A thread where we post nothing but first lines of New Yorker feature articles, watching to see if patterns emerge

One morning earlier this year, Ben Shoucair, a junior at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and his father, Afif, a retired math teacher, got up before dawn and drove to the Detroit Airport, twenty minutes from their house.

The Dalai Lama's birthday party, an event he has never much cared for, was set to begin at 9 A.M. on July 6th, in the Indian Himalayan town of Dhamramsala, where he lives.

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children.

On August 29, 1952, David Tudor walked onto the stage of the Maverick Concert Hall, near Woodstock, New York, sat down at the piano, and for four and a half minutes, made no sound.

damning evidence imho

(idk of what however)

The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic.

One afternoon last winter, two ships lined up side by side in a field of pack ice at the mouth of the Ross Sea, off the coast of Antarctica.

At the Kennedy Center Honors in December of 2008, a slight [lol!], copper-colored woman wearing a red gown sang "Love Reign O'er Me" by the Who, one of the evening's honorees.

cold places

cold places

In the summer of 1996, rains flooded the Amazon, rendering it virtually impenetrable.

Sun was bouncing off the miles of Jerusalem stone and the black hats of the Hasidim on the afternoon when Mike Huckabee went to visit the Wailing Wall, earlier this year.

lol

On October 6th, at 10 A.M., Neal Katyal, an attorney for the Department of Justice, rose in front of the Supreme Court to argue the government’s position in the matter of United States v. Stevens.

places of great heat or cold

On August 6th, a week after the Democratic Convention, a clandestine summit meeting took place at the Aspen Institute, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

On September 8, 1999, a thirty-two-year-old Los Angeles police officer named Rafael Perez, who had been caught stealing a million dollars’ worth of cocaine from police evidence-storage facilities, signed a plea bargain in which he promised to help uncover corruption within the Los Angeles Police Department.

Several of the world's top experts in the conservation of very old wood covered with very old paint met recently in a windowless, cramped room of the St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium.

As Susan Greer was walking her golden retriever one morning near her home, in Morristown, New Jersey, she heard footsteps behind her.

Evergreen oaks were fingering up the creases in the mountainsides, pointing toward the ridgeline forests of bigcone Douglas fir, of knobcone and Coulter pine.

Evergreen oaks were fingering up the creases in the mountainsides, pointing toward the ridgeline forests of bigcone Douglas fir, of knobcone and Coulter pine.

bible code 2.0

so far the avg number of commas per sentence is 3.3 repeating

seems like a lot

Wondering if I should have done first paragraphs. A lot of the ones that don't start out with the most typical NYer first line structure ("On January 4, 2015 outside a small hotel in Medno, a suburb of Ljubljana, Slovenia, a slight woman wearing a parka and jeans was hocking hand-knit shawls and mittens she had spread across a small folding table") tend to vary things by putting the same information in the second or third sentence instead.

i wish i could remember the article i read about writing for the nyer--might have been that ridiculous dan baum twitter thing--where the author talked about how all pieces that are submitted to the nyer are edited to read in chronological order

i mean i think this is sort of a strength of the magazine--their invisible army of editors who will wring all "personality" out of pieces in favor of that easy nyer "tone"--you always know that what you get will be readable, smart, generally well-paced, etc

sometimes i feel like all i do on ilx is defend the new yorker

Every weekday for the past twenty-seven years, a long-in-the-tooth history major named Phil Schaap has hosted a morning program on WKCR, Columbia University’s radio station, called “Bird Flight,” which places a degree of attention on the music of the bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker that is so obsessive, so ardent and detailed, that Schaap frequently sounds like a mad Talmudic scholar who has decided that the laws of humankind reside not in the ancient Babylonian tractates but in alternate takes of “Moose the Mooche” and “Swedish Schnapps."

like the economist... xps

i wish i could remember the article i read about writing for the nyer--might have been that ridiculous dan baum twitter thing--where the author talked about how all pieces that are submitted to the nyer are edited to read in chronological order

there was a thing in relation to the 'x # of writers under 40' feature about the editing process for fiction - how long and involved the process is - that shed light on how impt the editing staff is in keeping a consistent tone & vision through the entire mag

Flash Rosenberg, an artist-in-residence at the New York Public Library, sat toward the back of the Celeste Bartos Forum last week, surrounded by assorted pens, a tray of watercolors, and thirty-odd colored pencils.