New Yorker magazine alert thread

never felt more alone than when balls deserted me

movie requires you not only have a tolerance of flash mobs but find them absolutely wonderful. it was better than no strings attached, at least the leads were fun.

Requiring Kunis and JT to "make love" to serious music to signify their commitment to Something Lasting And True was gross imo.

xp def agree flash mob is worse than terrible but thats just like the last ~10 min iirc? it's a p funny movie til then

plus c'mon who doesn't remember semisonic did 'closing time'

What's wrong with Steve Coll?

he has a bit of a coll

golfclap.jpeg

The story about the Horace Mann pedo was crazy.

i know!

as for Kriakou, I kept thinking of Kevin Bacon in JFK mode playing ("Oh bring ON those muthafuckas with dere college degrees. I got nuthin to HIDE").

The story about the Horace Mann pedo was crazy.

Literally crazy -- the main guy (Berman) sounds totally deranged.

yeah it was pretty nuts, i like when he ranked himself 27th all time

i read half of the cia thing and found it kinda boring, update

is y i skip those mostly

the part in the horace mann article where the author gets this response from one of berman's protegé's that is written in the exact same excruciatingly florid style as his master was amazing

i love cult shit

^^^YES

he reminded me of people i knew when i was a teenager, without the abuse, but that same way of drawing hapless teenagers in and making them feel elite and super-special and then leaving them totally bereft a little while later.

It was an incident out of an Auchincloss novel.

this weird seductive art-infused semi/pseudo-genius personality type that is all a shell around a core of pure selfishness

i liked how the author just printed eveyones assertions that the guy was a genius until then end when one of his ex students was all he was just making top ten lists and didnt really get art at all

"People don't understand," Gene told me. "People think of child abuse as a moment in a shower, like Sandusky. They don't think of it as essentially abducting and brainwashing. This was a cult of art, literature and music, a cult that was revered in some circles. And being in a cult is seen as a sign of weakness."

also his novel lmao

no surprise that Berman was a writer of laughable floridness ("especial"!).

i knowww xp

and he lived with four former students and the girlfriend of one of them wtf!

the fact that it took place at this august institution that was so full of itself but really had no better idea than anyone else wtf is going on w/life was pretty interesting

catholic church imo

yup

the amount of time Berman put into the grooming of these kids is def the creepiest part to me. that he could control them even in adulthood is terrifying

and that 'rebuttal' letter showed how he was still wielding his ego over them even now

big fan of the Gina article

the what

wall-to-wall Gina http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/03/25/130325fa_fact_finnegan?currentPage=all

oh meant to read that

yeah very interesting

ya it was good

shes a real messed up person

aren't we all ~

i would not want to be the daughter of lang hancock

i don't think i would mind being the daughter of lang hancock

the daughter of gina rinehart on the other hand...

wow that horace mann article quotes a professor/advisor of mine from college

show us on the new yorker where he taught you

he reminded me of people i knew when i was a teenager, without the abuse, but that same way of drawing hapless teenagers in and making them feel elite and super-special and then leaving them totally bereft a little while later.

Yeah, he reminded me of a high school English teacher who had a lot of the same characteristics, just not as extreme. My teacher even did a similar thing to Berman at the beginning of the course, drawing this high cliff on the chalkboard and a swamp at the bottom of the cliff. "Up here on the cliff," he said, "are geniuses -- Plato, Da Vinci, Shakespeare. Down here in the swamp, in the mud, is you. And I'm standing on the shore, reaching up to the top of the cliff and bringing all of that genius down to you." He was pretty crepey too, tho his predilection ran toward girls. He had a small group of four or five female devotees who sort of worshipped him, and he would totally ogle them when they walked past his desk. I don't think anything went farther than that, but he did a lot of weird power-trip stuff in class. One day when he thought we were being insufficiently attentive or worshipful or something, he pushed all the desks to the side of the room and made us all sit on the floor. He sat in the only remaining chair, so we were literally at his feet. Then he berated us, told us we could just sit there on the floor like kindergartners, because that's what we were, compared to him. (We were seniors.)

A whole lot of strange stuff goes on in classrooms.

Still working my way through the Rinehart article. Love the bit about her dad wanting to use nukes to mine for iron ore.

wow holy shit tipsy

where do they learn that chalkboard shtick are there workshops for psycho wanna be genius teachers

I don't know! I'd never heard of anyone else doing it until I read the article.

hmmm a nyer piece on vice media, wonder if ilx will have any opinions on this

A young producer pulled up a file with clips for the HBO show, labelled “iraq-cock-ass.” “Iraq” referred to a segment about the aftermath of the Iraq war, in which Smith investigates whether the use of toxic weaponry caused birth defects in the local population. “Cock” meant “Cockblock”—a segment in which a scrawny Vice staffer named Thomas Morton attempts to navigate China’s dating scene.

“What is ‘Ass’?” Rosenstein asked.

“Assassination,” Smith said. It was the piece about political violence in the Philippines.