing a bit

I haven’t read it but it’s Gary Shteyngart so probably yes

this is terribly unfair! capybaras deserve better. and so do we, by golly. i'm going to put "angry letter to nyer mag" on my List and promptly forget about it, that'll show 'em

Yeah, that article was very dumb. The short story in this week's issue kinda sucked, too.

I ate a capybara in Suriname over 30 years ago. Pretty tasty, but maybe not as good as iguana

!!!!!!!!!! how capybara taste????????! and how was it prepared? they look like meaty little lads; i could imagine carving a juicy steak off one. they have that semi aquatic thing going on so perhaps they fishy?

but anyway that article, sheesh. he calls dominant males alphas despite that never having been a real thing, and then calls the other males incels? i hate that. incel capybaras. horrible. and he hyphenated early morning and no one on their staff of nerds stopped it. the nerds whiff it again when he talks about people speaking spanish in brazil -- come the heck on bro brazil is like the second most portuguese place and how come candy nast paid you to go harass animals there and you don't even get the language right you absolute goober.

and their exploitation by the capybara cafe, influencers, zoos that don't take proper care of them, he acknowledges it but just shrugs because looking at big rodents makes him happy and there's nothing more to it. he could easily have drawn a parallel with his (weird and clumsy) characterization of them as favorites of the working class but nah, not even that. bad article! bad writer! boo!

i admire the hustle at least. guy got paid to fly around the world and cuddle capybaras.

I think the Spanish speaking was in the scenes in Argentina

gosh dang it you're right and now i'm even more mad

The story doesn’t really go anywhere — despite Shteyngart running up quite a travel tab — but it is still about capybaras, and hence worthwhile.

capybaras eat their own poop and in turn their poop is eaten by tadpoles https://defector.com/normalize-eating-poop

The circle of life

Capybara, as I recall, was a bit “tough”/chewy. It was stir fried with chilis, not unlike the Indonesian dish dengdeng balado

We reading this yet

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/02/10/the-us-militarys-recruiting-crisis?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Weekly_020325&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_term=tny_weekly_digest&bxid=5be9da642ddf9c72dc27c25d&cndid=29476922&hasha=f0ef51a738774f8c6d037c5c6beb7573&hashb=7cfed5b1cbcbc6a71fea3c2fc2bc754ee2661f52&hashc=fdd5c8d249d863be98861f55628588b242a4ca01384346986428715bbfdd44db&esrc=auto_auth_de

#letbyWatch

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/feb/04/no-medical-evidence-to-support-lucy-letby-conviction-expert-panel-finds

“I’ve moved beyond the world you live in. I cut the tether. It was just me, the great outdoors, and the phone I relied on heavily for navigation, documentation, and a podcast to take my mind off how much sweat was pooling around my lower back. Nothing can compare to the type of awareness you feel when you take out your headphones and realize that someone has been trying to pass you for a mile.”

A bit old, but so what?

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/behold-i-have-returned-from-a-hike

i liked the leaning tower article, esp how it still kept to the house style of touching on historical structures & foundations

"I always tell them, pay the foundation person more money than you'd ever imagine paying them, because you will never fix a foundation,"

Keen-eyed grammar fans may notice some changes in our pages -- and in this newsletter. Last fall, David Remnick, the editor, suggested convening a group to talk about the magazine’s house style, to see if any rules might bear reëxamination. The group—comprising copy editors, current and former, and editors -- met this past January and came up with a list of styles that might qualify for changes, and in a subsequent meeting the following month the director of copy and production and I came up with a limited list of proposals. It was decided that, while no one wanted to change some of the long-standing “quirky” styles (teen-ager, per cent, etc.), some of newer vintage could go. Along with a few other changes, “in-box” is now “inbox,” “Web site” is now “website,” “Internet” is now “internet,” and “cell phone” is now “cellphone” (though everyone acknowledges that the word “cell” in this context will soon disappear altogether).

Some of you may lament the changes as being radically modern, while others are likely to greet them as long overdue. Welcome to 1995, you may be thinking. (Italicized thoughts are new, too.) Regardless, it should be noted that the diaeresis has overwhelming support at the magazine, and will remain.

seems reasonable!

should have fucked with people by changing out Regardless for Irregardlessly at the end

^^ this is the kind of quality lovable mookieproofposting that keeps me coming back here

you are kind but mistaken : /