New Yorker magazine alert thread

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/03/120903fa_fact_widdicombe?currentPage=all

I found this inneresting

he's kinda zuckerbergian

After that top 40 hitmakers piece, we get two more how the pop sausage is made pieces: the Bieber bro and the One Direction bros. One more article like those and I think I'm all set to dominate the top 40.

the piece about the violinist is surprisingly good

ooh thanks for reminding me to read that one

it made me actually want to listen to him. in fact I am right now

why surprisingly

violinist piece was v excellent imho, beiber bro was good, what an uninteresting fellow

i reread the paragraphs about Bieber meeting up with The Wanted 3 times, and then ditched the article because life was complete.

he sees someone from the Wanted and they calling each other bro and comparing tats. Wanted guy lifts up his shirt and has one of his own lyrics tattooed there, and it's really embarrassing, but Bieber's like "cool tat bro, let me show you mine". Bieber reveals his tattoo of Christ praying and everyone in the Wanted is stunned. Bieber starts flicking everyone's balls. after a few failures he finally lands a solid hit on someone from the Wanted. the Wanted guy wants to hit him back but "doesn't want to hurt his pretty face" or something like that. Bieber's manager is like "HIT HIM IN THE BALLS, WE'RE FAMILY", but then Bieber starts crying. he doesn't want to get hit, no fairsies! waaaaaaaaah. "Where is my dressing room" he asks

yeah the bieber manager himself seems pretty zzzzzzzzz but any of the parts of the article featuring bieber are hilarious, he's so dumb and infantile

From the online section: an appraisal of Lester Bangs. I love the clueless comments.

My favorite bit in the Bieber article:

Bieber greeted the members of the Wanted familiarly. (Braun’s policy, among his acts, is that “everyone’s family, everyone has to get along.”)

“It’s your birthday, bro?” Bieber said to Nathan Sykes, one of the band’s singers. He had been prepped by Braun, who was throwing Sykes a party that night, at the Playboy Mansion. The young men immediately began comparing tattoos. George lifted up his shirt to reveal some song lyrics: “We try / we fall / we live another day.”

“Dope,” Bieber said, and pulled up his pant leg to show, on his calf, a large tattoo of Jesus with hands clasped in prayer. (Bieber and his mother are devout Christians.) The Wanted members looked a little stunned.

Biebs trying to be cool by using slang.

I think I have a small lit crush on Maria Bustillos ever since I read her joint-review of the Olive Garden on The Awl.

We try / we fall / we live another day

THOSE were the lyrics. i was sitting here at work trying to come up with the most stupidest combination of words of all time (usually something that comes very easily to me), but i couldn't remember.

I guess wrt the violinist piece, I just didn't expect to be that impressed or surprised by the approach of a modern violinist, and also I thought from the title and taglines that it was about something else (e.g. maybe one of these dull "science of making a violin sound good" kind of pieces). But then the guy seemed totally OTM to me, and he kind of expressed something I had experienced but not identified in trying to find good recordings of various violin pieces (lately, on Spotify) and feeling like too many of them were similar to each other and not quite hitting me the way I wanted them to.

Bieber’s fans, who call themselves Beliebers

I've lost all respect for the Biebster :(

it's really sad, he is an irritating little shitstain

Braun’s policy, among his acts, is that “everyone’s family, everyone has to get alongpunch everyone else in the dong.”

i reread the paragraphs about Bieber meeting up with The Wanted 3 times, and then ditched the article because life was complete.

he sees someone from the Wanted and they calling each other bro and comparing tats. Wanted guy lifts up his shirt and has one of his own lyrics tattooed there, and it's really embarrassing, but Bieber's like "cool tat bro, let me show you mine". Bieber reveals his tattoo of Christ praying and everyone in the Wanted is stunned. Bieber starts flicking everyone's balls. after a few failures he finally lands a solid hit on someone from the Wanted. the Wanted guy wants to hit him back but "doesn't want to hurt his pretty face" or something like that. Bieber's manager is like "HIT HIM IN THE BALLS, WE'RE FAMILY", but then Bieber starts crying. he doesn't want to get hit, no fairsies! waaaaaaaaah. "Where is my dressing room" he asks

― Thanks WEBSITE!! (Z S), Wednesday, August 29, 2012 9:39 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha yes this was sublime

violinist piece was cool, you get a feeling for not only the guy's skill but also his inimitable artistry - to ppl who understand this kind of music better than i it must be like seeing marat safin play tennis for the first time, or manu ginobili playing basketball

Anyone get to Anthony Lane's piece on Portrait of a Lady?

i was gonna finish that issue on the train tonight - should i bother with that if I haven't read the novel?

story on confidential informants was pretty fucked up

ariel levy on naomi wolf's new book was pretty awesome

i liked the levy review too tho the 50 shades connection seemed forced

curious about jets and satanic verses

My last three issues have said WARNING LAST ISSUE on the front, and yesterday they accidentally mailed me an issue from 2-3 weeks ago.

WARNING WERE DRUNK

jets article has some solid LOLs, rushdie article is half fascinating and half weird (lots of self-aggrandizing and written in second person for some reason)

the 50 shades connection seemed forced

tru. tho tbh 50 shades sounded kind of ok in comparison to vagina: a new biography

i'll wait for the oral history

LOVED the Levy review. Much more elegantly devastating than the straight-up axe-grinding of, say, Katie Roiphe's Slate review.

have to check it out, seeing all these headlines re her new book i realized i couldnt remember what i disliked abt naomi wolf

Going way back to the Rachel Carson/DDT/mosquito debate:

When the recently created Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT for most domestic uses in 1972, this ruling had no force in other parts of the world and the insecticide remained part of the international anti-malaria arsenal. The United States continued to manufacture and export DDT until the mid-1980s, and it has always been available from pesticide makers in other countries.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/09/silent_spring_turns_50_biographer_william_souder_clears_up_myths_about_rachel_carson_.2.html

FYI, Ware has been sneaking himself into his past several covers, Where's Waldo? style. That's him on the bike in the lower left of the Sept. 17 issue.

Catching up after being on vacation. Confidential informants article is seriously making my blood boil with fury. This is basically the death penalty for possession of weed.

yeah it took me several days to actually finish the youth ci piece. i'd read a page and have to put it down, so disturbing and enraging.

It is damning, yes

jets article has some solid LOLs, rushdie article is half fascinating and half weird (lots of self-aggrandizing and written in second person for some reason)

I glanced at the Rushdie piece, and isn't it in third person?

Anyway, looking forward to that and the Elizabeth Warren profile once I finish the interminable article on the Danish architect.

sorry, third person, you're right. mixed up my terminology.

Second person would be weird - like a choose your own adventure book but with a fatwa.

you are not the kind of guy who would be the target of a fatwa at a place like this at this time of the morning

Your wife, who is falling out of love with you, calls you to say that 200 journalists are outside of your home. Do you:

a) Go home and fight through the mob of journalists to your home.
b) Ask your wife to meet you at your agent's office.
c) Say, "200? Exactly 200? It's very easy to make inaccurate estimates with a crowd that large, are you sure? I bet it's only 100."

You have written Haroun and The Sea of Stories.

Do you want to be a children's author? Go to page 43.
Do you want to divorce your model wife? Go to page 230.

My English degree finally proves useful.

Also, GO TO PAGE 43 TO THE MAX.

lol lol lol

Thought the Rushdie piece was excellent, and I understand the impulse to write it in the 3rd person: both as a process, in order to step out from under that kind of shadow and describe it with any kind of objectivity; and as a kind of compensatory measure — he justifiably wants to sever the "I" from this story, to be regarded more for his work than his face/notoriety.

Also thought it was a good narrative strategy that dovetailed neatly w/ the historical sections....

ugh i couldn't read the gladwell thing about pedophiles, not even because of ugh gladwell, but it was just too disturbing and gross, it basically read like "how to be a pedophile"

good pieces this week: surprisingly touching profile of joe girardi, interesting piece about the first political consulting firm

really wish the contents flap on the front of the magazine read MALCOLM GLADWELL how to be a paedophile