New Yorker magazine alert thread

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

not at the new yorker tho

personally embarrassing david remnick is a public service

more to the topic of this thread i really enjoyed the article on mega yacht culture in the latest issue

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/25/the-haves-and-the-have-yachts

I’m still working my way through it. Man, it’s … something.

Yeah, that yacht story is fascinating.

i started reading it but i hate all these people, find them almost physically revolting

yes. but there's a way in which he gets at how pathetic and insecure they all are even as they scale up to unimaginable heights of wealth

No matter how much money you have, you cannot escape death.

this just gets better and better

So I was waiting for another hit piece to drop before responding to the @Gawker piece, but feel like it’s important to respond to this now. But first, does the @NewYorker still have a fact-checking dept?? Does @Gawker? So buckle up, kids—this will be a long one…

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) August 5, 2022

lol

overbey evidently is so far handling this very well on twitter and gawker -- assuming they're not just fibbing -- may well have been stiffed by new yorker management (and also the union?)

BUT:
"Overbey did not respond to a lengthy list of questions we sent her on July 26 and multiple subsequent requests for comment. But after we reached out, she tweeted about the request. “To that @Gawker reporter who contacted me, I'll simply say, Go ahead & publish,” she wrote. “Publish it ALL. I'll just be over here sipping…”"

^^^this is where the fact-checking process kicks in and she deliberately opted not to supply any information to challenge the story they were getting from the other side? i mean this is her choice and her right obviously -- she's a journalist herself, she wants to control her won story -- but it does tend to support the claim that this is all a solo operation on her part (as does her suggestion that anyone they've anonymously quoted from the new yorker must be a management stooge…)

"of course you won't find anyone else to support my version of events! they're all in league against me!"

anyway as i say she's running the event well so let's see what round two scares up

personally embarrassing david remnick is a public service

― mark s, Monday, 25 July 2022 17:45 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^this is still the key takeaway