New Yorker magazine alert thread

:)

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?

Infuriating because of what it reveals. They basically ruined the reputation of this young woman because her life didn't fit into their preconceived notions of what a foster child or first gen student looks like or acts like, and then they further ruined when she helped another woman seek justice against the school's malfeasance. I live in west Philly so I already have plenty of reasons to despise UPenn, and this story just gave me more.

God, what a terrible story. It's so insane that the whole institution would buy into the idea that she had concocted all of this — and then endured living as a foster child for several years, having no financial support, being cut off from everyone, with no obvious benefit from any of it. OK, she got in as a low-income student, but clearly she was a good enough student to get into Ivy League schools regardless, and her life would have been much easier with a supportive family if that's what she actually had. Basically, all of her actions and words make complete sense as a victim of abuse. They make zero sense for a fabulist.

heartbreaking story. there is plenty to be said about (as she says) “trauma porn” and the embellishment of experience on applications for entry to elite institutions, but I’m not sure diming out your own student is the move

Hard pressed to decide with whom I would least enjoy a leisurely dinner: David Brooks or Tad Friend.

Of course his daughter's name is Addison. Of course.

one time tad friend wrote a 1000000000 word nyer article on playing squash

glad to know i'm not alone, his articles have always stood out to me as insufferable.

I mean in the past few years the NYer as so obviously tried to increase the diversity in what/who it publishes, but then. . . this.

My mom told me about this article and it just absolutely wrecked me. tw: suicide, child suicide

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/11/the-mystifying-rise-of-child-suicide

yeah that was a tough read

RIP https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/remembering-roger-angell-hall-of-famer

I'm assuming most of you have read this, if not: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/old-man-3

the matthew wong piece was really good; rip

Several yrs ago, when my @NewYorker newsletter hit a 70%+ unique open rate (as I've mentioned previously here), I noted this accomplishment to a male icon of journalism. I was pleased by this feat & thought he would be, too. Instead, he turned to me & said, “Now don’t get cocky!”

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) July 19, 2022

oh, I wonder why she was put under a performance review. I just can't figure it out--

In the last 15 years at the @NewYorker, during the tenure of editor-in-chief David Remnick (author of a bio on Obama), less than 0.01% of print feature & critics pieces have ever been edited by a Black editor.

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) September 14, 2021

The male colleague at the magazine who added these errors to my copy while I was under performance review is David Remnick, the @NewYorker’s Editor-in-Chief. I don’t pretend to understand why he did this. I do know that he has intimate knowledge of Malcolm’s work & when she died.

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) July 19, 2022

erm

I’m gonna guess they send out a looooong staff memo that boils down to: “Let’s just all be nice, mmmkay?” Then a bunch of nearly identical tweets appear from junior staffers about what a great working environment The New Yorker is. Erin gets rape and death threats and is fired.

— Accidental_librarian (@ErkaLoubrarian) July 19, 2022

chotiner more or less sits back and lets alan dershowitz chotiner himself: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/alan-dershowitzs-marthas-vineyard-cancellation

Does Chotiner usually do this much faux-toadying to flatter the interviewee? I guess his shtick’s getting too well-known

there are only so many people who think they can ~ by general acclaim ~ come out on top against a canny guy with the final edit

dershowitz is a suitable avatar for them all

osnos superyacht article is v good

I feel like I've read a few versions of this piece over the years, but this one is really well-written:

I snuck into CPAC Hungary and all I got was this lousy article (and a heightened sense of foreboding about the fate of the American republic)https://t.co/hoovBMMqoq

— Andrew Marantz (@andrewmarantz) June 27, 2022

yeah good read

So the @New Yorker has fired me, effective immediately. I’m speaking with the union about potentially filing a grievance on the termination. But here are some things that I will say….

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) July 25, 2022

This is fucked up.

2) that several errors that were cited in an email reprimanding me while I was under the performance review were not mine; and 3) that these were errors that David Remnick added to the copy.

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) July 25, 2022

tbh overbey sounds like a nightmare - it's a difficult dance to be an employee who raises major criticisms against their employer, and she doesn't seem to have had the social skills to pull it off.

this reminds me of the recent felicia sonmez stuff where the person is right on the merits of the argument — well in overbey’s case the stuff about diversity there; i have no opinion on the performance review aspect — but you can only publicity castigate your employer for so long (especially from such a position of visibility [viral twitter threads]) before they’re probably going to want to fire you. that doesn’t feel very controversial to me… journalism jobs are not tenured, no one has a legal right to them. if she weighed the risks of speaking out (being fired) and decided that it was still important enough to her than more power to her honestly but she had to have seen this coming, no?

Also looks like she has been documenting this stuff for years. She mentions starting the diversity tracking in 2019, because at that point she was "increasingly concerned." So yeah, you've got to assume she saw this coming.

if they wanted to fire her for being a pr disaster on twitter that's kind of understandable

putting her on review for supposedly different reasons and then allegedly introducing errors into her work seems rather different

Every white guy in journalism right now over the age of like 50 still gets to play by a completely different rulebook than the rest of the world

how many email-only newsletters does the editor-in-chief normally edit personally

Jeffrey Toobin literally jacked off in front of a staff meeting and still has a job