New Yorker magazine alert thread

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

just got a response:

Our records indicate you have purchased a print only subscription, which does not include digital access.

We would like to offer you the opportunity to upgrade your print
subscription to digital access for an additional $10.00.

is this a new thing? (i suppose it's worth it, i just don't remember this being the case)

I think it's an old thing that the subs system is screwed up -- in my 14 months "between subscriptions" I still had full access to the desktop digital archive.

weird....

also i feel like i clicked on a dozen diff pages last nite and couldnt ever see what the cost for a "digital only" subscription was?

sorry i know this has probably already been discussed upthread

http://i.imgur.com/WOfPVNt.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/y1QsBGx.jpg

that's just for the didge???

i think so

apparently

dear new yorker: giving me free digital access will prevent me from bitching at you when my print issues fail to arrive, like the one with the professor who went on a shooting spree

yeah and thats basically the same price for print + digital tho right?

ok so its $60/year for print OR digital, $70/year for BOTH

there's some nefarious pricing mind control at work:
http://conversionxl.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/economistpricing.png
http://conversionxl.com/pricing-experiments-you-might-not-know-but-can-learn-from/

One of Berman’s lists tracked the thousand greatest people who had ever lived, and, Berman confided, he himself had recently reached No. 27, surpassing Herman Melville.

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.

― the tune was space, Tuesday, April 2, 2013 11:12 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

curious why these psychos are drawn to milton

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/sonali-deraniyagala-wave-review-teju-cole.html
― s.clover, Thursday, March 28, 2013 4:54 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

reading this book rn; awful story

One of Berman’s lists tracked the thousand greatest people who had ever lived, and, Berman confided, he himself had recently reached No. 27, surpassing Herman Melville.

― turds (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, April 2, 2013 4:06 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark

i like the "recently," like what happened that in his head he was like "nailed it"

that was amazing. like he thinks he's being humble not putting himself at the top

i love david carr so much in that clip

I immediately searched on line for a downloadable version of Berman's novel. No luck.

http://i.imgur.com/azKsgZf.jpg

lunatic in repose. gonna pull out all the stops to find a copy of his novel.

(btw it still being 60/yr for a subscrip is killing me, is it really worth that price rn?)

He looks like a Godard character.