New Yorker magazine alert thread

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.

where is anyone reading great longform feature writing these days

lrb, nyrb, tls, n+1 etc etc

Those outlets all have good stuff but they're more essays than reporting. It's the reporting where I think the New Yorker just doesn't do quite as much as it used to, the pieces where you know the writer spent months digging into something, on the ground, talking to people, accumulating data and detail. They still do that obviously — the Wagner Group story, e.g. — but I read more things than I used to that feel assembled much more quickly. More like normal magazine features, less with that distinctive New Yorker depth or precision or background.

But also I'm sure it's also improved in lots of ways, not least of them being the diversity of viewpoints it offers.

You're right about both, and I miss that about the NYer too. Here's an example (from the LRB) of the sort of story they hardly ever do, and which the NYer used to just own - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n14/james-meek/who-holds-the-welding-rod

NYer is waaaay ahead of LRB in terms of diversity of viewpoints afaict

NYer is waaaay ahead of LRB in terms of diversity of viewpoints afaict

Each the product of a small island that thinks it's the center of the universe...

“But his overriding instinct is to find ways to be visible. Adams’s diary of official events seems far fuller than those of his predecessors Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg. They might have been glad to skip, say, a Croatian flag-raising, or a mayoral forum on drones. New York is now led by someone who takes deep pleasure in the pleasure people take in seeing him. Adams recently told an audience, of his visits to an outreach center for unhoused people, “If you can see their faces when they walk down the line and they’re given food—and they see their mayor!” (Adams has dismissed less responsive constituents as “naysayers,” “haters,” and “little people.”)”

Unperson made me lol

LRB is at least aware there's a rest of the world, NYRB has trouble seeing a world outside the US Supreme Court.

The world of the LRB personals ads was a sublime thing that was glorious and will likely never be recaptured.

In a past life I was in charge of personals for a decently prominent paper, so I consider myself a connoisseur of the genre.

Nowadays, dating apps have made personals ads obsolete. But for a brief shining moment, they were an art form.

The Eric Adams profile in this issue is excellent.

― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, August 9, 2023 1:45 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

it’s soooooooooooo good haha

I'm partway through it, he's even cringier than I thought (and I thought he was super cringe). The writing is funny because mostly it's just observational but the details don't need any editorializing.

sounds like it's time to let your haters be your waiters at the table of success

Yeah, it's peak understated comic writing

Monster Truck article is great. Especially the dirt logistics, lol.

Matos reflects on his time writing for Goings On About Town:
https://michaelangelo.substack.com/p/bc040-last-thoughts-on-night-life

He also links to this longer piece about how the change to that section has affected the freelancers who wrote for it: https://archive.ph/69ijY

For reasons, the NYer has drawn new attention to Bullet in the Brain, a Tobias Wolff story from 1995.

I feel like this kind of story - short, self-conscious, postmodern, a little experimental - gets a bad rap. In the 90s, literature was in dire need of fun. Barthelme, Coover, Winterson, Ishmael Reed? Not all were giants but they did bring some fun back into the enterprise.

I remember reading that story when it was first published. For some reason I had it filed in memory as the work of T.C. Boyle. Which I guess means I have never read anything by T.C. Boyle.

Boyle is in the same ballpark.

the essay over the weekend from the prison inmate who loves taylor swift is really beautiful https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/listening-to-taylor-swift-in-prison

the Hasan Minaj story is taking a beating

Wow. This is pretty horrible. Hasan Minhaj has just produced the recording of the interview and the documents he provided to the reporter, showing that The New Yorker totally smeared him.

They absolutely should not stand by the story. https://t.co/ZpU2Z69jhr pic.twitter.com/pcHp1OXHu7

— Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) October 26, 2023

The way he talks with his hands drives me crazy.

yeah I’m not sure that really discredits the story