New Yorker magazine alert thread

about being blocked on facebook by her ex-boyfriend's mom

it's extremely quotable

Just read Ryan Lizza's Paul Ryan article, pretty useless boilerplate bio stuff. Talks a lot about him as the new intellectual core of the GOP, but barely talks about or analyzes his actual ideas. There's some gestures toward the end, that basically all this Randian stuff is a crock, but pretty lightweight.

this week's issue has a "personal history" piece by lena dunham

― congratulations (n/a), Monday, 6 August 2012 14:47 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is wonderrrrful

in the louis sense?
felt like an extended blog to me

Well, now we know the inspiration for Elijah in Girls.

i know very little about dunham, have never watched girls or tiny furniture, and i thought it was pretty cringeworthy and very out of context in the new yorker. but most of the personal histories are dumb.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2012/08/chick-fil-a-introduces-new-hate-sauce.html

;_;

http://www.newyorker.com/images/permanent/p290/perm_w-andy-borowitz_p290.jpg

and i thought it was pretty cringeworthy and very out of context in the new yorker.

More so than the two excerpts from Bossypants?

Actually yes.

definitely more cringeworthy

Oh, I read the Dunham piece this morning, I just don't know that I agree.

I thought those excerpts of Bossypants were pretty funny.

YMMV re cringeworthiness, but I don't think it was any more "out of context in the New Yorker" than the Bossypants stuff.

and not really out of context?

I thought those excerpts of Bossypants were pretty funny.

Me too!

they run show biz stuff, profiles and such all the time, the show she works on takes place in New York, it's shot in New York. . . seems like a good fit.

i guess i think the new yorker can run an article on just about anything they want. i can't imagine something would feel out of context to me.

i'll even put up with Rin Tin Tin articles

Yeah, I feel like I am not being very articulate: I liked both the Fey and the Dunham. Both did feel a little "out of context," but the Dunham no more so than the Fey, and I'm not terribly bothered by it, anyway.

By "out of context," I guess I mean that both Fey and Dunham's pieces were in a style that was kind of offhand/casual/jokey, very digestible. "Bloggy," I guess. The kind of voice that wouldn't be out of place in a Shouts & Murmurs piece, but not in a Personal History written by a staffer like Jane Kramer.

were in a style that was kind of offhand/casual/jokey, very digestible. "Bloggy," I guess.

LOL

INTERVIEWER

Were you employed by The New Yorker because you were funny . . . they’d seen funny pieces?

TRILLIN

The first one I wrote was about the integration of the University of Georgia, a fairly serious piece. The first pieces I did were all fairly straight, I think partly because I hadn’t really figured out what I sounded like. Then I started writing a series of pieces that were all about the same guy, Barnett Frummer who had a girlfriend named Rosalie Mondle he was trying to impress. Each one was about a different kind of trendiness. At one point she became a radical; he tried to be radical. She got interested in gourmet cooking; he tried to do the same. These were what The New Yorker called casuals—short pieces that were signed. At the time, they had a special deal on them, like a cut-rate special in the fiction department: if you sold six of them in one year, something wonderful happened to you. It was sort of like hitting the pinball machine in “The Time of Your Life”—flags went off, you got a lot of money, piano lessons for a year, a new pair of shoes, all that stuff. So I wrote these really sporadically at The New Yorker.

OK.

this post is kinda SPOILERY- which is to say that i think the article's really good & that scanning it might sorta foreshadow some of its finer bon mots:

i thought it was really moving! i guess we could have a girls-thread style interrogation into to what degree something is maybe only rewarding if particularly familiar, ie if you are eligible for it, but i found it very affecting (& new yorker-ish in tone, really, re: n/a's comment, ie have your cake and tweet it too). stupid happy, the line about rolled-up sleeves, reading enough of a thing only to determine that its author was smart, capturing the minutiae of parner's-watchful-parents dynamics (she noticed that i pick all the carrots out of my stir fry); i was entertained. it mightn't have fit in w/the magazine more generally, in the sense that it says fucking and dick-slapped in the first graf, but it seems so redolent of those tenderly-handled, semi-wistful memories you have of early romance, to me, part aware of its naivete but super evocative of its rapture - "i would watch his strong back as he rose from bed to get a mason jar of water and think, That's mine".

i thought the bossypants extracts were good also so ymmv

xpost I don't get it, Que, are you looking to play "gotcha" with that Trillin quote? All I said was the style of Fey's and Dunham's pieces stood out for me, but I didn't say it was unprecedented within the hallowed annals of the magazine or anything. And I found them all fairly entertaining, anyhow, so no big deal.

i just thought it was funny that you used the word casual to describe the pieces when the New Yorker has been running these kinds of pieces for a long time.

. . . and even called them casuals!

now ON IPHONE, current issue free

Speaking of mobile NYer, anyone know why my Asus Transformer (Android) can't use the Android app?

I cannot believe how hard it is to log in to the iPhone app. I've subscribed for years and there is no way in hell I'm getting into this thing. I can get into the archives online just fine.

I logged in okay, but it logged me out again, so could be a bug. btw nice that the editions are 27 mb and not 270 mb

It doesn't help that Conde is partially running the back end, so you can have two logins (NYer and NYer Archives) ... the UI on this thing is annoying (filled out an entire form, hit 'done' which of course didn't submit the form, it erased it). I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume their servers are being hammered by fanboys like me, and try again tomorrow

Feel free to describe the wonderful world which I am forbidden to enter

it's nice, I've not explored properly yet (sick) but the interface is more considered than slapdash

Just read Ryan Lizza's Paul Ryan article, pretty useless boilerplate bio stuff.

Just the latest in a recent string of know thine enemy pieces (see also: Newt, Koch Bros., other billionaire LA Republican fundraiser guy)

this no work 4 me

Looks like Claressa shields, the boxer profiled a couple months ago, will be trying to win gold tmrw.

hey, this is the fucking worst
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTiCulvL-lA

Fareed Zakaria: "Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore's essay in the April 23rd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers."

"Time has suspended Zakaria for his offense"

i always kinda wonder if anyone ever genuinely does that by mistake -- like, reads something, silently absorbs its exact phrasing, and unknowingly regurgitates it -- or if the journalism industry is just filled with lazy ppl who believe they'll be the one who gets away with it, or 'everybody does it' or something. i assume zakaria's in the latter group, since his paragraph is virtually word-for-word plagiarism.

I was kind of idly wondering in the Zakaria thread about the chance it was unintentional. Part of my job involves writing, and sometimes a word will strike me as particularly apt or evocative, and then I'll realize/discover that it was in a source I just consulted. But usually it's just a single word or maybe a short phrase. I think you're right, though, about Zakaria -- it's hard for me to imagine someone unwittingly copying the shape and structure of a whole paragraph.

not every publication can have the same level of fact checking as the new yorker

i cant say i really care that zakaria barely reworded another writers paraphrasing of a book

otm

I think our obsession with punishing plagiarism is becoming hysterical.

I can't believe people do this? Like I don't even understand the impulse to steal words like that.

I think our obsession with punishing plagiarism is becoming hysterical.

Would you say the same thing about shoplifting? Probably not, right?

no because they're not the same thing

so plagiarism isn't stealing? what is it then?

Like jaymc said, anyone who writes a lot will unconsciously borrow words or even consciously emulate the way in which someone else's graceful or zingy sentence works. The trick is to catch it and rearrange it just so. It's Zakaria's misfortune to be caught stealing boilerplate.