New Yorker magazine alert thread

"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.

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

― just sayin, Monday, May 21, 2012 9:18 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was really good; someone needs to make a movie about this guy

gun piece was pretty good for the most part, it's sort of too internet-age to identify parts one doesn't like & then say "she sucks" - much to like about that piece. however, k3vin otm that this

"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."

sucks

i'm going backwards to the travel/fashion issues now following the very meh gay white house issue and finding things of interest.
That kenyan long distance runner story was already done more concisely and more pointedly by Sports Illustrated; would recommend trying that one instead.

richard brodys taste in movies contrasted w/the fact that he looks like http://www.newyorker.com/images/contributors/p154/contributor_richardbrodyphoto_p154_cropxrail.jpg and is NYER FILM GUY is so hilarious and baffling

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/05/wes-anderson-moonrise-kingdom.html

This week is the science fiction issue, I look forward to reading it in a month.

I love Brody's enthusiasm. I'm tired of Denby (no surprise there) and Lane (increasingly) comparing every new mainstream comedy unfavourably with Howard Hawks or the Marx Brothers or whoever. Even worse are the blockbusters, which drive Lane to reach for his increasingly worn bag of jokes about fanboys and the tightness superhero outfits. I still think he's a terrific writer but he's been doing this for 20 years now and he can't conceal his boredom with anything that doesn't wow him. I don't know why Brody has to stay in his front-section ghetto.

gee, only took 5 pages of this raw milk article to get to the words "ron paul". smh these people

both that and wendell steavenson's (who i just figured out is female) piece were great

this is the 4/30 issue - i'm trying to catch all the way up before school starts next monday

raw paul

r.i.p. science fiction, heave needed a once disreptuable genre

i like brody too. even given his fanboyism, i love that somebody would name a movie as ornery and flawed as jlg's king lear as the greatest of all time. i feel like he's playing a very long game waiting for one of the regular back of book crits to quit/die.

anyone read last week's piece on genre fiction?

Yes, I thought it was a bit flat. More of a history of highbrow authors who liked detective fiction than the how-we-read-now essay it seemed to be billed as. Couldn't help thinking what James Wood or Louis Menand might have done with that theme.

raw milk essay was great though. & the genre thing was a little flat, yeah - maybe in being too rigorously a history of anecdotes relating to it without really plumbing what it's like to read.

i like brody a bunch, though disagree with him pretty often. not that ive seen moonrise kingdom yet, but tbh it isn't that kind of thing that i'd really take issue with - it's nice that he's got a clutch of new filmmakers (like he really, kinda inexplicably repped hard for somewhere) who he's into as zealously as he is the old guys, it's more when he's finding gold in something new & obscure that's weird.

thought bruce sterling on sci fi was nice

I think because Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson are such easy targets, especially on ILX, as ambassadors of a mannered, moneyed faux-indie aesthetic, I like Brody's enthusiasm for them more.

i did like how the raw milk essay started off as having me being all "how OUTRAGEOUS that they are targeting these people" and by the end i was like "jesus, lock all these fools up before they feed more poisonous milk to babies"

It's my favourite kind of New Yorker food writing. Spare me the long profiles of the hot young chefs who have redefined Southern/Russian/Szechuan cuisine - show me the screwy libertarians who only eat roadkill. The story a while back about eating insects was fantastic.

Highlight of this piece was the phrase "freedom milk". In the UK you can buy raw milk at farmers' markets, no bother, but I haven't been tempted to sample it yet. Maybe it tastes even sweeter if there's a risk of the feds raiding your farm.

found most of the sci-fi stuff in the new issue pretty dull. i liked colson whitehead and karen russell's pieces but wasn't blown away by either. however, the sam lipsyte short story was fantastic.

pretty much every sci-fi personal history piece was exactly the same.

any reason why none of the fiction in the sci-fi issue was written by a sci-fi writer?

those fuckers

i haven't read it. just the list of fiction authors.

I am officially dreading 'new yorker sci-fi issue'

lethem is a sci-fi writer, or a former sci-fi writer at least

he sucks though

he is so totally not a sci-fi writer.

i don't know if you're using some weird purist definition of sci-fi but:

Lethem’s first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, is a merging of science fiction and the Chandleresque detective story, which includes talking kangaroos, radical futuristic versions of the drug scene, and cryogenic prisons.
...
He followed Gun, with Occasional Music in 1995 with Amnesia Moon. Partially inspired by Lethem's experiences hitchhiking cross-country,[8] this second novel uses a road narrative to explore a multi-post-apocalyptic future landscape rife with perception tricks. After publishing many of his early stories in a 1996 collection (The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye), Lethem's third novel, As She Climbed Across the Table, was published in 1997. The novel takes as its starting point a physics researcher who falls in love with an artificially generated spatial anomaly called "Lack", for whom she spurns her previous partner. Her ex-partner's comic struggle with this rejection, and with the anomaly constitute the majority of the narrative.
...
His next book, published after his return to Brooklyn, was Girl in Landscape. In the novel, a young girl must endure puberty while also having to face a strange and new world populated by aliens known as Archbuilders.

he is an urban fabulist in the tradition of borges and calvino! i made that up. i've glanced at his pre-whatever he does now books and i never wanted to read them. same with the corrections dude's "sci-fi" books. nobody needs to read that stuff. its like telling a crime fiction fan to read motherless brooklyn. they would laugh and then set that book on fire.

crappy genre fiction fanboys be not proud

ok so you're using some weird purist definition of sci-fi

in that case, i don't know why you would expect the new yorker to publish what you consider to be sci-fi

no flogging your shit to Analog for a nickel a word, no credibility

^^^