New Yorker magazine alert thread

liked this from the joe beef article:

McMillan remains proudly chauvinistic about Montreal’s dining scene. “I had two eighteen-year-old girls from Laval”—a suburb of Montreal—“the other day, who were having a meal at Joe Beef before going out to a night club, and they were having deer liver medium rare,” he said. “Show me a restaurant in Manhattan that has deer liver, and then show me two eighteen-year-old girls from New Jersey eating it—and loving it—medium rare.”

What's funny is my wife and I had a great meal there, but I would by no means describe it as decadent. Our specific meal, that is. Our server (from France, who admitted she struggled for a long time with Quebec French) did a great job guiding our selections, and I want to say the final results were heavy on seafood and fresh vegetables, not too much wine, not too expensive. And not heavy. We left full and satisfied, but we did not feel gorged. I think if you go in there looking to get stuffed and blitzed, they can/will do that, too.

This is, however, perhaps the third long piece on McMillan and Joe Beef I have read or heard in recent months. So much so that my wife skipped the article, saying "I'm tired of hearing his story." Usually the New Yorker doesn't tread over such familiar ground.

Talk about indulgent, the Houston article was stupid and boring.

the other joe beef articles i've read have not mentioned their chauvinism or how their alcoholism created a bad work environment

I guess? I just assumed that was a given, because restaurant industry.

Nick Paumgarten really doing it for me with these sporting travelogues, there was the ski race a ways back and Augusta this week.

he is THE BEST

Yeah so this Mary Gaitskill story

It's good and often excellent, despite smart cavils I've read.

― recriminations from the nitpicking woke (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, May 19, 2019 5:15 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

i just finished it. it was excellent (the "aren't people on their phones a lot these days" stuff notwithstanding)

(these truths by jill lepore, that is)

I absolutely loved the golf and ski stories, which is something I never thought I would write, seeing as golf and skiing are two things that really don't interest me (and that I didn't think would be interesting to read about, for that matter). Shows what a great writer can do with ... golf and skiing.

I am about 20% of the way through ben taub’s 20000-word story about mohamedou salahi and his guard at guantanamo, and I can already tell it is going to be one of my favorite things I read this year

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-darkest-secret/amp

it's a really good piece; amazing arc

damn good piece.

an aside: wood's coffee consumption is something else:

“Out here, I’m probably only drinking seven or eight coffees per day,” he told me. (During the layover in Casablanca, he had drunk a Red Bull and twenty-two shots of espresso.)

sounds like http://blissbat.net/balzac.html

The New Yorker’s review of “untitled goose game” is the most New Yorkery thing I’ve ever read pic.twitter.com/yVhyssKrb9

— Alison Agosti (@AlisonAgosti) October 17, 2019

Why even both to review a video game if you're not gonna New-Yorker it up?

lol, can't wait to read the segue

Since everybody's letting out their frustrations with prestige publications failing to give credit, I thought I'd share my own most recent experience: @cduhigg's XXXL piece on Amazon in the @NewYorker this week.https://t.co/dRHqfp6pVN

— Emily Guendelsberger (@emilygee) October 18, 2019

yeah i kinda wondered about that, as there have been several journalists to work in amazon centers

liked the fraudulent cybersecurity firm story

bonus sewickley content for quincie

Oh I have not read that yet!

Sewickley so much better than Upper St. Clair tbrr

This New York article about Conde Nast is pretty great. It's about the whole company, but there's plenty of info about things in New Yorker-world.

That was awesome thank you

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/blood-and-soil-in-narendra-modis-india

yeah just started that last night

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELnEScmWoAICrAW?format=jpg&name=small

at least they don't put him in print

I just came across that old Damon Baehrel / fraud article ( i see spoken about upthread) because his 'restaurant' showed up on a new list of hardest reservations in the US. I don't understand so much about this. Also the Dept of Health doesn't have to do inspections?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/29/damon-baehrel-the-most-exclusive-restaurant-in-america

I am reading random blog posts about this restaurant too and it seems highly likely he's refilling wine bottles...which ...gross.

The Mary south fiction piece this week is really good , will be Reading her collection when it comes out

xpost hmm i found a semi recent health inspection and liquor license so this is all even more confusing.

I went back and read that article too, it's unusual to publish an article with a bunch of speculation and loose ends, and just be like "here's all the shit we couldn't successfully fact-check", isn't it?

It's definitely intriguing, but what are the options here? On one end of the scale he's a weirdo but making exactly the food he claims to make, and lying about the scale and celebrity of his diners (either out of compulsion or desire to build a buzz)? On the other, it's some sort of scheme to make a foodie fantasyland and cash in on locavore + auteur chef trends, and he (or someone else, or a staff of people) is preparing high-end food out of 'normal' ingredients offsite and the whole setup is a sham?

he seems to have a gap in the very few online reviews (right around after the article came out) and I could see subtle things of where he looks like he may have stopped the shadier business practices. I don't know. I watched some interviews with him and he is definitely odd.

My main annoyance with something like that is that it's so hard to run a successful and lucrative restaurant that this supper club that only does a handful of seatings a month... I wish reviewers would stop putting him on restaurant lists and giving free publicity when it could go to a restaurant that serves more than 4 people in a week.

the new jill lepore book about nationalism is very good. it's a brisk 160 pages. purely as a prose stylist, i like her very much btw: "Writing national history creates plenty of problems, but not writing national history creates more problems, and those problems are worse."

her audiobooks are great. she reads them, and she does "pompous ass" voices when she quotes people she doesn't like.

lol heroic

The new one about the rich guy bankrolling a bespoke submersible so he could be the first person to dive to the deepest point in all five oceans was some fantastic old-school, David Grann-esque NY-er escapism. So many ridiculous details.

yeah, i don't have tons of time for nyer Adventurer pieces, but this one was fun

Yeah, that was a great read, one of my recent favorites.

^^^agree.

I like imagining that pieces like this are actually fiction. Well what I really want is fiction written to be a dead ringer for a NYer article.

can someone post a link? i can't find it easily

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/thirty-six-thousand-feet-under-the-sea

thanks

some interesting stuff in the fiction issue, emma cline fictionalizes harvey weinstein's don delillo delusion & an unpublished hemingway work

Boy ... my wife had left a stack of New Yorker's for me to sort and discard, and wow, what a (sad) trip that was. As old as 2015, right up to the last few weeks, in random order. I would just flip through the table of contents and think, ok, this is pre-Trump, this is post-Covid, and so on. And one after the other I could just not bring myself to be interested in reading any of them, not even the stuff that was interesting. Just really underscored how absolutely exhausting, enervating the last few years have been, hurtling forward so fast that focusing on even the most recent past seems almost impossible.

if i had that stack i'd probably just read the classical music-related bits.

I specifically scanned the movie reviews in the table of contents (tables of content?) to help date each issue, and it felt like stumbling across a time capsule. I just skimmed an article about the Apatow/Feig casting director, and it talks about casting the "Ghostbusters" reboot, which, per another thread, I forgot existed, but which it's still hard to believe was only four years ago.

I read more of the fiction issue than I have in awhile

i'm perpetually 6 months behind with the NYRB and i get the same feeling with their politics articles. someone spent weeks of their life on this article and with the benefit of hindsight it was based on totally faulty premises about what would happen. every single time.

(Ugh, just noticed I put an apostrophe in "New Yorker's." I'm not sure I've ever done that before, and it's super ironic that I should do it when writing the name of that particular magazine. I blame the beer, a delicious hazy DIPA from Revolution which is perfect for the weather.)

I changed my approach in 2004. I read *so many* NYer articles about Kerry and the election, all (retrospectively) total wastes of time.