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.

I actually have the complete archives on DVD thing, though god knows if it still works on a modern OS. Having a curated selection each week in print would be worth paying for IMO.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/did-capital-punishment-create-morality

so i should read past 'alpha males' in the subhead?

Haven't read this yet, but the brief synopsis in the NY Times is intriguing:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

That story is controversial:

There is so much that’s suspicious about this @NewYorker story that my bullshit alarm is going off at full blast. @SteveBrusatte is already on this, but wow... this is someone with a severe case of Bakkeritis trying to fast track fame. https://t.co/MQKF4ELLFN

— Riley 🏴‍☠️ Skeleton Keys! (@Laelaps) March 29, 2019

That story is controversial:

There is so much that’s suspicious about this @NewYorker story that my bullshit alarm is going off at full blast. @SteveBrusatte is already on this, but wow... this is someone with a severe case of Bakkeritis trying to fast track fame. https://t.co/MQKF4ELLFN

— Riley 🏴‍☠️ Skeleton Keys! (@Laelaps) March 29, 2019

oops

That's the beginning of a long thread

yeah i was suspicious because the atlantic (?) story from a while back convinced me about the mendacity of the lost weekend theory

Fwiw my neighbor Roy is a paleontologist (!) and while he agrees this dude is a showboater and that no one likes a showboater, he thinks what is being reported is a huge deal.

Dude is Brian DePalma's cousin, so maybe a taste for show-biz runs in the family. I was impressed by the imagination it would take for someone to look at what to most people would probably look like a few crumbly fish bones (as it even did to the professional fossil hunter who tipped DePalma to the site after losing interest in it) and imagine how it could connect so many dots.

did anyone read jill lepore's new book yet?

The one about America? I already am dangerously fond of America, not sure I should risk it

It's good and often excellent, despite smart cavils I've read.

I don’t really know enough about paleontology to comment on the specific scientific controversies, but that “day the dinosaurs died” was a beautiful, riveting read

It’s really baffling to me how that Jia Tolentino piece on Ecstasy got published.

lmao rt

i thought it was p good

Apparently it’s an excerpt from a forthcoming book. It would have been a fine but still kinda unremarkable blog post but I guess I still have idealized notions that the magazine print standards should be higher.

Haven't read that Jia piece, but generally think she's pretty consistent and great, would be surprised if it was more boring than any last 10 years of John McPhee

The piece on Rhiannon Giddens was pretty good, I thought: a nice mix of deeply researched background, breezy personable interviews, and cultural context.

john jeremiah sullivan dead to me after his lil peep obituary but i'll check that out

i thought there was some great writing in the tolentino piece. i'm seldom disappointed by her articles tbh.

i like the article about the football (soccer) leaks in europe too, this week.

if pretty sentences can get you through the passages on lean, more power to you

what did you think was bad about that part? i don't remember that bit standing out but i dunno if i'm missing something as a euro.

i think the stuff about ecstasy spliced with the religious bits interested me, it was quite a personal story but overall made me consider my use of ecstasy in a new light. i guess by well written i don't really mean pretty sentences so much as well-expressed thoughts, though the sentences i'm sure were fine.

The Sullivan piece was okay. I loved the Hogg profile last week and this week's piece on those alcoholic Canadian chefs.

I haven’t done Ecstasy but her descriptions of being on the drug sounded utterly banal to me. The lean stuff seemed a gratuitous way to tie her kinda bland childhood to something interesting that also happened in Houston.

give it a go sometime

only way i ever read the new yorker

i take a half while perusing daily shouts then i double drop for the week's detached, plotless fiction

i do a pill bucket then read borowitz

rolling shouts and murmurs

liked this from the joe beef article:

McMillan remains proudly chauvinistic about Montreal’s dining scene. “I had two eighteen-year-old girls from Laval”—a suburb of Montreal—“the other day, who were having a meal at Joe Beef before going out to a night club, and they were having deer liver medium rare,” he said. “Show me a restaurant in Manhattan that has deer liver, and then show me two eighteen-year-old girls from New Jersey eating it—and loving it—medium rare.”

What's funny is my wife and I had a great meal there, but I would by no means describe it as decadent. Our specific meal, that is. Our server (from France, who admitted she struggled for a long time with Quebec French) did a great job guiding our selections, and I want to say the final results were heavy on seafood and fresh vegetables, not too much wine, not too expensive. And not heavy. We left full and satisfied, but we did not feel gorged. I think if you go in there looking to get stuffed and blitzed, they can/will do that, too.

This is, however, perhaps the third long piece on McMillan and Joe Beef I have read or heard in recent months. So much so that my wife skipped the article, saying "I'm tired of hearing his story." Usually the New Yorker doesn't tread over such familiar ground.

Talk about indulgent, the Houston article was stupid and boring.

the other joe beef articles i've read have not mentioned their chauvinism or how their alcoholism created a bad work environment

I guess? I just assumed that was a given, because restaurant industry.

Nick Paumgarten really doing it for me with these sporting travelogues, there was the ski race a ways back and Augusta this week.

he is THE BEST

Yeah so this Mary Gaitskill story

It's good and often excellent, despite smart cavils I've read.

― recriminations from the nitpicking woke (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, May 19, 2019 5:15 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

i just finished it. it was excellent (the "aren't people on their phones a lot these days" stuff notwithstanding)

(these truths by jill lepore, that is)

I absolutely loved the golf and ski stories, which is something I never thought I would write, seeing as golf and skiing are two things that really don't interest me (and that I didn't think would be interesting to read about, for that matter). Shows what a great writer can do with ... golf and skiing.

I am about 20% of the way through ben taub’s 20000-word story about mohamedou salahi and his guard at guantanamo, and I can already tell it is going to be one of my favorite things I read this year

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-darkest-secret/amp

it's a really good piece; amazing arc

damn good piece.

an aside: wood's coffee consumption is something else:

“Out here, I’m probably only drinking seven or eight coffees per day,” he told me. (During the layover in Casablanca, he had drunk a Red Bull and twenty-two shots of espresso.)

sounds like http://blissbat.net/balzac.html

The New Yorker’s review of “untitled goose game” is the most New Yorkery thing I’ve ever read pic.twitter.com/yVhyssKrb9

— Alison Agosti (@AlisonAgosti) October 17, 2019

Why even both to review a video game if you're not gonna New-Yorker it up?

lol, can't wait to read the segue

Since everybody's letting out their frustrations with prestige publications failing to give credit, I thought I'd share my own most recent experience: @cduhigg's XXXL piece on Amazon in the @NewYorker this week.https://t.co/dRHqfp6pVN

— Emily Guendelsberger (@emilygee) October 18, 2019

yeah i kinda wondered about that, as there have been several journalists to work in amazon centers