New Yorker magazine alert thread

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

Nancy Franklin's gone, dude.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m43ej8CQb31qdmmiqo1_500.gif

loool

re that Toobin story: he's getting scuttlebutt from Alito and Roberts' clerks, I guess.

story about kenyan olympic marathon runner was really...not great. and boring. i was bored during this morning school event at R's & C's school, so i read that and at first i thought it would be intriguing. starts out great with the whole *he won the most dramatic marathon in history...two months later he would be dead.* ooh, what happened???? died accidently. after a night of drinking. that's it. sad and all...basically the whole long thing was: guy was a good runner. made a lot of money running. won races. died accidently after a night of drinking. and you got absolutely zero idea what he was like as a person. zero. zilch. zip. just about the only thing i learned was that the japanese made kenya a powerhouse marathon country. feel like it was a missed opportunity. probably all kinds of interesting/cool details you could intrigue people with in a story like that.

i liked it

but i'm a boring guy

Finding the profile of that "business thinker" or w/e (Christensen?) surprisingly interesting.

This is from the last issue though, not the current one.

i liked the junot diaz story about the guy who fucks his high school teacher

"i liked it"

just felt really pedestrian to me. ooh young poor kenyan kid moves to japan. that's gotta be crazy. what happened there?... he was homesick. he learned japanese. you know? normal lives are normal. the best parts were the descriptions of his races. wish that they had been longer. and that they had talked more to people who knew how to make things interesting with a choice anecdote or two. they even got really boring quotes.

i still liked it

LITERALLY pedestrian

the last issue was great - the twin climate change articles, one oh my god so depressing, the other entirely optimistic until it gets to the last two paragraphs & they throw in '-& of course while this technology is nowhere near being able to work successfully, & while earlier on we might have said 'size of a playing card' instead of 'of a door', -'. now i'm really annoyed that having been prepared to abandon it in favour of this issue, i am learning that the recent diaz & the business profile articles are good.

new david grann this week - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/28/120528fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all (havent read it yet)

Just got an iPad and am excited to read this week's issue on it.

haha jill lepore sucks.

"I opened the door, and turned on the tap. TJ Lane had used a .22-caliber Mark III Target Rimfire pistol. For a long time, I let the water run."

oh i really liked that piece

really man? i mean obviously i share her and your views on the absurdity of our gun laws, but i can't say i really leaned much from that piece. parts of it were excruciating to read - her attempts to discredit NRA peeps (while noble in aim) just totally failed for me in their transparency and obviousness, and the parts where she really laid it on thick with the writerly BS, like the part i quoted or the last few graphs, were just impossible for me to read without rolling my eyes. i'd have probably preferred a more thorough detailing of the history of the second amendment in the courts to what she tried to do

"I cut my chicken with a serrated steak knife... the Zodiac Killer had used a serrated steak knife. My life would never be the same."

(I own a Mk3 .22, they're fun!)

i liked the jill lepore guns piece, too. i like her in general. seems absurd to say she sucks. i thought that piece drew the interpretive thread pretty finely: you might know all these things already, but they add up to we're no longer a civilian society.

yeah i dunno, not particularly taken by her style but the DONT U SEE stuff was a bit much to take

Well it works like magic on us feebs.

oh i dont know i thought her ability to draw things together, create parallels, connect it w/ the trayvon martin case was really fine. and i definitely learned things. if u didnt buy the stylistic choices thats fine.