New Yorker magazine alert thread

yah i liked it v much, songwriter in the booth just fn around singing gibberish then a few steps later youve got this multi millon dollar product

Finished the Viktor Bout article, and it's interesting that the writer sez at one point,

I have a faltering grip on two of the languages Bout speaks—Persian and Urdu...

He's the same guy who wrote the Killing Bin Laden article, which was critiqued (unfairly, imo) here, namely:

Mr. Schmidle wrote that the men in attendance mostly spoke Pashto but “knowing Urdu, I could understand enough [of their Pashto] to realize that they weren’t rehashing the typical J.U.I. rhetoric.” That made the rest of the article immediately suspect. I knew Mr. Schmidle, and knew that his language skills in Urdu were functional at best and, even if he had superb Urdu skills (and he did not), this would not render Pashto comprehensible in the slightest. (It is not an Indo-Aryan language like Urdu and therefore has a grammar and syntax that is starkly different from Urdu.) While one may recognize some Urdu words, without grammar and syntax the content of the discussion would have been opaque to Mr. Schmidle.

The music sounds sort of like this: thump thooka whompa whomp pish pish pish thumpaty wompah pah pah pah

ok, thanks new yorker.

lol

ive been behind, antrim fiction was the first story ive liked in a while; also, as ppl said, the romney piece by menaud is v good

yeah i read the viktor bout article a couple days ago, great read

who else had a big bout feature w/in the last six months or so?

The music sounds sort of like this: thump thooka whompa whomp pish pish pish thumpaty wompah pah pah pah

ok, thanks new yorker.

― 40oz of tears (Jordan), Wednesday, March 21, 2012 6:10 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha guys breezy tone is def condescending but also p hilarious and awesome, i say this as a fan of much of the music described within

That article and, moreso, a Rick Moody explains why drum machines are totalitarian thing on NPR, almost caused me to bump the rockism thread the other day.

your fault for reading rick moody imo

I didn't read anything! It was just on NPR -- I had it on while I was doing some boring work.

a Rick Moody explains why drum machines are totalitarian thing on NPR

can't wait to read this!

looong LBJ article this week was v good and unusually exciting. stylistically it didn't seem very new yorker-y - maybe because of the strict focus on events in chronological order?

it's an excerpt from robt caro's work-in-progress biography so i guess the editors can't/won't fuck with it

events of 11/22/63 seen from LBJ's perspective = riveting

daaamn! I can't wait to read it

hmm i was all cannot experience a single nother piece of jfk assassination related media for my whole life but maybe ill give it a shot

The composite I've drawn from conflicting report (Dallek, Schlesinger, etc): LBJ showed great compassion to Jackie and immediately started acting as president, which he was -- to the great resentment of the shellshocked Kennedyclaque.

that's the way I read Caro too. apparently the immediate swearing-in on AF-1 pissed off Bobby K but he already hated LBJ and was spoiling for a fight

anyway I don't want to spoil. the Daily Mail article is good too.

ill give it a shot

no pun intended I'm sure

hmm i was all cannot experience a single nother piece of jfk assassination related media for my whole life but maybe ill give it a shot

haha yeah i felt really tired just looking at the pictures and read the article about the daily mail instead

well i think if we all read it at the same time from different points of view were sure to have it covered xp

the piece on the children of the disappeared in argentina in the march 19 edition was v good and moving, don't think anyone's mentioned it yet. if it was just a story about what happened to the orphans of the victims of the dirty war it'd be interesting enough, but it evolves into a politico-media scandal that makes murdoch in britain look almost innocent.

Kennedy's men made no secret of their at best patronizing attitude towards LBJ and at worst hatred when he was veep so his keeping most of them way past their expiration date strikes me as the sort of magnanimity for which he deserves a smidgen of credit -- as long as I get to revoke said credit because these jokers persuaded him Vietnam was worth fighting.

btw every time I read about LBJ's miserable three years as veep I have to remind myself that after Ike he was the most powerful man in the country not too long before.

oh shit, didn't realize new yorker was excerpting caro this week. super excited!

should i try to read all of 'master of the senate' in the next month?

YES. That thing is a Tolstoy novel.

or Joseph Roth.

i've read the first two (both awesome) but needed a break from LBJ (or maybe just a break from caro, who is sort of an overwhelming writer to have in your head for hundreds of pages) after that.

the piece on the children of the disappeared in argentina in the march 19 edition was v good and moving, don't think anyone's mentioned it yet. if it was just a story about what happened to the orphans of the victims of the dirty war it'd be interesting enough, but it evolves into a politico-media scandal that makes murdoch in britain look almost innocent.

― joe, Tuesday, March 27, 2012 4:14 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Reading this now, and yeah, the specific orphan stuff would be engrossing on its own but the way the article connects it with Argentina's recent socio-political history does make it feel more widescreen, so to speak.

Truly multidimensional. Didn't they have something of the same situation in Chile, with kidnapped children raised by members of Pinochet's government? Only maybe without a specific scandal of such enduring/spreading proportions?

although "stolen" would be better than "kidnapped," which implies ransom etc (check that recent thing archived on This American Life re kidnapping and also prevention of ?and otherwise coping w kidnapping among the biggest businesses in Mexico)

the arms dealer story is pretty dope

OK, having finished the Argentine orphans article? That last paragraph is amazing.

Unrelatedly, Elif Batuman's Neolithic man is no longer paywalled!

Despite reading several bios, my hand was at my throat for most of that Caro article about LBJ. M

how so?

it felt weirdly hagiographic at the end.

Maybe. I've read Master of the Senate, and I'm pretty sure by the end of it that Caro holds the same opinion of LBJ as most of us.

Amy Davidson pretty funny here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/03/are-the-mikes-on-presidents-russians-and-gaffes.html

The ExxonMobil piece in this week's issue is fascinating. Helps provide context for why I feel like I'm living in some dystopian movie every time I see that Keystone XL pipeline ad they're running now.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/04/09/120409crbo_books_kolbert

I've always found so-called ethical arguments against having children to be the height of philosophical silliness, and I don't feel any differently here, but an interesting read nonetheless.

I thought her essay/review was really funny, the way it kept trying to balance all these sort of fascinating paradoxes (like the right of people who don't exist, or how a life 99% good and 1% bad is worse than never having lived at all). She seemed to relish the sophistry.

Exxon piece was sort of scary, like reading about some shadow agency that runs the world. Which it sort of does.

yeah actually there might have been more intentional bemusement than I was reading into it now that you mention it

For sure. Like how she notes the infinite number of people who have never been born, and how they've never complained?

She still ends with this, though:

The decision to have a child, or one more child, or yet another child may seem to be a personal one—a choice about how many diapers you want to change in the short term versus how many Mother’s Day cards you hope to receive later on. But to see it in these terms alone is to be, as Caplan points out on the cover of his book, selfish. Whatever you may think of Overall’s and Benatar’s conclusions, it’s hard to argue with their insistence that the decision to have a child is an ethical one. When we set the size of our families, we are, each in our own small way, determining how the world of the future will look. And we’re doing this not just for ourselves and our own children; we’re doing it for everyone else’s children, too.

which I guess is technically true, although I find it to be kind of an irrelevant conclusion, and also a typically (for the New Yorker set) self-important one. Most of the audience for an article like this is starting families late and having zero to maybe three children at most. And two factors make a much bigger difference to their impact than the number of children they have: (1) the distance between generations and (2) the consumptive patterns of each child. Well-off western families are going to continue to have small families with spread out generations, irrespective of ethical concerns, but that consume like 10x as much as the people in other parts of the world having 8 kids starting at age 16. Fretting about the "ethics" of having children (or an extra child) is pointless. Supporting policies that favor family planning, education for women and reduced consumption might actually make a difference.

I found that last paragraph out of step with the rest of the piece -- as if a large section was edited out. She really didn't say much about ethical reasoning as much as philosophical, at least as far as ethics is framed in the last two sentences.

gopnik piece on camus/sartre is p terrible

haha you literally could not formulate a piece i would have less interest in reading

otm

otm again i skipped that in a heartbeat

Actually the NYer does formulate pieces I have less interest in reading every week, but they are usually either the non-lead talk of the town pieces, shouts & murmurs, or one of those weird shopping survey articles that that one lady does every so often.

would rather read 100 patricia marx articles than gopnik on sartre