New Yorker magazine alert thread

Getting read is a better outcome than getting recycled

They both end up with dog shit all over the place

Borowitz isn't in every issue

What the hell with the McPhee piece this week

I have adored McPhee for a long time but his last few things were a bit rambling, and not in a fun way.

I stopped subscribing for the first time this year, as I barely have time to read enough to finish my degree with a one-year-old toddler, let alone the New Yorker.

I pulled out the articles I still wanna read from 2-3 years of archive, tossed the rest out, and now we have a nice, telephone-book-size pile of paper and staples for my daughter to play with.

Before the pandemic I took magazines that I had read or wasn't going to read to the fitness center at my workplace. Since the fitness center closed I've been saving these magazines in anticipation of the place reopening.

I really liked the McPhee piece, you all didn't? A real pleasure to read something not in the standard register, but that still sings. Then again, you could say the same about the short story in this issue whose strange energy appreciated but which I wasn't actually finding myself liking and haven't finished yet. I thought the piece about Native language in Maine was badly written and just kind of off, too bad because the subject is one I really wanted to read about. French tacos piece was fluff but I enjoyed it all the way through. Jack Handey v. good in the exact way he's always good, I've read enough of these for a lifetime but I endorse NYer running them because there are always new readers.

Oh, I forgot, the Missouri fraternity suicide article, that was also really good. Good issue!

Was this issue the one with Nathaniel Mackey, or was that last issue? I don't get it because its liberalism makes me nauseous, but sometimes the profiles of artists and writers I admire are great.

That was the last issue.

And that was a really interesting piece though I would say that for people like me who haven't read the poetry it doesn't convey any sense of what the poetry is (not for lack of trying), just the person.

i also let my subscription lapse this year. they're still coming due to the lag but any week could be the last. usually it updates without my knowing it but this year i had a new credit card and i haven't been reading enough to justify. i mainly read the poems tbh. anyone else like them? i feel like the current poetry editor kevin young is kinda great; the poems are really varied and sometimes have a fun almost slam vibe. couple recent ones i liked Remembering a City and a Sickness By Christian Wiman and My Empire By Kaveh Akbar. also i love the podcast, the recent one with margaret atwood was amazing. my memories of the poems under the former editor paul muldoon were super dull but i wasn't as into poetry then

Kevin Young is the poetry editor? I thought he was director of the African American museum at the Smithsonian now.

I won't comment on the poems.

Mackey is truly one of the great poets and poetic thinkers of our times. His work is really indispensable.

haha not surprised you aren't a fan :)

Kevin Young is the poetry editor? I thought he was director of the African American museum at the Smithsonian now.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Tuesday, April 13, 2021 2:50 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

since 2017. i think he does both. he seems extremely prestigious

flopson, yeah, not my cuppa.

The last issue I received was April 5, so I can't comment on any of these more recent pieces. I thought Rachel Aviv's profile of Elizabeth Loftus was really good, though.

I also have a 700-page book by him (Kevin Young) on my shelf which looks really interesting but which I've been too intimidated to read so far

Bunk, right?

I actually think he's not a bad poet, though I prefer work around similar issues by some of his contemporaries.

flopson, yeah, not my cuppa.

― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Tuesday, April 13, 2021 2:58 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

xp- any poetry magazine or website that you'd recommend?

Bunk is an interesting book. Not exactly what I hoped for when I bought it (I was looking for something more directly Luc Sante-meets-Ricky Jay, rather than a philosophical tome about why human beings are so easily suckered into bullshit), but I'm glad I read it and I keep it around as a potential reference.

i haven't read many of his poems, although i watched some videos of him reading on youtube and they were pretty killer. he gets really into it, iirc at the end of one he was visibly perspiring. it was powerful and mb not something that would necessarily hit the same "on the page." i also really like him on the new yorker poetry podcast. you can tell he was like, a really good student in poetry class at Harvard, which makes him a bit tedious, and he can be totally insufferable in combination with a pretentious guest. but he's overall really warm and fun

flopson, Poetry Magazine might interest you, as they have a wider range of styles and schools that they publish.

If you're in Canada, the Capilano Review is indispensable (I can't remember where you are, apologies).

Websites? Tbh I only know the ones that I read, but I think that the Poetry Project does a good job with The Recluse: https://www.poetryproject.org/publications/the-recluse

I also stan for Nomaterialism:
https://www.nomaterialism.com/

Black Sun Lit has a pretty robust online presence:
http://blacksunlit.com/

Tagvverk does more concrete poetry and experimental work:
https://tagvverk.info/

baest is one for the queers
https://www.baestjournal.com/

And I could keep going. But I think you'd do well to start at The Recluse. I also recommend everyone sign up for this, it's wide-ranging: https://poets.org/poem-a-day

If you haven't, also, flopson...you should definitely look up Tongo Eisen-Martin. I can't remember if we've discussed him elsewhere. He's amazing.

Back to New Yorker programming...

I will say that now that I can spend time at my parents' house again, I will probably be purloining back issues that interest me, much as I did before the pandemic.

thx!

i live in vancouver

Oh, then the Capilano Review should be quite easy for you to get a hold of. Please give a kiss to that city, I love it and have so many friends there.

:)

I also have Bunk on my shelf but have not read it yet.

Yep, Bunk is the book that sits unread like a pile of old New Yorkers, to keep the thread on-topic, but those who have read it do rekindle the likelihood of my picking it up at some point....

This was wild and weird:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-the-trail-of-a-mysterious-pseudonymous-author

that was cool

i did enjoy that although i wasn't sold on the books being good from what they could relay

this new ben taub story is riveting and confirms everything you might suspect about the austrian (inept, illiberal) and israeli (effective, amoral) intelligence apparatuses

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/how-a-syrian-war-criminal-and-double-agent-disappeared-in-europe

This is relevant to my interests, ty

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/alison-roman-just-cant-help-herself

lol

As the writer Andrea Nguyen has observed, the brash, prescriptive “bro tone” that has served many a male food-world personality so well is increasingly becoming gender-neutral. Roman has been one of its premier female purveyors, rarely shying away from—and occasionally picking—a fight. “Rice has always seemed like filler to me,” she wrote in 2016’s “Dining In,” dismissing the world’s second most important cereal crop as though she were swiping left.

Disrespect our cereal crops, will ya? Why I oughta

Permafrost thaw has brought to the surface all sorts of mysteries from millennia past. In 2015, scientists from a Russian biology institute in Pushchino, a Soviet-era research cluster outside Moscow, extracted a sample of yedoma from a borehole in Yakutia. Back at their lab, they placed the piece of frozen sediment in a sterilized culture box. A month later, a microscopic, wormlike invertebrate known as a bdelloid rotifer was crawling around inside. Radiocarbon dating revealed the rotifer to be twenty-four thousand years old. In August, I drove out to Pushchino, where I was met by Stas Malavin, a researcher at the laboratory. “It’s one thing for a simple bacterium to come back to life after being buried in the permafrost,” he said. “But this creature has intestines, a brain, nervous cells, reproductive organs. We’re clearly dealing with a higher order.”

The rotifer had survived the intervening years in a state of “cryptobiosis,” Malavin explained, “a kind of hidden life, where metabolism effectively slows down to zero.” The animal emerged from this geological “time machine,” as he put it, not just alive but able to reproduce. A rotifer lives for only a few weeks, but replicates itself multiple times through parthenogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction. Malavin removed from the lab fridge a direct descendant of the rotifer that had crawled out of the permafrost and placed it under a microscope. An oval-shaped plankton squirmed around; I imagined this blob, two-tenths of a millimetre in size, as a nervous explorer who awoke to find itself in a strange and unexpected future.

yeah I am looking forward to that one

the entire issue w that article was v good

stuff of nightmares tho right?

harking back to: “Rice has always seemed like filler to me,”... said the person who pretends to know something about eating food. ffs, ofc "rice is a filler". It fills the stomachs of people who were hungry and then ate some food.

hilton al's weerasethakul profile was fuckin' great

Infuriating article, especially since I know some people who were directly involved in an incident described toward the article's end.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/04/mackenzie-fierceton-rhodes-scholarship-university-of-pennsylvania

Just came here to see if anyone else had read this (not that I have anything sensible to say about it).

Let's just say that I know two of the people who were witness to the older student having a seizure then later dying because he couldn't get care quick enough— they were in the classroom when he started seizing.

One of them told me yesterday that she is quitting their job at Penn because of revelations made in the article, and I don't blame them,.

Infuriating because of what it reveals or because it is wrong?