New Yorker magazine alert thread

NA otm about that Patricia Marx piece. So much potential, so much UGH.

Holy shit that Syngenta article

yeah

the last line of the Wm. Burroughs piece is painfully OTM

i read a lot of his stuff in college (the more narrative, straightforward stuff mostly, the cut-up shit was too abstract for me then, can't remember if i actually made it through NL) but feel no need whatsoever to return to it for any reason now

it's a negative review? i love burroughs

i mean of his work not the bio

i guess i can just go read it or look at the last line

let me save you some time.

The line is

"William Burroughs sucks."

lol

yesterday i read the evil oakland county mayor (what a fucking asshole!!!) one and the 20 page obama profile/interview. kind of wish the latter was just a 5 page interview w/o all the flourishes & context but it was pretty good, was actually kind of surprised how aware he was of a lot of criticisms from the left, seemed clear that he had thought about them a lot and responded to them fairly straightforwardly

Loved the Obama piece, partly because it illustrated how the things I admire about him as a person, eg his sense of complexity and nuance, are at odds with the demands of the presidency.

TNC did an excellent dissection of what he disliked about Obama's comments on black achievements.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/the-champion-barack-obama/283458/

nobel prize for science to those hayes -> syngenta e-mails
so beautiful

I was p pissed off about the Syngenta article cuz the day I read it, I was driving somewhere and npr did this really toothless summary/interview with the author where they presented the story as though Syngenta's actions were somewhat reasonable instead of being some sort of calculated Scientology-style mental fuckery

Is there a name for a day where you read the New Yorker and listen to npr

Sunday

True

The piece about Diana Nyad this week is brilliant

lots of New Yorker plot (w/Sparks Nevada as a NY writer) on Brooklyn 99 this week

i have issues w/diana nyad but first few pages of article were fascinating. will finish later.

Good piece but didn't they do a nyad piece in the not-to-distant past? Like withing a few years?

was actually kind of surprised how aware he was of a lot of criticisms from the left, seemed clear that he had thought about them a lot and responded to them fairly straightforwardly

― flopson, Friday, February 7, 2014 11:19 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hah really, did u think he was dumb or something

I decided somewhat on a whim to read all the articles in the current issue - I usually read about one on average. The Roger Angell piece on being 90+ is great - kind of stunning in its frankness. The Batuman article on Turkey is pretty good, although it seems now that she's mastered that understated, knowing New-Yorker style there's less of her personality than in her older articles that I prefer. I ended up enjoying the piece on Amazon's fraught relationship with the NY publishing establishment a lot more than I expected to, mainly for how Amazon seems to have a gift for inciting the publishing world into paroxysms of rage that end up being kind of self-destructive - witness the whole Apple iBook anti-trust debacle, which seems to be a major self-inflicted wound driven by Amazon derangement syndrome.

i read that nantucket boating article, the most baffling part was

Tom began running summer fishing charters out of the island's West End. He'd make himself a peanut butter, mayonnaise, and lettuce sandwich,

YES

Haha, otm! I read that article last night and was baffled by that as well. I demand a follow-up story on that terrible sandwich.

the Angell piece o.nate references is amazing.

It's online here:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/17/140217fa_fact_angell

True rationalists are as rare in life as actual deconstructionists are in university English departments, or true bisexuals in gay bars.

fuckin gopnik

surprised that made it through fact checking

gopniiiiiiik *shakes fist at nyer app*

Gopnik wrote the article as if trying to impress disillusioned McSweeney's readers.

is it played to complain about how shitty borowitz is

i mean, fuck

I've got a teaching colleague who posts Borowitz garbage on Facebook every day

are you implying there are people somewhere on facebook who don't post borowitz garbage every day?

I deny the existence of people who write "Essential reading!!" on a Borowitz garbage post.

how about peolpe who write "haha" or "totally true" on a garbage borowitz post?

The top two slots on the "most popular" list are Borowitz yet again. Do you think the Gopniks and the Hertzbergs really hate him for that? I would.

i am at peace with max's justification of borowitz's existence, which is essentially that he brings the NYer a lot of clicks so they can keep paying people to write cool stuff

it is the search for the justification of those clicks that keeps us awake though

what is up with the pluralization of 'SATs'

it's not even consistent

the borowitz report is a million times better than letting gopnik right about books

what is up with the pluralization of 'SATs'

it's not even consistent

― mookieproof, Thursday, February 27, 2014 7:22 PM (Yesterday)

huh?

Taking the SATs is not something to do lightly.

The last time I took the SATs, there was no essay.

she determined to take the SAT each of the seven times it was offered in the course of the calendar year

Stier’s only experience with the SAT was the sort that most students have, or at least had

The SATs were administered for the first time on June 23, 1926.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/03/140303fa_fact_kolbert?currentPage=all

oh i thought you were referring to there not being an apostrophe. yeah unless there's some sort of difference in i'm not aware of that's poor editing

yeah i don't understand why it would ever be plural, but at least pick one way

poor t-pain :(

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2014/03/the-sadness-of-t-pain.html

I just finished the epic Amazon article. Scared for the future.

xpost I could have sworn from that article that SAT doesn't even stand for/mean anything anymore.

this is massive and fascinating
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/03/140303fa_fact_khatchadourian
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/02/video-how-to-put-a-star-into-a-bottle.html

^^^

Yes.

"Spitzer was given time off from his bomb work to set up a secret thermonuclear-energy project in an old rabbit hutch at Princeton. He designed a tabletop device, which he called a stellarator, that looked like a pipe twisted into a figure eight. When the device was first turned on in the darkened hutch, an instantaneous purple glow appeared ..."