New Yorker magazine alert thread

xxxp

on second thought, FdB writing about Agnes is probably good because most of his work is in the "inventing a type of guy to be mad at" genre

If Agnes Callard did not exist Freddie de Boer would have to invent her

and then accuse her of rape

I’ve never made any case against unions. I made a case for persuasion, in which I expressed doubts about whether I could justify canceling my class in response to the strike. I was asking for an argument, so I held an event in which a union organizer explained that argument. 1/2

— Agnes Callard (@AgnesCallard) July 11, 2023

Man, she's the king of "I'm just asking questions ... "

god, what a tiresome person

on the topic of labour strikes, i thought this piece on Orange Is the New Black really drove home how much streaming has screwed over working actors in Hollywood (and minority actors in particular). really depressing read.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/notes-on-hollywood/orange-is-the-new-black-signalled-the-rot-inside-the-streaming-economy

Traditional broadcast series pay residuals for each re-airing, calculated as a percentage of the actor’s salary. The 2012 New Media Agreement entitled Myles to residuals only after the first fifty-two weeks the show was on the platform; the amount was based not on how many times each episode was watched but on a percentage of the licensing fee that Netflix paid Lionsgate to distribute the show. (If this sounds confusing, don’t worry—the actors also find it baffling.) Myles still gets around six hundred dollars a year for a handful of guest spots on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” stretching back to 2004, but her residuals this year for “Orange” have come to around twenty bucks.

...

Despite the Beatlemania-like fame, many cast members had to keep their day jobs for multiple seasons. They were waiting tables, bartending. DeLaria continued doing live gigs to keep up with her rent. Diane Guerrero, who played the fashionable inmate Maritza Ramos, worked at a bar, where patrons would recognize her. “How could you tell this complete stranger how much you’re getting paid for being on a television show?” she asked. “Because everyone’s reaction would be, like, ‘Oh, my God, I love you on that show! But also, what are you doing here?’ It was this incredulity that was teetering on offensive.” Myles was working in a basement for a financial firm, acting in live simulations for aspiring financial planners. One day, one of the candidates paused on the phone and said, “You sound exactly like the Amish meth head on ‘Orange Is the New Black.’ Has anyone ever told you that?”

I hope you guys are ready bc my next essay is about sex

— Agnes Callard (@AgnesCallard) July 15, 2023

Sex rule #1: Stay away from scabs

"FHM have only gone and done a bloody 'Sex issue'!"

I’m ready for Agnes to make me feel exasperated by the idea of having sex

never been so thankful to be paywalled

WSJ editor: find me five people with a really normal understanding of sex

Second WSJ editor: you got it, boss pic.twitter.com/inQ4BjIYbc

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) July 28, 2023

agreed, too much

Hey, I have a post that's not about Agnes Callard!

Anyone else shook by Goings On About Town getting slashed from 6 pages to 2 (and dropping "About Town" in the process)? I do think it made sense to refresh that section: As much as I liked that its movie coverage had become a place to put recommended streaming titles (originally a pandemic pivot, but one that proved worth keeping), it did sort of raise the question of what Goings On About Town was for. Same goes for the occasional podcast reviews. But the location-specific events that were the meat of the section were also arguably irrelevant to a great portion of the magazine's readers (those who do not live in New York).

That said, the 2-page spread feels kind of flimsy for a section that's been such a mainstay of the magazine. And it's a bummer that Matos's byline (and those of other freelancers) will no longer appear:

After this week, Goings on About Town will shrink from six pages to two and be written entirely by staff.

— Michaelangelo Matos (@matoswk75) July 22, 2023

Also, despite the fact that Tables for Two remains in this week's issue, it seems like it might be evolving as well.

This week's TFT is by Helen Rosner, who announced that she has a new New Yorker newsletter that will sometimes appear in print:

Psyched to launch my @NewYorker column, The Food Scene — a newsletter (also on the web! sometimes in print!) about what, where, & how to eat. Sort of reviews, sort of vibes, sort of a weird 00’s blog.

First up: the strange & clever & super fun Café Mars https://t.co/l1sHcWCmqo

— Helen Rosner (@hels) July 31, 2023

And I noticed that Hannah Goldfield's bio was quietly updated. Until a few days ago, the first line read:

"Hannah Goldfield is The New Yorker’s food critic and writes the weekly Tables for Two restaurant column in the Goings On About Town section of the magazine, as well as essays and reported stories."

Now it says: "Hannah Goldfield is a staff writer at The New Yorker, covering restaurants and food culture."

I like both Goldfield and Rosner a lot, so if the change means that they will share that space in the magazine, I won't be too disappointed. But I am curious.

I can't speak for the popularity of the section but I've always loved "Goings On," especially during the majority of my life that I haven't lived in NYC. I like knowing what's going on! The same way I loved to read weeks-old Voice calendar listings on newsstands when I was a teenager. For all the other legitimate contenders, New York is still the cultural capital of the country, that's some of the most interesting stuff to me.

I used to absolutely inhale the live music and art listings. A really special section, with very impactful capsule reviews.

And there was no way I’d get to see these shows in that city! But it didn’t matter.

(When I started writing capsule shoe previews for alt weeklies, the New Yorker model was definitely in mind.)

Definitely a model. When I started a weekly calendar newsletter with some friends here last year, one of the things I said was "Sort of like Goings On About Town ..."

I have spent approximately fifty years reading this magazine while not living in its titular city.

There was almost zero chance of me going to a show it reviewed, or eating in a restaurant it described.

It will do what it wishes, I guess. Shrug. I will still subscribe out of sheer habit.

That section has actually been a really valuable research tool for me — as many ILXors know, I'm currently writing a biography of Cecil Taylor, and the New Yorker included his performances in Goings On About Town from the moment he appeared on the NYC scene in the mid 50s and never stopped listing him, even when the writer clearly didn't like his music or wanted to make fun of him, so there are all kinds of amazingly sarcastic descriptions of his work in those pages.

They are ending the kindle version, which I’ve had for years. Guess I’ll be going back to print.

Just seeing this and reading the Bklyn Sounds Dada Strain substack about the reduction in size and dropping of freelance contributors to the Goings On Around Town section . Ugh . One page in print now w/ 1 pop music event, one classical, one dance, one show is disappointing

iirc alex in nyc was a longtime contributor to Goings On About Town

yeah, before they gave out bylines

More crappy news in that Dada Strain newsletter: my friend Steve Smith just lost his job at Gothamist.

Yep. M. Matos & other freelancers did a nice job in recent years in that section of the New Yorker

John Updike and John McPhee also did TotT

One page in print now w/ 1 pop music event, one classical, one dance, one show is disappointing

― curmudgeon, Tuesday, August 8, 2023 11:18 PM (yesterday)

what really disappoints me is the severe culling of museum, art & film blurbs. i don't care about them cutting most of the music stuff bcuz in a time where for any good club night, decently sized indie act, let alone real pop star requires purchasing a ticket months in advance i just don't see the use of a week-of concert calendar. but w/ things like exhibits or films that might be around for a few months, you don't have the same problem. there's so much culture lost in the removal of the 4 pages

i'm looking at the first issue w/ the one page and it's one pop music event (carly rae jepsen -- sold out for ages, who cares), one broadway show (the new david byrne play which appears to be a blurb taken from a previous review), a contemporary dance show (mark morris dance group), a classical concert (bard music festival) and a film (passages, lol). pretty lame stuff

the restaurant review looks much shorter too -- reduced from three columns to two. the new addition is a column called "pick three" where in this issue staff writer michael schulman offers three "alternatives" to major pop cultural events/phenomenons -- "the summer pop playlist", "barbie" and "the big top" (he recommends another festival at bard, lol). this format is used frequently by the various NYT arts sections. not a very encouraging start so far

the last issue w/ the full goings on & the first issue w/o are both 66 pages so i guess they're just shifting things around instead of reducing issue size

I remember talking to people back in the west who thought the New Yorker was just a magazine about stuff happening in NYC. Which I guess is the impression you'd get if only made it about ten pages in.

I have been reading the magazine for 40-ish years. They used to have blurbs for every movie that was showing (even if it was, say, "National Lampoon's Vacation").

Nowadays we have other ways of obtaining that information and it isn't necessarily the job of a belletristic variety print magazine. If I want to get a synopsis of the Mission Impossible movie (or whatever) there are a lot of sources for that. That wasn't necessarily the case in 1949 or even 1979.

Who else is regularly sending out stacks of glossy paper with poetry, humor, and long-form book reviews in front of a mass nationwide audience?

Yeah, I did it between about 2000 to 2011. I used to joke that I wrote the blurbs about bands that the average New Yorker reader would never in a million years go see, until my editor told me to stop saying that.

It was great. The fact that I got paid for it was just icing on the cake.

agree with jordan, even as someone not living in new york it feels like a big loss

It's one part of a larger unfortunate shift. It used to be that the New Yorker ran articles that had clearly taken months to put together, about shit you'd never even heard of or thought about, and when you were done you thought, "Holy shit, I now know something I didn't know before, about a subject I had never even considered in my life." Now, the New Yorker runs articles about the shit everyone was talking about on the internet the week before, and you gain nothing by reading them except a sense that the writers and editors are some of the most cloistered, provincial people alive.

They still run some good long features, but yeah, a lot of times I'll see they did a piece on something I'm interested in and then I'll be disappointed because it's just retreading familiar ground. In ye olden times, it would be like, "Wait three months for the New Yorker article on this thing that's happening to really understand what's going on," now it's often just the same three-days-of-reporting take you can get from the NYT or Esquire or whoever.

i think the features section has still been pretty great especially in comparison to what else is out there... where is anyone reading great longform feature writing these days? we get ny mag & nyt mag at home also and the new yorker still kicks their asses. there hasn't been anything worthwhile to read in GQ in years. the new yorker feature on the submersible explosion was prob the best of them all. idk. i still find a few things per issue i find quite interesting

Oh I agree, it's why I still pay for it. But like so many things, it ain't what it used to be.

Honestly, I think the NY Times Magazine is about as good as the New Yorker these days. Their Q&As in particular are frequently amazing. And the important thing is that they both stomp all over the Atlantic, which is just a leaking Glad bag full of rotting roadkill at this point. But the New Yorker is undeniably Not What It Was, and a lot of that is due to their increased online presence and that (content and mindset) bleeding into the print mag.

NYT mag front of book is pretty great -- marchese interviews, the advice column is great, the food column is some of the better food writing out there. their features stink tho imo

There are weeks when I read it cover to cover (except for the fiction), others when I throw out the issue after a skim. It was ever thus. Some of their reporting in the last decade has been best-ever imo.

Alfred is like me in this regard. Some weeks, everything. Other weeks, just the cartoons.

yeah I still find the magazine indispensable. the feature on the wagner group last week, for example, was the best on the topic I’ve read. and I actually really like the online stuff too, though I don’t read all of it obviously

The Eric Adams profile in this issue is excellent.

Oh, I need to read that profile!

It’s been a long time since the whole issue begged to be read - but some of that’s on me, and my level of interest and the amount of time I have to dedicate to the magazine.

the music issue from recently was a great front to back read, prob the best assembled mainstream music journalism i can remember in the last few years

yes that was great. I loved the stax article!

X-post to Jordan S -

The New Yorker week of music event calendar included music gigs in small clubs not just big shows requiring advanced purchase months in advance , so it was a way for me to discover some acts that might be coming to small clubs near me, or small ones in NY if I was visiting there. Plus as others noted upthread, it like old school Village Voice listings was a way to see what live music was happening in NY both big act and small

But like so many things, it ain't what it used to be.

I had a friend that used to work at the New Yorker (not as a writer, just doing office stuff), and once she invited me to their old offices and showed/gave me a few copies of the magazine from the good old days, and let me tell you, it was often a mess. The layout (iirc more than three columns to a page, sometimes, with tiny type and squeezed between ads), the editing, or lack thereof (dense articles that spanned 10+ pages). Maybe I am misremembering, it's been many years, but she made a point of showing all the ways the magazine had improved over what it once was. Ymmv when it comes to the subject matter, but as far as the writing and stuff goes, I generally have no complaint about the magazine as it is now, except that I get it in the mail a week after everyone else.

Josh

and let me tell you, it was often a mess. The layout

Yes but. As a practicioner myself, I will not defend the mess. However! Counterpoint: the messy layout gave them more opportunities to do those goofy things like "constabulary notes from all over" and "correction of the week."

As desktop publishing has improved, there are considerably fewer situations where the whole article is in there but you just need one more column-inch of copy. Which is, in my view, a loss for the world.

I spent most of my youth and young adulthood making magazines happen. Technological advancements have improved the overall polish - but they also leave less room for idiosyncrasies and serendipitous duc-tape solutions.