New Yorker magazine alert thread

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."

I thought some of the subtle cues were well-done like letting the faucet run for a long time after shooting etc.

i don't really know much about guns or gun control so ymmv i guess. but mainly i liked the stylistic mix of really dry factual/historical writing with the occasional writerly line, it was a very readable piece.

> like letting the faucet run for a long time after shooting etc.

I thought that was not subtle at all, actually.

The parts about gun ownership as a percentage of individuals declining (from 50% to 20%) over time while the number of guns in circulation increased was interesting. Also, the part about Yemen having the second highest rate of gun ownership -- and that rate being 1/2 of the US -- kinda blew my mind.

I would have thought there could be more to say about the influence gun industry in the NRA than the decrease from that of otherwise reasonable sportsmen. Seems to me that the NRA has become a marketing/propaganda/scare group instead of actual gun owners. Like, despite all indications otherwise, the line has become "the government is going to take away your gun -- you must buy more." Mass marketing to paranoid, anti-government types seems like a really bad idea, but I guess if you're livelihood depends on it, you gotta do what you gotta do.

yeah I think the fact that gun ownership is more and more a crazy old white guy thing is important

the raw milk article has me wondering if it's the 1st time the phrase "bathtub cheese" has been printed in the nyer

i keep thinking abt how that guys say raw milk and blood tastes just like ice cream

that is a startling fact

Two sort of complimentary things I learned from recent New Yorker articles that I probably should have known but did not:

1) The ANC's struggle to end apartheid was extremely violent, and
2) Bob Marley's appeals to love and peace were backed up by his actual political peacemaking, unlike the frat guys who sing redemption song on their stoops

well sometimes they make peace w/ other frats

and nerds

i watched part of marley last night

would watch, based on that review

its p good, cool facts

rita marley i like

the new yorker comments on its use of the diaeresis:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/04/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis.html
(more like diarrhesis, am i right, guys?)

wasn't jose canseco recently asking about diaeresis?

ends with an esis...

Elif Batuman alert!

the women's boxing article was great

Feel like a bad Jew for getting drowsy every time I see another "Obscure Jews of X" article

you're not alone. in fact: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2009/12/jewspotting.html

haha

and to be fair, it's mostly Jews responsible for all the Jewspotting. My dad is an incorrigible Jewspotter!

I was pretty surprised about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_China

the women's boxing article was great

Yeah. Nice to see Ariel Levy get to report on something that afforded her the opportunity to exercise some nice prose styling, too.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/CVC_TNY_05_21_12_no_date.jpg

(http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/05/cover-story-spectrum-of-light.html)

Really liked the piece on the (possibly) hidden Indian palace treasure. Also liked the surprisingly lite piece on drones, which approached the subject with a note of absurdity tempering the awe.

enjoyed the piece on clayton christensen

The treasure piece was good but felt either somewhat underresearched or somewhat badly written and i couldn't tell which

A little of both? Actually, it seemed kind of tall-tale elliptical, like it was writing around a big secret it knew from the start it would never reveal.

the new yorker comments on its use of the diaeresis

Awesome. I remember being kind of obsessed w/the NYer's use of the diaresis (a word I apparently have been totally mispronouncing lo these many years) when I first encountered the magazine at someone's house in the early '90s. (It was during the Tina Brown era: I think one of the issues I saw was guest-edited by Roseanne.)

when the new yorker makes you shout
why'd they add this dumb umlaut
diaresis
diaresis

i am a little out of sync with this thread, but here are some new yorker observations and questions from the past month of receiving & reading this magazine:

where is hendrik hertzberg?

also i'm glad they seem to have stopped repeatedly running that ad where words like GLOBAL TURMOIL and FORECLOSURE are aligned so that OPPORTUNITY can be picked out of the various letters.

i just looked at the contents page for this week, i'm psyched for toobin, & the portfolios. it seemed like they redesigned, a little about a month back, to align things neatly & maybe to show the photos off a little better.

toobin article is really great imo (and isn't paywall-protected)

i very much enjoyed learning that one of the female boxers has a cat named mr. hashbrowns

Edmund White remembers Cranbook.

i like the toobin article but i thought it was funny that he was saying that a book wouldn't fall under mccain/feingold's restrictions because you would have to seek it out to be exposed to it - well, wouldn't this have been the case with the hillary clinton VOD documentary too? obviously this wasn't the point of the article, but he was basically saying that in the citizens united case, the supreme court ended making the right decision.

thought all of the nyer's romney/cranbrook stuff was great, like this:

My husband, John, and I had two weddings: one in 2007 in England, where civil partnership has sweeping legal ramifications, and one in 2009 in Connecticut, where we got to use the word marriage. I am a dual national, and the British ceremony gave John immigration rights. The Connecticut one seemed at first like a formality; an estate lawyer had suggested that we should have something called marriage on the record, so that if I were hit by a bus the day after DOMA was repealed, our union would be appropriately classed even if the legal status of a foreign civil partnership was being debated. I was amazed at how emotional both weddings were—the first because it was a public declaration of our love in the company of everyone we cherished most in the world, and the second because married, which had applied to my parents and grandparents and back a hundred generations, was ours, too. The use of that expression drenched us in dignity. Since then, I’ve read stories to our children in which princes marry princesses, and though John and I are both men, I can say, “Just like when Daddy and Papa got married.” To the children, the difference appears no greater than the difference between being nonspecific royalty in a fantasy castle and being a writer and horticulturist in lower Manhattan.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/05/a-birthday-and-two-weddings.html

the blogs are real good, i never understand why amy davidson's stuff isn't creeping into the magazine

The blogs drive me nuts. It's hard enough for me to keep up with the damned magazine, let alone the supplements.

Yeah I fucking hate newspapers/magazines that have supplemental online only features. I feel like that's a concept that came out of some early 00's boardroom misconception of how media companies could best use The Internet and it just stuck.

you can just not read them. i don't think there are ever articles in the magazine that break halfway with CONTINUED ON PAGE THE INTERNET. it's more as part of your daily perusin'.

evan osnos on internet dating in china was great, really enjoyable. he is reliably pretty great.

WHERE IS NANCY FRANKLIN

Halfway through the drone piece, which isn't creeping me out as much as previous non New Yorker drones-in-Amerikkka pieces have somehow. Maybe there's another shoe waiting to drop.

Also: WHERE IS SY HERSH

"the first time a drone Tases the wrong guy at a Phish concert, you're going to have problems"

lol that acocella piece on strunk & white, etc last week or so had probably the heaviest subtext of 'o go fuck yrself' to it i've ever seen from her, pretty awesome that this is where the new yorker can barely contain its rage