New Yorker magazine alert thread

i used to read the main articles in every issue but let most of my 2010 issues pile up without reading anything.

if you read something good in a new issue of the New Yorker, post about it here.

The review of the new Mao biographies.

Denby's Joan Crawford essay.

A trick to not letting them pile up: if you're a subscriber, read a couple of articles online at work.

Man I've thought abt starting this thread a few times

this is why i don't have a subscription

Subscription to the print version: $39.95
Subscription to the iPad version: $234.53

http://runawayjuno.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/thumbs-up-low-res.jpg

AYYYY WE MAKING INTERNET MONEY

http://www.gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs/490177_o.gif

alright enough

Anything related to Mexico in the past year's issues has been pretty compelling, mostly by William Finnegan and Alec Wilkinson. The Jane Mayer article about the Koch brothers and the discreet establishment of the tea party is definitely worth reading. This week's Gopnik piece on postmodern desserts is a good read, too.

Date and month/description of the cover of the issues you're referring to would be helpful!

George Packer's essay on the decadence of the Senate was illuminating.

Oh, and, both from around August, the profiles of Gil-Scott Heron and John Lurie.

A trick to not letting them pile up: if you're a subscriber, read a couple of articles online at work.

― Gus Van Sotosyn (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, December 31, 2010 3:27 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^otm

links would be nice too

recent fire:

Joyce Carol Oates, Personal History, “A Widow’s Story,” The New Yorker, December 13, 2010, p. 70

David Owen, Annals of Environmentalism, “The Efficiency Dilemma,” The New Yorker, December 20, 2010, p. 78

only abstracts are online for nonsubscribers for those i think

Some articles are popular enough to remain accessible to all (e.g. the Packer article on the Senate to which I linked above).

here's the one abt the koch bros - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

A thread like this for all (literary/current event) magazines would be pretty cool.

Joyce Carol Oates article devastated me.

John Lurie article blew my mind.

dessert article was excellent, thanks for the recc

so john lurie is insane huh

The review of the new Mao biographies.

seconded

Gopnik's desserts article was like a magazine version of the No Reservations episode in Spain.

Which is not meant as a negative at all! They make good companion pieces.

dessert article was good but gtf outta here w/ this

Finally, the server arrives with the Messi dessert, as Jordi fusses anxiously in the background. He presents half of a soccer ball, covered with artificial grass; the smell of grass perfumes the air. On the “grass” is a kind of delicately balanced, S-shaped, transparent plastic teeter-totter—like a French curve—with three small meringues on it, and a larger white-chocolate soccer ball balancing them on a protruding platform at the very end. A white candy netting lies on the grass near the white-chocolate ball.

Then, with a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile, the server puts a small MP3 player with a speaker on the table. He turns it on and nods.

An announcer’s voice, excited and frantic, explodes. Messi is on the move. “Messi turns and spins!” the announcer cries, and the roar of the crowd at the Bernabéu stadium, in Madrid, fills the table. The server nods, eyes intent. At the signal, you eat the first meringue.

“Messi is alone on goal!” the announcer cries. Another nod, you eat the next scented meringue. “Messi shoots!” A third nod, you eat the last meringue, and, as you do, the entire plastic S-curve, now unbalanced, flips up and over, like a spring, and the white-chocolate soccer ball at the end is released and propelled into the air, high above the white-candy netting.

“MESSI! GOOOOOAL!” The announcer’s voice reaches a hysterical peak and, as it does, the white-chocolate soccer ball drops, strikes, and breaks through the candy netting into the goal beneath it, and, as the ball hits the bottom of a little pit below, a fierce jet of passion-fruit cream and powdered mint leaves is released into your mouth, with a trail of small chocolate pop rocks rising in its wake. Then the passion-fruit cream settles, and you eat it all, with the white-chocolate ball, now broken, in bits within it.

You feel . . . something of what Messi must feel: first, the overwhelming presence of the grass beneath his feet (he’s a short player); then the tentative elegance of acquired skill, represented by the stepladder of the perfumed meringues; and, finally, the infantile joy, the childlike release, of scoring, represented by the passion-fruit cream and the candy-store pop rocks. I saw Jordi watching us from the kitchen entrance. He had the anxious-shading-into-delighted look that marks the artist.

David Owen, Annals of Environmentalism, “The Efficiency Dilemma,” The New Yorker, December 20, 2010, p. 78

Would not recommend this one! People have been arguing about Jevon's Paradox for a century now, and the article doesn't really advance any significant new ideas. As a primer on the "debate" around energy efficiency, however, it's alright.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all

^ totally recommend that

yeah i read that one the other day, great stuff

it was interesting, lol scientists

i liked this one, seemed like a great premise for movie: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_collins

Haven't finished it yet, but I'm digging the Freud, psychiatry, and mental health in China article (subscription needed): http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/10/110110fa_fact_osnos

The Patel story was amazing.

yeah needs a good 3rd act tho.

he only contributed a couple of articles this year but i always enjoy atul gawande's stuff: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande is probably his best piece this year

if anyone subscribes then feel free to webmail me the china/freud article kthx

I would, but I can't figure out how to turn it into a pdf or another webmail suitable file.

just copy and paste the text? or is it a different viewer thing.....no worries if that's the case

the lehrer article is indeed pretty good and supplies ~evidence~ for my distrust of falsificationism and the inability of some ppl to think of scienctific 'knowledge' subjunctively, tho it does show science self-correcting so i don't read it as a total excoriation of the method

The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

The recent one on the Vatican Library was pretty sweet: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/03/110103fa_fact_mendelsohn

I really like Toobin's diptych on JP Stevens and... the other guy.

nakhchivan, FYI, digital subscription gives you access to this weird applet-y, un-C&P text.

Oh, and that review of the new biography on Sergei Diaghilev was A+++++++ and really wish it was available to all humans: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/09/20/100920crbo_books_acocella

you can c+p articles from an library institutional subscription, but the evan osnos china thing is from the jan 10 issue which is not on the library wires yet. if you can't get it nakh, bump this thread in a week or two and i'm sure someone from what the fuck am i getting myself into with this grad school stuff will help you out.

Lamp, thanks for the Gawande link.

ive been using a friends login for the subscriber stuff for a while and the interface is just so poor i dont usually bother to fuck w/it - seems theyd much rather you read the actual magazine - lol

^agreed. kind of why i started this thread so i knew which actual magazine to pick up and start reading.

p interesting follow-up of sorts on the recent duchenne muscular dystrophy activism article -- they just had a spot f/ clay matthews sponsored by cadillac during the orange bowl

OK a TA I had in college had a poem published a few issues ago, woah.

the whole Jan. 11 issue is worth picking up, the aforementioned freud in china article is amazing and hilarious, and it also has decent articles about belgium and why stieg larsson is so fucking popular

i know the concept of 'worth picking up' is still valid, even for subscribers, in translating to 'worth retrieving from the well-intentioned pile of unread NYers', BUT in general it's still worth remembering how insanely valuable subscribing to the magazine is when compared to buying a newsstand copy. like forty bucks, for a year, for it to be mailed to your house, which is the cost of like seven newsstand issues.

yeah that was a tough read

RIP https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/remembering-roger-angell-hall-of-famer

I'm assuming most of you have read this, if not: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/old-man-3

the matthew wong piece was really good; rip

Several yrs ago, when my @NewYorker newsletter hit a 70%+ unique open rate (as I've mentioned previously here), I noted this accomplishment to a male icon of journalism. I was pleased by this feat & thought he would be, too. Instead, he turned to me & said, “Now don’t get cocky!”

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) July 19, 2022

oh, I wonder why she was put under a performance review. I just can't figure it out--

In the last 15 years at the @NewYorker, during the tenure of editor-in-chief David Remnick (author of a bio on Obama), less than 0.01% of print feature & critics pieces have ever been edited by a Black editor.

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) September 14, 2021

The male colleague at the magazine who added these errors to my copy while I was under performance review is David Remnick, the @NewYorker’s Editor-in-Chief. I don’t pretend to understand why he did this. I do know that he has intimate knowledge of Malcolm’s work & when she died.

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) July 19, 2022

erm

I’m gonna guess they send out a looooong staff memo that boils down to: “Let’s just all be nice, mmmkay?” Then a bunch of nearly identical tweets appear from junior staffers about what a great working environment The New Yorker is. Erin gets rape and death threats and is fired.

— Accidental_librarian (@ErkaLoubrarian) July 19, 2022

chotiner more or less sits back and lets alan dershowitz chotiner himself: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/alan-dershowitzs-marthas-vineyard-cancellation

Does Chotiner usually do this much faux-toadying to flatter the interviewee? I guess his shtick’s getting too well-known

there are only so many people who think they can ~ by general acclaim ~ come out on top against a canny guy with the final edit

dershowitz is a suitable avatar for them all

osnos superyacht article is v good

I feel like I've read a few versions of this piece over the years, but this one is really well-written:

I snuck into CPAC Hungary and all I got was this lousy article (and a heightened sense of foreboding about the fate of the American republic)https://t.co/hoovBMMqoq

— Andrew Marantz (@andrewmarantz) June 27, 2022

yeah good read

So the @New Yorker has fired me, effective immediately. I’m speaking with the union about potentially filing a grievance on the termination. But here are some things that I will say….

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) July 25, 2022

This is fucked up.

2) that several errors that were cited in an email reprimanding me while I was under the performance review were not mine; and 3) that these were errors that David Remnick added to the copy.

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) July 25, 2022

tbh overbey sounds like a nightmare - it's a difficult dance to be an employee who raises major criticisms against their employer, and she doesn't seem to have had the social skills to pull it off.

this reminds me of the recent felicia sonmez stuff where the person is right on the merits of the argument — well in overbey’s case the stuff about diversity there; i have no opinion on the performance review aspect — but you can only publicity castigate your employer for so long (especially from such a position of visibility [viral twitter threads]) before they’re probably going to want to fire you. that doesn’t feel very controversial to me… journalism jobs are not tenured, no one has a legal right to them. if she weighed the risks of speaking out (being fired) and decided that it was still important enough to her than more power to her honestly but she had to have seen this coming, no?

Also looks like she has been documenting this stuff for years. She mentions starting the diversity tracking in 2019, because at that point she was "increasingly concerned." So yeah, you've got to assume she saw this coming.

if they wanted to fire her for being a pr disaster on twitter that's kind of understandable

putting her on review for supposedly different reasons and then allegedly introducing errors into her work seems rather different

Every white guy in journalism right now over the age of like 50 still gets to play by a completely different rulebook than the rest of the world

how many email-only newsletters does the editor-in-chief normally edit personally

Jeffrey Toobin literally jacked off in front of a staff meeting and still has a job

not at the new yorker tho

personally embarrassing david remnick is a public service

more to the topic of this thread i really enjoyed the article on mega yacht culture in the latest issue

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/25/the-haves-and-the-have-yachts

I’m still working my way through it. Man, it’s … something.

Yeah, that yacht story is fascinating.

i started reading it but i hate all these people, find them almost physically revolting

yes. but there's a way in which he gets at how pathetic and insecure they all are even as they scale up to unimaginable heights of wealth

No matter how much money you have, you cannot escape death.

this just gets better and better

So I was waiting for another hit piece to drop before responding to the @Gawker piece, but feel like it’s important to respond to this now. But first, does the @NewYorker still have a fact-checking dept?? Does @Gawker? So buckle up, kids—this will be a long one…

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) August 5, 2022

lol

overbey evidently is so far handling this very well on twitter and gawker -- assuming they're not just fibbing -- may well have been stiffed by new yorker management (and also the union?)

BUT:
"Overbey did not respond to a lengthy list of questions we sent her on July 26 and multiple subsequent requests for comment. But after we reached out, she tweeted about the request. “To that @Gawker reporter who contacted me, I'll simply say, Go ahead & publish,” she wrote. “Publish it ALL. I'll just be over here sipping…”"

^^^this is where the fact-checking process kicks in and she deliberately opted not to supply any information to challenge the story they were getting from the other side? i mean this is her choice and her right obviously -- she's a journalist herself, she wants to control her won story -- but it does tend to support the claim that this is all a solo operation on her part (as does her suggestion that anyone they've anonymously quoted from the new yorker must be a management stooge…)

"of course you won't find anyone else to support my version of events! they're all in league against me!"

anyway as i say she's running the event well so let's see what round two scares up

personally embarrassing david remnick is a public service

― mark s, Monday, 25 July 2022 17:45 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^this is still the key takeaway

I find it hard to believe there is a real person named Tarpley Hitt.

‘tarpley hitt’ tho

― mookieproof, Sunday, 5 December 2021 07:17 (eight months ago) bookmarkflaglink

its tarpleys world we just live in it

From that most recent Overbey thread, I learned that she's Jack Hitt's daughter.

I still laugh at Whiney's first post img.

From that most recent Overbey thread, I learned that she's Jack Hitt's daughter.

Of course she is.

At the same time, Overbey insinuates that Tarpley Hitt has a conflict of interest because her father is a "New Yorker contributor" ... even though, as best as I can tell, this amounts to one magazine feature in 2012 and eight online pieces between 2012 and 2016. During that time, he also contributed to the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Saveur, etc. etc. Now people are in Tarpley's mentions talking about her "rich New Yorker columnist father."

I started off feeling somewhat sympathetic to Overbey, whom I've followed on Twitter for years (mostly just because "New Yorker archive editor" sounded like a cool job). But the social-media dynamics of it all are leaving a bad taste in my mouth, regardless of whether she is actually "whistleposturing" or not.

Pretty much every media story is just “no winners here” these days

30 rapidfire tweets have never made anyone more sympathetic but if that's the platform you have to battle the New Yorker, I guess you've got to run with it. No one would notice if she tweeted a link to a blog laying out the case.

has anyone done the “when that tarpley hitt” joke yet

No one would notice if she tweeted a link to a blog laying out the case.

hey dudes on this thread just a quick note

if a woman is saying she felt unsafe and shitty at work and has receipts it's kind of shitty to criticize her methods. and her points about lack of diversity at that magazine still stands, no matter how much folks support her

don't remember her saying she was unsafe

though I figure this is a loose useage

So the @NewYorker has absolutely no problem with a male reporter who literally took rides on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane, yet somehow the female employee who blew the whistle on diversity is the big problem. I honestly don’t think the magazine realizes how much it’s telling on itself

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) August 10, 2022

she's talking about Gladwell, right?

“I was invited to the TED conference in maybe 2000 (I can’t remember), and they promised to buy me a plane ticket to California,” Gladwell says now. “Then at the last minute they said, ‘We found you a ride on a private plane instead.’ As I recall, there were maybe two dozen TED conference goers onboard. I don’t remember much else, except being slightly baffled as to who this Epstein guy was and why we were all on his plane.”