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.

you get caught wacking off at work you're gonna get fired I have no idea what type of debate there's supposed to be

Can't get caught if no one is looking. Takes two to tango.

not sure he for sure would have gotten fired had the story not leaked

Was it just the story that leaked?

(Sorry, I'm twelve)

km otm

someday this thread will be in SNA and it will be about a New Yorker article rather than Toobin's dick

nah

maybe we need a new thread: New Yorker magazine alert thread: post-Zoom Jackin' incident edition

(this is petty but at least not toobin-related...) had a hard time with this sentence in anthony lane's 2020 roundup article: "covid-19, an affliction that, like a notable Burgundy, will forever bear the date of its vintage."

ah yes, thank you for finding a way to invoke the mental image of you decanting a fine wine while referencing this tragedy

"September 11, like one's first visit to a favorite Montparnasse brasserie, was a morning that will always be remembered"

Does Anthony Lane have photos of David Remnick’s Toobin or something because he’s the absolute worst

Isn't Lane married to arch-fuckwit-COVID-denier Allison Pearson?

someday this thread will be in SNA and it will be about a New Yorker article rather than Toobin's dick

The Lawrence Wright piece in the current issue about the critical first months of US COVID response is more interesting than Toobin's dick, and substantially longer

Whoa I was not even aware of Allison Pearson, much less her connection to Lane. She seems pretty terrible.

It's also depressing to realize Lane has now been a New Yorker critic for five years longer than Kael was. They need to shake that up.

ideally shaken upside-down from the Brooklyn Bridge

I'm so old I remember when everybody liked Anthony Lane. (Including me! I remember him being authentically funny! Was I wrong? If I went back and read those columns now would I blanch?)

when was that, exactly

At some point I liked Lane enough to buy his book *twice*, once in hardback and once in paperback when I moved to another country.

Now I just skip him entirely - the jokes are tired and everything is a variation on "i'd rather be watching preston sturges"

yeah, I used to like Lane and bought his book

ideally shaken upside-down from the Brooklyn Bridge

that would require him to be in New York, rather than his actual home of Cambridge, England

here is a collection of Pearson, btw:

Good question @allisonpearson! What did they do in China and Wuhan that has allowed them to get back to normal? pic.twitter.com/oLOtKg1suG

— Sam Bowman (@s8mb) January 1, 2021

Oh right he’s English that explains his lechery and his mawkish turns of phrase

I used to like Lane too, I enjoyed his one-liners. He's a breezy writer. But I feel that shtick wore thin a long time ago, and there's not much beneath it. I've never thought he had very interesting ideas about film as a medium — or really, any particular ideas at all. You can like or dislike Brody, but at least he seems like a serious film guy to me, he has an aesthetic orientation steeped in knowledge of cinema. Lane has always seemed like a dilettante.

can't be worse than denby

I remember really liking a piece where he picked some random year from the early 20th century and read every NYT #1 bestseller from that year and reviewed them all. Probably sometime in the 1990s.

Pearson appears to be having a giant covid-denialism meltdown today because she doesn't want to have to spend any time with their kids?

also having a giant freakout about the pervasive curse of media wokeness, including this assertion about a current TV programme that is part-funded by the BBC and which she is watching on the BBC

#Spiral, arguably one of the best TV cop dramas ever made, could not have come out of the current BBC. It is too truth-telling about tensions in French society, too unvarnished, too dirty, too damn incorrect. That’s what makes it so remarkable.

— Allison Pearson (@allisonpearson) January 3, 2021

Allison Pearson should accept this prompt deletion & public apology as enough to undo any damage to her reputation. Going further is bullying. https://t.co/UoaEolnp2I

— Simon Cox (@SimonFRCox) January 4, 2021

Quite a bit going on:

People today are accusing Allison Pearson of not caring about mental health. I think it is worth pointing out this column for the Daily Mail in April 2010, in which she wrote about her own depression: https://t.co/klwv8OInd8

— Robert Hanks (@RobertHanks) January 4, 2021

Back in the late 90s she was some mild arts commentator. Her journey into the utter monstrosity of today is something else, a lot to map out.

Denby was the worst. Didn't he write a book about porn addiction? Lane is fine with me, I think he's a good, witty writer, even if he doesn't always have anything special to say. Brody ... he reminds me of Rosenbaum or other quirky cineaste contrarians a lot, and because of that I've warned friends to tread carefully when they read a Brody rave.

yeah brody is one of those critics who doesnt really have value as a consumer guide, but is still a good read bc it can be fun and useful to follow along with the mental gymnastics he uses to get to his wacky opinions. as a bunch have pointed out before, even though hes nuts he seems to come by his bizarre opinions honestly. imo lane is fine but boring, i have less & less interest in his tasteful cocktail party wit thing. brody seems like a legit movie-obsessed weirdo which is way more fun for me.

Excellent post, OEO.

one of those critics who doesnt really have value as a consumer guide, but is still a good read bc it can be fun and useful to follow along with the mental gymnastics he uses to get to his wacky opinions

This just kind of makes me want to waltz sideways into an alternate universe where Armond White is a beloved New Yorker movie critic for decades

I wish the magazine would find room for Brody in print, apart from capsule reviews. It's a shame that all of his long reviews are online-only.

1 100 percent agree that Lane is better than Denby. Just kind of a low bar. They've done a good job bringing in younger, diverse writers in other arts/culture realms, it would be great to expand that to film.

I wish the magazine would find room for Brody in print, apart from capsule reviews. It's a shame that all of his long reviews are online-only.

― jaymc, Monday, January 4, 2021 10:40 AM (one hour ago)

yeah it's maddening, he's really their only full-time film critic with anything interesting to say

I remember really liking a piece where he picked some random year from the early 20th century and read every NYT #1 bestseller from that year and reviewed them all. Probably sometime in the 1990s.

― Guayaquil (eephus!),

It's better than Vidal's, after whom he modeled it.

I also dug his essays on Matthew Arnold, Gide, Bunuel.

I had no problem with Denby when he wrote for New York. I still on occasion look for reviews on '80s and '90s stuff of his on Google Books.

It's kind of interesting, there are all sorts of well-known and respected young-ish (let's say, liberally, under 50) music writers, but to my knowledge no equivalent for film writing. For some reason I thought Manohla Dargis was young, but she's almost 60 (same as Lane). AO Scott is in his mid-50s. Brody, fwiw, is 72.

Get @filmcrithulk the New Yorker gig

I love Brody. He’s a reasonably good guide for me, tho has a higher tolerance for twee aesthetics than I do

Same. Our sensibilities align even when we disagree.

A few youngish film writers working for top publications:

K. Austin Collins (Rolling Stone), Richard Lawson (Vanity Fair), Alissa Wilkinson (Vox), Angelica Jade Bastién (Vulture), Alison Willmore (BuzzFeed), Justin Chang (L.A. Times)

Also, Hunter Harris isn't a film critic, but she's a film writer with 100K Twitter followers and a Substack.

david sims at the atlantic

OEO OTM wrt Brody; i find him generally insufferable and tend to find his aesthetics incompatible with mine but at least he's working with an internal logic that mostly stands up even when i completely disagree with it.

i've been getting into old issues of cineaste lately

I don't know how old Vern is, but he's the only film critic whose taste I trust implicitly.

dril has a good letterboxd account

Vern has to have been born between 1971 and 1976.

reïmpeached

Löl