New Yorker magazine alert thread

I am currently irritated with the NYer because it feels like they are doing “double” issues way more than they used to.

That Austin piece was kinda irritating, too.

That Austin piece was a rare example of a New Yorker article that seemed like it should be a book

He already wrote a big book about Texas, "God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State."

Hope it was better than his novel, which was a pile of shit.

Scientology book was ok, but fell short of being the definitive outlier text

that tweet phrasing is abominable

should i read the agnes callard thing

i mean i love a trainwreck as much as the next person but possibly it will be too depressing

i read it and just kind of shrugged but she seems like she sucks

Yet another pseudo-intellectual justifying their fucking around with bullshit, this stuff should have died with the Fabian Society.

seems like she's surrounded by people who like her for some reasons and just kind of let her do whatever because it's not worth disagreeing

I did see some reactions on twitter from the guy she co-hosts a podcast with and he was kind of brutal!

A few years ago, I wrote an essay that, in passing, questioned faculty solidarity with unionizing graduate students. I had not realized how sensitive that topic was, and I was inundated with angry and hateful messages and a few threats online.

https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-1240w,f_auto,q_auto:best/ap/06990af2-6d7a-4d62-b9c3-1ddcf771b5e5.jpg

that bad stance still far outweighs the weird and bad relationship hijinks

JCO multiple-driveby for those who celebrate

(excerpt from an uncompleted novel of Iris Murdoch focusing intensely, one might say hysterically-minuscule-ly, upon banal-stereotypical notions dressed up in philosophy-speak is no departure for the deceased novelist but her usual fatuous characters are here unleavened by wit.) https://t.co/YLvTL4SYdS

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) March 8, 2023

damn

Thought JCO would like her for throwing out her kids' Halloween candy

JCO = out there everyday, proving what a power user she is.

I read 2/3rds. Veered between "that's the piece I would point ppl to if they wanted an answer to "what is philosophy for?" question to juvenile giggling at stuff like this:

After seven years of marriage, they watched Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage,” a portrait of a couple as they struggle to understand the limits and possibilities of their relationship in the course of a decade. “It’s extraordinary that two people can live a whole life together without—” the wife’s mother says. “Without touching,” the wife answers.

you've got to read to the end to get the final story twists

It turns out she is...a cat person

the proposed book title "Marriage is a Preparation for Divorce" is like an alternate world Lana del Rey album title

sorry, song title

She wondered what it would look like if she and Arnold integrated new romantic relationships into their marriage. They would all keep talking about philosophy, but with fresh ideas in the mix. They asked each other whether it would violate the terms of their marriage if they became romantically involved with other people. “We didn’t think there was any good reason other than the usual conventions of marriage to answer that question with a yes,” she said. They referred to their new agreement as the Variation.

university of chicago philosophy geniuses, and they arrive at being poly

After our conversation in Pennsylvania, Agnes said Arnold worried that they’d given me the impression that their marriage was a success story.

as much as you can quantify marriage on a success/failure scale, no

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-barney-frank-went-to-work-for-signature-bank
nice one from chotiner, again

Heard Frank on NPR the other day, and he sounded like a raving lunatic.

Abusive romantic relations between faculty and students are a genuine problem, it is irresponsible to willfully exacerbate this problem because you want an outlet for some negative energy towards me.

— Agnes Callard (@AgnesCallard) March 16, 2023

Tfw analytical philosophy does not equip you with the tools to survive online.

https://media.tenor.com/6to6rc8LRLoAAAAC/oddball-negative-waves.gif

the article about "hache carrillo" was great, they should be required to have an in-depth deconstruction of a literary fraud in every issue

Before it's deleted

okay i've had just about enough of this shit. in our society, you can pretty much do whatever you like short of crimes. (you can also often get away with crimes.) have two boyfriends or whatever, that is your business. if you publicize your life, no matter how dull, https://t.co/0EeGDsYk9R

— John Ganz (@lionel_trolling) March 17, 2023

I liked Frank or at least admired him for a while because he was good at invective and took no shit. How reassuring to know he's brought these same virtues to corporate banking.

a good liberal!

Why didn’t anyone warn me that cat person was back?

uncatperson?

Astor Places Closest Shave

At Astor Place Hairstylists the other day, a businessman and a barber sat around talking razors. Electric, disposable, Harry’s, Schick, safety, straight: “It’s a three-billion-dollar industry!” Jonathan Trichter, the businessman, said. “When Gillette came out with the Mach 3, they put seven hundred fifty million into manufacturing and development. It took seven years.” Joel Valle, the barber, had constructed his first prototype—“a bendable razor blade!”—in prison, for the cost of a can of soda. “We’ll roll it out here. We’ll be the test kitchen,” Trichter said. “Then we’ll sell direct to consumers!”

Trichter, a former banker with J. P. Morgan, bought the barbershop two years ago, after the Vezza family, its owner for about seventy-five years, announced during the pandemic that they were closing it. “It couldn’t be like a vulture came in and picked it up,” Trichter said. “I could not look like a scumbag. So I probably overpaid.” He wore a made-to-measure suit over a monogrammed shirt. The purchase was more about fame than about fortune. “It’ll be the first line of my obituary,” he said.

Valle held up a handmade straight razor whose handle was studded with plastic gems. It had a bendable blade, curved like a scythe. Trichter looked at Valle and said, “You can step in if you want, but I’m gonna tell your story.” He went on, “So . . . he did a five-year stint in the federal penitentiary for cocaine—”

“One thousand one hundred seventy-­three grams,” Valle interjected. “I thought it was the end of my life. But it was the best thing that happened. I wouldn’t have come up with the idea of the razor.” He elaborated: “The only thing you have to play with in there is the trash.” At first, Valle, who is tattooed from head to toe (“Dick, balls, ass—I’m tatted up!” he said), melted down plastic (toothbrushes, water-bottle caps) to make a knife. “Anything could happen at any time,” he explained. “Thank God I didn’t have to use it.”

Before long, he started applying his ingenuity to matters of grooming. He crushed the graphite from pencils and mixed it with baby powder to make hair dye. He offered facial treatments (toothpaste mixed with Noxzema and sliced cucumbers) to lifers in their cells. One day, a guard asked what was going on. An incarcerated man replied, “This mothafucka turned this place into a spa!”

Valle had started out cutting the hair of local fishermen, in Puerto Rico, when he was nine; by 2006, he was giving trims to Newark’s mayor Cory Booker. “My entire life, I was gonna be a barber,” Valle said. After his drug arrest, in 2013, he began working as a jailhouse hair stylist. One problem: scissors were hard to come by at the Metropolitan Detention Center, where he landed before being sent to a maximum-­security prison in Pennsylvania. But he had an idea. By attaching a razor blade to a comb, he made his own razor-­comb, and soon he was blending fades like a pro. The guys paid him in packs of tuna. “I was eating every day like a king,” he said. He noticed that some prison barbers were using nail clippers; others used toothbrushes as combs. People loved that Valle did things differently. (Reached by phone, one of his former clients, who is currently at the Pennsylvania prison where Valle did time, said, “He can cut hair real good, yes indeed.”)

Valle went on, “Everybody’s got visitation. Everybody’s gotta look good for family. If you’re somebody that can make that man look good, that man will kill for you in there.”

In prison, a close shave is a different matter entirely. Valle had another idea. He would remove the blades from plastic disposables and hold them carefully in his fingers to give precision shaves. Next, he tried using his prison I.D. card as a handle. In 2015, he perfected his masterpiece, which he called the “Go 2 Razzor.”

He demonstrated the gizmo on a customer. “This is what barbers have been using for more than a hundred years,” he said, holding up a box of Derby professional chromium-ceramic-­platinum-tungsten blades. He shook his head. He picked up a pair of scissors and cut into a ginger-ale can, then folded a square of aluminum around one of the razor blades. By gripping the aluminum, he could bend the blade into different arcs. The result? The O.G. version of his ­patent-pending bendable razor blade. (He and Trichter plan to split the profits.) “With this, I used to make the saddest man in prison happy,” he said.

Trichter said, “Inmate innovation!”

“The bending is what makes it different,” Valle added. “It can adjust to any facial structure!”

Trichter watched nervously as the customer got the closest shave of his life. After Valle wiped off the lather, he plugged his side hustle. “I also sell Frenchies—French bulldogs,” he said. “I’ve got, like, twenty. You want me to bring you one?” ♦

New Grann book dropped:

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then ... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.

The essay on pop stars playing private events was awesome:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/05/how-to-hire-a-pop-star-for-your-private-party

was just coming to post abt that

this quote made me think like who is the biggest profile celeb/athlete whatever who doesnt do this shit (not that i knock it) idk like jokic probably?

The music executive told me that there is even a sense of commercial competition among stars, who now measure themselves as entrepreneurs. “If you’re Kevin Durant, and you don’t have five businesses, you’re a schmuck,” he said.

now this is a paragraph:

n the spring of 2015, Steely Dan was hired to play a fiftieth-birthday party for Robert Downey, Jr., in a converted airplane hangar in Santa Monica. Steely Dan didn’t do many privates, but Downey had endeared himself to the singer Donald Fagen. Downey, who had built a thriving late career playing Iron Man in Marvel movies, was celebrating with friends from Hollywood. “Phones were taken away. Downey came up and sang ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ with us,” Michael Leonhart, who was playing trumpet that night, recalled. When the evening’s other band, Duran Duran, took the stage, Leonhart quickly realized what it meant to generate stadium campiness on a small scale: “Simon Le Bon has his back to the audience. Then he turns around, the drum machine starts, and he goes, ‘Is anybody hungry—like the wolf? Two, three, four!’ And I’m, like, ‘Oh, my God, this guy gives good privates.’ ”

"Gives good privates" heh. If I read that correctly, Steely Dan opened for Duran Duran.

Obviously I don't live in a world where I attend private concerts by one legendary act, let alone two. But I was at a corporate event some years ago and they had KC and the Sunshine Band. Even I will admit that it was cool.

When I worked at a charity, I went to a corporate fundraising show where Madness were playing - incredibly tight set, right after Norton Folgate came out, and they played a bunch of album tracks, I guess to the puzzlement of 99% of the attendees. Weird vibe! They put on a great show while simultaneously looking like they would rather have been anywhere else. Between the songs Suggs kept saying “you are a wonderful audience but no one in the venue has brought us a beer yet“

Got a friend who has been to a few of these (Coldplay might be the biggest band that apparently regularly says yes that isn't cited in the piece). He said once a slightly older finance cohort hired the English Beat and none of the younger employees knew who they were. But this guy loved them, and he, my friend and a few others had a blast, since the band was awesome and giving 100%.

loved the stax article and (obviously) the matty healy article

If you count conferences as private events:

Aerosmith played at least one IBM user conference

I saw Spoon at a software event last year

are employees required to go to these concerts, do they occur doing working hours?

Yes for some if it's more of a convention/user's group situation, probably no for others if it's an evening "we made the execs a shit load of money this year" corporate party.

This one seems to making the rounds and I enjoyed it, but there wasn't anything surprising. Idk, I play in a band that does a lot of 'privates' (a few of which have included big names too, like the one with David Guett@ where we performed on a giant wooden cake), and it's all the same shit.

That Slate essay about the car dealer convention had some more private gig tales.

I haven't read the article yet so I don't know if it gets into this, but it exists on much more modest scales too. I know somebody who went to a friend's backyard birthday party in Connecticut some years back and the entertainment was Marshall Crenshaw. The guy's friend told him it only cost $3,000 to book him — granted this was 15-plus years ago, but still. (For stuff like that presumably you have to live within easy driving distance of whoever it is you're hiring.)

the idea that musicians only play shows that are open to the public and are ticketed (or for a non-profit, block party, whatever) seems kind of ahistorical

whether you’re a sell-out seems like it’s contingent on who is paying and the makeup of the audience

I am told that Mozart was a total shill for Hieronymus von Colloredo, the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg.

Iirc that history/distinction is addressed in the New Yorker piece.