New Yorker magazine alert thread

I still laugh at Whiney's first post img.

From that most recent Overbey thread, I learned that she's Jack Hitt's daughter.

Of course she is.

At the same time, Overbey insinuates that Tarpley Hitt has a conflict of interest because her father is a "New Yorker contributor" ... even though, as best as I can tell, this amounts to one magazine feature in 2012 and eight online pieces between 2012 and 2016. During that time, he also contributed to the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Saveur, etc. etc. Now people are in Tarpley's mentions talking about her "rich New Yorker columnist father."

I started off feeling somewhat sympathetic to Overbey, whom I've followed on Twitter for years (mostly just because "New Yorker archive editor" sounded like a cool job). But the social-media dynamics of it all are leaving a bad taste in my mouth, regardless of whether she is actually "whistleposturing" or not.

Pretty much every media story is just “no winners here” these days

30 rapidfire tweets have never made anyone more sympathetic but if that's the platform you have to battle the New Yorker, I guess you've got to run with it. No one would notice if she tweeted a link to a blog laying out the case.

has anyone done the “when that tarpley hitt” joke yet

No one would notice if she tweeted a link to a blog laying out the case.

hey dudes on this thread just a quick note

if a woman is saying she felt unsafe and shitty at work and has receipts it's kind of shitty to criticize her methods. and her points about lack of diversity at that magazine still stands, no matter how much folks support her

don't remember her saying she was unsafe

though I figure this is a loose useage

So the @NewYorker has absolutely no problem with a male reporter who literally took rides on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane, yet somehow the female employee who blew the whistle on diversity is the big problem. I honestly don’t think the magazine realizes how much it’s telling on itself

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) August 10, 2022

she's talking about Gladwell, right?

“I was invited to the TED conference in maybe 2000 (I can’t remember), and they promised to buy me a plane ticket to California,” Gladwell says now. “Then at the last minute they said, ‘We found you a ride on a private plane instead.’ As I recall, there were maybe two dozen TED conference goers onboard. I don’t remember much else, except being slightly baffled as to who this Epstein guy was and why we were all on his plane.”

Dear god will this Louise Brooks piece never fucking end????

Did it?

I abandoned it and assume it continues to go on and on and on with detailed descriptions of every scene of every movie that she ever did.

The Louise Brooks piece doesn't get good until 3/4 of the way in, when the writer actually shows up at the apartment she hasn't left for years and starts talking with her. Then it's delightful. But it was 1979, so I assume it was novel to read a recap of someone's entire movie career.

Generally with archival issues, I read the restaurant review and do the crossword puzzle and then enjoy the week off from the New Yorker.

Cancel your subscription and enjoy that feeling 52 weeks per year!

I liked the Dylan piece in there, at least for the recording studio scene and period slang.

jordan's point is good but also this (insanely long pieces) was notoriously an NYer characteristic under late-days shawn

when i started reading there'd be an unending extract every x months from whichever volume of ved mehta's autobiography* was then in process, i think i read three before i noped out

when shawn was given the boot, robert gottlieb and most of all tina brown manhandled the copy back to more normal length

*continents of exile, 12 volumes in all lol

pity in some ways, i remember greatly enjoying a shawn-era factual two-parter on DYNAMITE, which must have been like 12000 words in toto (ie not long enough)

really liked this week’s issue

the gangster brewery article is batshit, I kind of can’t believe it’s not dominating twitter (probably for the better)

loved keith gessen’s review of fathers and sons (technically the new translation, though he spends about 3 sentences on that in particular)

new ben lerner short story which is a banger

I read the entirety of Janet Malcolm's Plath bio article in summer '93. Amazing what mags got away with in the advertising era.

Keith gessen’s book out this summer is great btw

the guy at the center of the gang brewery story is fucking nuts jeez

everything about that story is insane!

it's one of the worst ideas i've ever heard and the guy went off and actually did it irl

*ears perk up*

it's one of the worst ideas i've ever heard and the guy went off and actually did it irl

― call all destroyer, Thursday, September 8, 2022 3:00 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

there’s something poetic and beautifully american about gangsters and rich idiots getting into business together and despite multiple people getting merked in very predictable ways, getting the venture capital to keep on pouring in

it's one of the worst ideas i've ever heard and the guy went off and actually did it irl

― call all destroyer, Thursday, September 8, 2022 3:00 PM (forty-one minutes ago)

the way he used the term "street cred" and such leads me to believe he's not just a canny businessman who has a good idea of how to get himself positive press (until this story anyway) but also someone who just gets off on the idea of hanging around dangerous people

yup, 100%.

"Two former employees told me that, for a long time, the company was essentially home-brewing, trying to get the recipe right. I asked Taylor recently how much he knows about brewing. 'I just know enough to be dangerous,' he said." 🙄

Also, quelle surprise:
https://www.starnewsonline.com/story/news/2022/09/07/gang-member-run-tru-colors-brewing-to-close-wilmington-nc/8014356001/

this feels like a very of the moment and meaningful piece
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/12/the-victim-who-became-the-accused

Ooh. Rachel Aviv byline is v promising.

She has a new book imminent.

Holy shit, a Gopnik piece I could bear reading (George Simenon review).

I was unaware of Simenon, but am now inspired to try out his Inspector Maigret series.

The Aviv article is good and infuriating.

it gave me pause because the first few pages had me writing off the cop accuser, right up to the point where she was being arrested

Oh man! Written just for me:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/the-enduring-allure-of-choose-your-own-adventure-books

it gave me pause because the first few pages had me writing off the cop accuser, right up to the point where she was being arrested

― i cannot help if you made yourself not funny (forksclovetofu), Thursday, September 15, 2022 3:59 PM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I couldn’t get riled up by this story tbh, men gonna men

Oh jesus did they seriously let bobo in?

Haha I meant bono, apt typo tho

I thought you meant David Brooks and was about to cancel my subscription

I couldn’t get riled up by this story tbh, men gonna men

The behavior was bad and exploitive, but the infuriating thing to me was the criminalizing of the complaint. Big difference between thinking the situation was murky and thinking she should be prosecuted for reporting it in the first place.

i found that story pretty disturbing for one bcuz it seems like the guy is serially drugging and assaulting women, not something i'm comfortable handwaving personally. but also bcuz of the general idea that there are people (men generally) out there who want to play act as cops, and if they have enough money or business connections in a community, are able to essentially become paramilitary, sidling up w/ cops and abusing the law while not being subject to any of the laws/regulations/policies that are in place to address (or at least document) police misconduct. it's upsetting on some base level like what kind of lame shithead do you have to be to want to be a cop groupie so bad, but also when you think about how many stories like this there must be all over the country, not rape per se but men who are giddy over the idea that their connections to a police department allow them to fuck over their fellow humans. when you consider how many sub police departments there are all over america & the kind of consolidation of power that exists among police departments in small towns and communities (i.e. some island off ohio), there's just this web of ppl running these kinds of low level grifts, or in this case something even more sinister. that we (or anyone else) knows about this story is a minor miracle, it's also a drop in an ocean. profoundly depressing tbh

^^^^^

Totally OTM posts by both Jordans. I first read the Louise Brooks profile in a Tynan collection, think it was titled Show People, also good on Johnny Carson and Ralph Richardson, others (whole thing is now folded into an even bigger collection, it seems). Think I'll get the library to order this expanded edition of her collection:

Louise Brooks, Lulu In Hollywood
Paperback – Illustrated, Univ Of Minnesota Press

One of the few film books that can be called indispensable (Roger Ebert, 1998)
Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2022
Verified Purchase
“Lulu in Hollywood” starts with a forty-six-page introduction by Kenneth Tynan, “The Girl in the Black Helmet”, originally published in The New Yorker of June 11, 1979, and reprinted in The New Yorker of August 29, 2022.
Following are seven essays by Louise Brooks (interspersed with 40 pages of photos):
[1] Kansas to New York
[2] On Location with Billy Wellman
[3] Marion Davies’ Niece (about her close friend Pepi Lederer, who died in 1935)
[4] Humphrey and Bogey
[5] The Other Face of W. C. Fields
[6] Gish and Garbo
[7]] Pabst and Lulu (about the making of the 1929 film “Pandora’s Box”).
At the end there is an epilogue by Louise Brooks, “Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs”, a little piece by Lotte H. Eisner, “A Witness Speaks”, and Louise Brooks’ Filmography (24 films between 1925 and 1938).
This is a great read. I read it overnight in one sitting the day I received it. Louise Brooks’ writes as an eyewitness to the world of filmmaking of the 1920s and 1930s in a style that is crisp and unpretentious.
In a 1998 review of “Pandora’s Box” Roger Ebert wrote:
“In Rochester, she [Louise Brooks] wrote memoirs that were eventually collected into Lulu in Hollywood, one of the few film books that can be called indispensable. She remembered Bogart as a kid starting out on the New York stage, and the private lovability of her old friend, W.C. Fields. And she was frank about her rise and especially her fall. Many silent stars become boring relics, repeating the same memorized anecdotes. Louise Brooks was saved by the astringent power of her wit.”

the personal history pieces sometimes dont hit for me but the 1 abt elizabeth hardwick in this issue was real good

yeah, I liked that one.

Same.

Menand's review of the Giuliani bio made me lol in places.