New Yorker magazine alert thread

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.

"a scrawny Vice staffer named Thomas Morton attempts to navigate China’s dating scene."

What is this person's ilx name?

so i managed to go almost an entire year after my print subscription expired while still using the same account to access the ipad version, but it looks like that stopped this week

weirdly, i can still log in to the shitty website reader version

dude, I've *met* that Berman guy before! when my dad did deliveries for a cleaners, he sent that guy's clothes plenty of times, i was there when i was about 16-17. had an irish kid at his house, which even then struck me as a little weird.

woah

man, I forgot all about that guy. reading this story now is wiiiiiiiild.

when folding laundry, your dad discovered that rolled up in Berman's pants was a 17-year-old boy clutching a volume of Melville poems.

thats insane

Re-read world's strongest man piece from last year. That piece is soooooo great.

irl lols at that. he was a real up his own ass kinda dude, kept pointing out busts of albert camus and saying things like "at your age, you are not ready to read camus. you are not ready to read shakespeare." the cult of personality shit around him does not surprise me at all, seemed like a real prey-on-the-weak type.

This is the Chris Berman article?

David Berman obv

not that this is the right handle by which to pick up something so serious, but . . . I have to say that the role of Miltonic "greatness" in Berman's predatory schtick was really particularly enraging to me- as an early modern academic, I have to say that the kind of parental superego of Miltonic authority is the most irritating part of Milton studies, the way that the rhetorical construction of Milton's lone visionary genius as the yardstick of all human achievement is just rife in the field as a disavowed-yet-obvious means by which Milton critics in turn pump up their own greatness as scholars/humans (and by extension flatter their readers as a "fit but few" exception to the herd who don't bask in the greatness), and to see this kind of debased variant of that cultish critical apparatus used as a tool to scare and intimidate (let alone molest) high school kids is just stomach-turning. Ugh ugh ugh x infinity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92JCleCaCj4

^^^wish she touched on that in the article

gr8080 i have a current print subscription and couldn't get in on the ipad last night -- it only showed 2012 articles in my library, wanted me to pay for anything in 2013. i think they're having some problems