New Yorker magazine alert thread

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.

what is the point of an article like this? - http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/01/17/110117ta_talk_surowiecki

surowiecki doesn't have a single interesting thing to say here

He's just summarizing the various memes on this now that are being mentioned in newspapers and blogs without asking anyone where things could go from here--what is the future for unionized government employees, will there ever be more unionized private sector employees, how would this help in regards to the inequality differences that have grown since union membership has declined...)

His column is like a monthly crib-sheet of conventional wisdom so you can sound like you know what you're talking about when you get invited to a garden party in Stonington

what is the point of an article like this?

to summarize and provide some context to a current event or idea its not really about 'saying interesting things' its just a primer? like i know being 1000x smarter than anyone else ever is your thing but i mean the section is called 'talk of the town' so yeah, it exists so the mag's readers can get a vague grip on an issue - the column (which john cassidy also writes some weeks) is supposed to be a gloss? & thats not really all that terrible???

honestly tracer maybe u wld get more out of the articles u read if u didnt spend all ur energy snarkily coming up w/ reasons why u wld have done it better

dude there are a zillion interesting things happening with unions at the moment (the biggest of which imo is the belated but hugely important efforts to hook up with undocumented immigrants). i'm not sorry for wanting more out of a column called "the financial page"! this article could have been written at any time in the last 15 years - there is zero content to it!

i'll also admit that i am rankled by his terminology - "cadillac health plans" etc - and his conclusion that ultimately the reason that lots of people "resent" unions now is because unions have been successful at negotiating good contracts

like, if i want economist-lite i'll read newsweek

snark on that one for size

there is a cover story public sector unions in the economist this week. dunno why i'm bringing it up though because i haven't read it.

i'll be interested in reading that, in an "oppo research" kind of way.

i should probably just recuse myself from talking about surowiecki - everything about his steez rankles me and i'm finding it hard to put into words - the "primer" aspect is part of it, but there are people who write primer-type stuff who i love. i dunno!

yah i can see finding the article glib and too-neat "The Great Depression invigorated the modern American labor movement. The Great Recession has crippled it" both oversimplifies and maybe misses the point - i was just sort of baffled that you didnt seem to understand why an article like this gets written

i guess i still don't! the avg new yorker reader could have dictated this article in their sleep 15 years ago

so did anyone else read the all of the "20 under 40" pieces? thought it was pretty disappointing. vaguely remember liking one about a guy working on a boat in florida that catches on fire, but not much else.

t-pain?

The psychoanalysis in China article is kind of disappointing imo, mostly because it seems to say that it'll explain why a) psychoanalysis fell out of a favor in the US and most other Western nations, and b) why China then picked it up. The article gets at b) at a certain superficial level, but really doesn't go into a) (which I'm sure has been the subject of a lot of other articles, just would've liked discussion here). Anyway, one of my prof is mentioned in the article, easily the best part of it.

really tapping into the slang here

The teens were from a variety of backgrounds—public and private schools, Manhattan and the outer boroughs—and they wore jeans, collared shirts, and leather jackets. They seemed like normal teen-agers, although they all had the faintly glamorous, knowing aura of city kids. They were discussing slang expressions. “ ‘Calm your tits,’ ” Yasha, an eighteen-year-old from Crown Heights, said, citing an expression that means “Calm down.”

“ ‘Good looks,’ ” said Kyjah, a sixteen-year-old fencer from the Upper West Side, who was wearing lime-green nail polish.

“It means ‘Thanks for looking out,’ ” Alexandria, from Yonkers, said. “Somebody’s like, ‘Oh, you dropped money.’ ‘Oh, good looks.’ ”

“ ‘Gucci’ is the same as ‘Good money,’ ” Yasha said.

“You can say, ‘What’s Gucci?’ ” Kyjah said. “ ‘What’s up?’ ”

Matteo, a sixteen-year-old from Park Slope, said, “ ‘What’s poppin’?’ ”

The teens hesitated. “That’s, like, a retro saying.”

Yasha added, “It’s gang-related.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/01/10/110110ta_talk_widdicombe#ixzz1AgfxnnHS

Does a print subscription also give access to the full digital edition + archives? Their website is suspiciously vague about that.

Yes it does - my international one does anyway.

yes, you can look at literally every single page of every single issue going back to 1921 or something.

the applet viewer thing is kinda stupid, but functional

the david brooks article is so terrible i cant remember the last time i read something that managed to be so offensive w/o actually saying or meaning anything

Yes, that was ugh.

i am considering writing a disappointed email, is how disappointed i am, right now

I know right! I couldn't even get through it.

I did enjoy the unintentional irony of describing what would commonly be thought of as "people skills" or "intuition" or "emotional intelligence" in ridiculously labored and aspergerian terms.

The psychoanalysis in China article is kind of disappointing imo, mostly because it seems to say that it'll explain why a) psychoanalysis fell out of a favor in the US and most other Western nations, and b) why China then picked it up. The article gets at b) at a certain superficial level, but really doesn't go into a) (which I'm sure has been the subject of a lot of other articles, just would've liked discussion here). Anyway, one of my prof is mentioned in the article, easily the best part of it.

― nomar little (Leee), Monday, January 10, 2011 7:21 PM Bookmark

Agree with this. Started to raise some interesting implications about what psychoanalysis could mean for China as well, but then wastes way too much ink on here-and-now descriptions of various conferences and meetings, which new yorker writers love to bore us with.

freud/china piece nakh http://pastie.org/1460821

The David Brooks article was so poor that I kept double checking to see if it was in fact fiction and supposed to be ironic. Or, failing that, if it was nonfiction and supposed to be a parody.

I knew the Brooks article would settle the argument.

I had trouble just imagining people named Harold and Erica being the same age.

that article was not about people it was abt the Composure Class (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Empty Factoids)

omg that brooks article guys

unacceptable

i saw the name and sort of hoped it was a different david brooks and after about two sentences i was like DX

Page 1 of 6?

forget it

Reading Jon Lee Anderson's recent article about Sri Lanka. I'm so curious what his personality is like, as far as how he behaves in a room with dictators and drug lords and everyone else he commiserates with as a reporter. (His article on Rio gangs from last year is terrific, too.)

just looking at some of the UK reactions to this story, a lot of people seem very stuck on the idea that someone *had* to have killed those babies

my main takeaway (even prior to this piece) has been that her defence was so wildly incompetent it beggars belief.

the gag order is not completely unreasonable - there is a retrial on one of the charges that the jury couldn't reach a verdict, but there are a lot of issues with how those reporting restrictions play out in practice in the uk.

again, very american perspective on freedom of the press here, but that the article is blocked in england is something that is so indefensible that how things play out in practice should be an indictment of whatever principle supposedly undergirds it

restrictions to avoid prejudicing a jury are reasonable, but there are certainly issues with how this plays out in practice in the uk. i do not think the answer is to give the deranged uk press freer reign though

curious about how many brits want to read this but cannot get around the geofencing

i get a 404 error on the article. But just read it on the wayback machine. fucking hell.

Archive ph should have it

i do not think the answer is to give the deranged uk press freer reign though

otm forever

I read it through my local library via Libby app.

Shocking case, defence were negligible in not challenging more robustly the statistics used to convict her.

it's just completely baffling how her defence had an expert witness lined up who was aware of a lot of the issues with the prosecution's case and planning to challenge them, but didn't actually call him to testify? that's a level of negligence/incompetence that's very hard to understand

also just having letby testify seems like an obviously poor choice that i struggle to understand

Weird that this NY-er article is blocked but a BBC documentary and a Daily Mail podcast on the case are apparently fine?

yes, that is strange…I wonder why that could be…

lol

Need to find a way to read this later. I can't believe it's blocked. Wtf.

https://archive.ph/TgC1X