New Yorker magazine alert thread

Is the new Gopnik article another excuse for him to talk about himself?

Article about Karl May is COMPLETELY FUCKING BONKERS. I knew about Schubert adoring James Fenimore Cooper but i had no IDEA about this.

Also yeah took about 1.5 seconds to decide on skipping gopnick/sartre

Patricia Marx on couch-surfing was enjoyable enough and made me want to couch surf.

someone should find a way to combine couch-surfing, crowd-surfing, and crowd-sourcing and call it couch-sourcing.

mailman dropped off new issue and i read it in 3 minutes.

couch-surfing, mecca, russian cooking, croatian party town, zzzzz.

i'm usually so easily entertained.

travel issue is always the worst. who the fuck wants to read about someone else's vacation?

croatoan party town

yeah I have been known to skip travel issue in its entirety

that and the style issue

oh and the titanic zzzzzzz...

Every article in the style issue is "Fashion Designer X is an artist and not just a guy who makes expensive clothes, no really"

i like to read about other people's vacations! if they're good writers

i don't mind travel stuff if the pictures are nice. or yeah good writers.

The fact that they rebranded the travel issue as "Journeys" is even worse.

i love how the couch surfing article painstakingly catalogs all of the rejected surfing opportunities that actually would have made for an interesting article - Marx starts by winnowing out profiles that include the word "party", and then proceeds to reject "a 'lovertarian' who grew up in Doylestown, Pennsylvania", a Hawaiian describing himself as "just a guy who has three acres of land, living in a shipping container house", a warlord from Kabul, and someone who has the had the hiccups every day for the past five years - before settling on Mrs. Boring McBorringster, a grad student from the University of Iowa.

I like my travel stories bland. reaaaaal bland

I didn't mind Gopnick's Camus article so much but I wanted more aphorisms from Camus' notebooks crowing about how hot he was.

The fact that they rebranded the travel issue as "Journeys" is even worse.

― i don't believe in zimmerman (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 11 April 2012 19:24 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this sounds like classic nyer to me, is it def new

Nicholas Lemann's omnibus review of several books addressing inequality. It's a classic New Yorker review: patient, expert at synthesis.

Gopnik's piece on forty year nostalgia is really lame (cherry-picks a few cultural phenomena from each decade which are supposed to support his dumb point and ignore everything else.)

a Hawaiian describing himself as "just a guy who has three acres of land, living in a shipping container house"

Gopnik's piece on forty year nostalgia is really lame

lol as soon as i saw that piece i laffed - "not today new yorker! not today!". i think the only thing i've read w/ a gopnik byline recently (ie since he returned from france)(should not be read as repping for his 'i am le wacky americain living en paris like ze valerie bertinelli and ze david sedaris oui?' pieces btw) is his lame piece on dogs only cuz i'll read anything the new yorker prints on dogs cuz i am part of the problem.

lol didn't mean to add to gopnik pileon. but while i'm here: http://www.tnr.com/article/smugged-reality

Nicholas Lemann's omnibus review of several books addressing inequality. It's a classic New Yorker review: patient, expert at synthesis.

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, April 16, 2012 5:48 PM (4 hours ago)

yeah looking forward to this. this week's issue looks especially strong

i was reading it off my iphone while traveling so i may not have given it the attention it deserved, but i thought that lemann review was kinda shallow

http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/hidden-protestations-in-plain-sight

I've always liked Nicholas Lemann a lot

that Gopnik Camus article, yeesh. I ran out of bathroom reading and started to slog through it, totally worthless.

i think i have received three of the last five or six new yorkers

fucking post office

that gopnik article is very well-reasoned. as just one example:

Our own aughts arrived with the sixties as their lost Eden, right on schedule. That meant too many sixties-pastiche rock bands to mention (think only of Alex Turner, of Arctic Monkeys, sounding exactly like John Lennon),

the important group everyone cared a lot abt who sounded just like john lennon the arctic monkeys

gopnik you monster

well to be fair Arctic Monkeys WERE conceived as a Plastic Ono Band tribute

The Interior Life of Noel Gallagher: A Speculative History

ILXORINTHENEWYORKER alert (self promo alert lol): My boyfriend's taste in ties gets a shoutout in Alex Ross' review of our concert of John Cage's music at Carnegie Hall in this week's New Yorker. Ross also describes me doing thirty pushups and taking off my clothes onstage. It's in his review of the "American Mavericks" series of performances.

i thought that lemann review was kinda shallow

well most NY essays are!

I know that the rep for style/fashion articles is that they tend to be rote, but I thought the Prada/Schiaparelli article is pretty engrossing!

still vividly remember how much i despised lemann's article about 'pluralism' back in 2008, tho tbh i'm not eager to reread it to find out exactly why.

Looking forward to the nostalgia piece so I can revel in the transcendent wrongness of anything Gopnik has to say about (among other things) pop music. Hope that Arctic Monkeys argument is just the tip of the iceberg.

Love the Wolcott review - "I sometimes wonder if Adam Gopnik was put on this earth to annoy. If so, mission accomplished."

Has anyone here read the Renata Adler tell-all that Wolcott quotes from? Is it as juicy as it sounds?

Adler quote about Gopnick: ""I had learned over the course of conversations with Mr. Gopnik that his questions were not questions, or even quite soundings. Their purpose was to maneuver you into advising him to do what he would, in any case, walk over corpses to do."

A+

gun control piece was my fave this week

Walcott is so mean!

Is that Adler book the one that blames everything on Pauline Kael?

dear god why does this thing come every week, how are they all sitting around in my room

i've got 3.5 piled up now :(