New Yorker magazine alert thread

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 :(

it's not even the reading pile that vexes me, just that when it comes to my losing battle against entropy they are on the side of the enemy

3.5 is NOTHING! I have, like, 3.5 DOZEN waiting in the wings.

13 here

you know what would make the New Yorker even better?

crosswords

omg you're blowing my mind over here

that's what harper's tries to be

true but half of Harper's pieces are dire leftist jeremiads which I don't need much of in my life.

harpers word thingies are like way too hard

wow the gopnik thing on nostalgia is just

I thought of like 20 counter-examples to his *theory* in the time it took me to read it.

but just imagine the aughts without the arctic monkeys

hope they're still alive to reap the rewards in 40 years

the wave of arctic monkeys-pastiche bands

Remember the vogue for depression nostalgia in the 1970s?

sheesh that wolcott takedown is endless. like bashing someone in the head long after they are dead.

yessss

that gopnik 40 year thing...i just couldn't even penetrate the levels of incomprehensibility. i kept staring at random paragraphs and couldn't bring myself to start at the beginning and read it all the way through. i felt like a puzzled arctic monkey sniffing a rotten banana. i kinda want to pick it up....but no it's terrible don't do it!

otoh i am 40 and the spinners are grebt, so

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/02/120402fa_fact_sedaris

really enjoyed this brief essay by david sedaris - kind of an andy rooney-like recounting of his experience with french health care that politely mocks the things we are used to and expect from our doctors and our health care system here.

I mean Shanana appeared at Woodstock. Happy Days ran from the mid 70s to the mid 80s. Bell-bottomed jeans made a comeback in the early 90s. Retro 80s stuff has been big for the last 10 years or so. Etc.

gonna dive into the long LBJ essay now

This infidel is really enjoying this paywalled piece on the Hajj/Mecca: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/16/120416fa_fact_peer

This bit in particular is o_O:

In 1924, days after the soldiers of al-Saud, inspired by the teachings of the puritanical preacher Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, conquered Mecca, the destruction of buildings associated with the life of the Prophet and his companions began. Wahhabis believe that revering structures with ties to the Prophet can lead to idolatrous practices. The house of Muhammad's wife Khadijah was destroyed, and the Saudis used the Prophet's birthplace as a cattle market before it was turned into a library, in the early nineteen-fifties. [...] The house of Abu Bakr, the closest companion of the Prophet and the first caliph, was buried under a Hilton hotel.

Remember the vogue for depression nostalgia in the 1970s?

There actually was one, with The Sting; Paper Moon; and the various post-Bonnie and Clyde films like Boxcar Bertha etc.

gun control piece was my fave this week

― congratulations (n/a), Wednesday, April 18, 2012 10:38 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I thought it was ok but could have been done better. The stuff on the history of the second amendment, the NRA etc. is very well done, but I thought she could have made the case for gun control a little better than "here are some examples of shootings." Some of the descriptions of guns were also so martian-visiting-earth that I pictured a conservative gun advocate reading them and laughing.

I mean I didn't think even the New Yorker's key demographic need explanations like this: "
A revolver holds a number of bullets in a revolving chamber, but didn’t become common until Samuel Colt patented his model in 1836."