New Yorker magazine alert thread

LA Mogul is the AEG guy?

Wow the Don Bosco article is a tour de force. I'm still not done with it, but I don't think an article has ever made me feel such a potent mixture of admiration and utter horror.

xpost Yeah, AEG guy, who doesn't do interviews and is a conservative Christian. For some reason it just felt like a story I've read several times over the course of the past few years.

got all geared up for a bitchy hatchet job on callista gingrich but that article illustrated what happens when you have a non-cooperative (and essentially boring) subject

shouldve just been 10 full pages of portraits of he frozen real doll face

I want to say the current issue is at least the second and maybe the third in recent memory to feature an author overview that focuses on the writing of explicit sex scenes. In other words, this is two issues in a row that I'd consider a bust, unless the piece about the guy trying to save a breed of endangered turtle is worthwhile.

i agree, i skipped most of the articles in the last couple of issues. although oddly shouts & murmurs was again at least amusing this week - your basic outsourcing/foreigners jokes but by gary shteyngart who at least is a little weird and funny.

sorry i said at least so many times

main thing i learned from the gingrich article this week: his first wife was his high school geometry teacher!?!?

I thought I had totally missed this detail until I got the magazine last night and realized that you were talking about the Gingrich article in this week's issue (focusing on Callista), rather than the one from two weeks ago (focusing on Newt).

(Anyone think that the New Yorker jumped the gun about six weeks ago, when Newt was leading the polls, and assigned both of those pieces with the assumption that his campaign would be doing better than it is?)

kinda, but newt is p much a fascinating topic anytime

True!

plus newt is on the rebound now

http://www.peteykins.com/sparklepics5/CallistaNewYorker.jpg

in real life she looks like an animatronic figure designed by ralph steadman

just read that article, yeah holy wow @ that illustration

i'm gonna crosspost this here just in case we have any harper's readers who check this thread:

i'm halfway through this article and it's totally fascinating: http://harpers.org/archive/2012/02/0083789

story of peru's largest prison, so overcrowded and understaffed that the inmates essentially are able to live normal lives within its confines: it basically has its own economy (inmates own and run restaurants and shops inside the prison) run on contraband brought by visitors; its inmates' (drastically disparate) living conditions are determined by their wealth, much like the outside world; and in one literally walled-off community they even hold local elections. the story follows some of the delegado candidates in the days leading up to the big election

― tebow gotti (k3vin k.)

there was a similar piece abt a brazilian prison in the times a while ago, so nuts

Donald Hall's essay on growing old was great

oh alright i gotta read that, it seemed interesting but then i forgot about it

steve coll's piece on mullah omar and the relationship between the US, afghanistan, and pakistan (& the taliban and al qaeda) was a good read too, especially if you haven't read much about omar

yah it was p sweet

which 1

mullah omar

'essay abt aging' isnt exactly in my wheelhouse

yeah me otm

xp aw u old

I'm about to start the Hall essay. I'm getting old!

we shall wear our trousers rolled

I hate peaches though

i'm up and down with gopnik but i thought this was a thoughtful and interesting piece on prisons in america
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all

Donald Hall's essay on growing old was great

what do u people think of the new tv critic, anyone is better than nancy franklin but she called dexter like intelligent and charismatic so basically i have decided never to read her

i like her writing, i don't think i've watched any of the shows she's written about

"better than nancy franklin" is pretty much the most i can say for her.

read the Bosco football and the 13 year old kills grandpa, goes to jail for life stories this morning. It's a fucking hard time being young right now.

i find myself missing nancy franklin or like the idea of nancy franklin. i guess it was p lol that the ny had someone who p much totally resisted the default narrative abt tv's golden age or w/e and just seemed bemused and mostly indifferent to the prestige cable dramas and single camera sitcoms that most tv critics really love. i mean i cant imagine that nancy franklin even knew 'community' was a tv show never mind thought it was 'the smartest sitcom on tv' or w/e. i just wish she were a better writer or smarter or s.thing so that when she treated the sopranos w/the same breezy condescension w/which she wrote abt dance moms or w/e it wasnt just dumm

anyway the new critic is a better writer, i thought her piece in last week's issue was p good but its mostly just standard blog opinions i guess

w/e w/e w/e

w/e w/e w/e so excited

lol yes reading her on downtown abbey I thought to myself the nyer has hired a blog style writer how interesting

lol same

downtown abbey

for a long time i thought this was what the show was called, tht i was abt like cool nuns or s.thing

ha the iPad did that swear, but I have for sure thought abt how it'd be a good name for an olde timey prostitute

did nancy franklin die or something?

she just like resigned w/o really having a new job/diff project iirc

For some reason I always mixed her up with the Sci-Ti weirdo who voices Bart Simpson. Cartwright, I know.

It seems like every issue of Harpers or the New Yorker has an essay about aging. A gentle reminisce with a sting in the tail about 2000 words in. Boooring

nuh uh, and nope

v. good issue this week - sad but balanced article about rutgers suicide, chinese "work novels", cookie factory strikes; i even liked the classical pianist talking about his recording process even if he came off a little annoying. i think i read every article this week after a few weeks of skipping lots of stuff.

Yeah, the last two weeks blew over me but the current issue is a grab bag. Putting it off until I have time to read it all properly.

slight update to the don bosco article: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2012/01/on-youthful-indiscretions-and-high-school-football.html

Interesting, not to defend some of the words he was using in the least, but have some of those people never seen a teenager's Twitter feed before? Seems like such an innocuous thing to lost a football career over.

yeah that seems like some pretty sanctimonious bullshit

it prob only happened cause it's a catholic school tho.