New Yorker magazine alert thread

i used to read the main articles in every issue but let most of my 2010 issues pile up without reading anything.

if you read something good in a new issue of the New Yorker, post about it here.

The review of the new Mao biographies.

Denby's Joan Crawford essay.

A trick to not letting them pile up: if you're a subscriber, read a couple of articles online at work.

Man I've thought abt starting this thread a few times

this is why i don't have a subscription

Subscription to the print version: $39.95
Subscription to the iPad version: $234.53

http://runawayjuno.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/thumbs-up-low-res.jpg

AYYYY WE MAKING INTERNET MONEY

http://www.gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs/490177_o.gif

alright enough

Anything related to Mexico in the past year's issues has been pretty compelling, mostly by William Finnegan and Alec Wilkinson. The Jane Mayer article about the Koch brothers and the discreet establishment of the tea party is definitely worth reading. This week's Gopnik piece on postmodern desserts is a good read, too.

Date and month/description of the cover of the issues you're referring to would be helpful!

George Packer's essay on the decadence of the Senate was illuminating.

Oh, and, both from around August, the profiles of Gil-Scott Heron and John Lurie.

A trick to not letting them pile up: if you're a subscriber, read a couple of articles online at work.

― Gus Van Sotosyn (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, December 31, 2010 3:27 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^otm

links would be nice too

recent fire:

Joyce Carol Oates, Personal History, “A Widow’s Story,” The New Yorker, December 13, 2010, p. 70

David Owen, Annals of Environmentalism, “The Efficiency Dilemma,” The New Yorker, December 20, 2010, p. 78

only abstracts are online for nonsubscribers for those i think

Some articles are popular enough to remain accessible to all (e.g. the Packer article on the Senate to which I linked above).

here's the one abt the koch bros - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

A thread like this for all (literary/current event) magazines would be pretty cool.

Joyce Carol Oates article devastated me.

John Lurie article blew my mind.

dessert article was excellent, thanks for the recc

so john lurie is insane huh

The review of the new Mao biographies.

seconded

Gopnik's desserts article was like a magazine version of the No Reservations episode in Spain.

Which is not meant as a negative at all! They make good companion pieces.

dessert article was good but gtf outta here w/ this

Finally, the server arrives with the Messi dessert, as Jordi fusses anxiously in the background. He presents half of a soccer ball, covered with artificial grass; the smell of grass perfumes the air. On the “grass” is a kind of delicately balanced, S-shaped, transparent plastic teeter-totter—like a French curve—with three small meringues on it, and a larger white-chocolate soccer ball balancing them on a protruding platform at the very end. A white candy netting lies on the grass near the white-chocolate ball.

Then, with a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile, the server puts a small MP3 player with a speaker on the table. He turns it on and nods.

An announcer’s voice, excited and frantic, explodes. Messi is on the move. “Messi turns and spins!” the announcer cries, and the roar of the crowd at the Bernabéu stadium, in Madrid, fills the table. The server nods, eyes intent. At the signal, you eat the first meringue.

“Messi is alone on goal!” the announcer cries. Another nod, you eat the next scented meringue. “Messi shoots!” A third nod, you eat the last meringue, and, as you do, the entire plastic S-curve, now unbalanced, flips up and over, like a spring, and the white-chocolate soccer ball at the end is released and propelled into the air, high above the white-candy netting.

“MESSI! GOOOOOAL!” The announcer’s voice reaches a hysterical peak and, as it does, the white-chocolate soccer ball drops, strikes, and breaks through the candy netting into the goal beneath it, and, as the ball hits the bottom of a little pit below, a fierce jet of passion-fruit cream and powdered mint leaves is released into your mouth, with a trail of small chocolate pop rocks rising in its wake. Then the passion-fruit cream settles, and you eat it all, with the white-chocolate ball, now broken, in bits within it.

You feel . . . something of what Messi must feel: first, the overwhelming presence of the grass beneath his feet (he’s a short player); then the tentative elegance of acquired skill, represented by the stepladder of the perfumed meringues; and, finally, the infantile joy, the childlike release, of scoring, represented by the passion-fruit cream and the candy-store pop rocks. I saw Jordi watching us from the kitchen entrance. He had the anxious-shading-into-delighted look that marks the artist.

David Owen, Annals of Environmentalism, “The Efficiency Dilemma,” The New Yorker, December 20, 2010, p. 78

Would not recommend this one! People have been arguing about Jevon's Paradox for a century now, and the article doesn't really advance any significant new ideas. As a primer on the "debate" around energy efficiency, however, it's alright.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all

^ totally recommend that

yeah i read that one the other day, great stuff

it was interesting, lol scientists

i liked this one, seemed like a great premise for movie: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_collins

Haven't finished it yet, but I'm digging the Freud, psychiatry, and mental health in China article (subscription needed): http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/10/110110fa_fact_osnos

The Patel story was amazing.

yeah needs a good 3rd act tho.

he only contributed a couple of articles this year but i always enjoy atul gawande's stuff: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande is probably his best piece this year

if anyone subscribes then feel free to webmail me the china/freud article kthx

I would, but I can't figure out how to turn it into a pdf or another webmail suitable file.

just copy and paste the text? or is it a different viewer thing.....no worries if that's the case

the lehrer article is indeed pretty good and supplies ~evidence~ for my distrust of falsificationism and the inability of some ppl to think of scienctific 'knowledge' subjunctively, tho it does show science self-correcting so i don't read it as a total excoriation of the method

The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

The recent one on the Vatican Library was pretty sweet: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/03/110103fa_fact_mendelsohn

I really like Toobin's diptych on JP Stevens and... the other guy.

nakhchivan, FYI, digital subscription gives you access to this weird applet-y, un-C&P text.

Oh, and that review of the new biography on Sergei Diaghilev was A+++++++ and really wish it was available to all humans: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/09/20/100920crbo_books_acocella

you can c+p articles from an library institutional subscription, but the evan osnos china thing is from the jan 10 issue which is not on the library wires yet. if you can't get it nakh, bump this thread in a week or two and i'm sure someone from what the fuck am i getting myself into with this grad school stuff will help you out.

Lamp, thanks for the Gawande link.

ive been using a friends login for the subscriber stuff for a while and the interface is just so poor i dont usually bother to fuck w/it - seems theyd much rather you read the actual magazine - lol

^agreed. kind of why i started this thread so i knew which actual magazine to pick up and start reading.

p interesting follow-up of sorts on the recent duchenne muscular dystrophy activism article -- they just had a spot f/ clay matthews sponsored by cadillac during the orange bowl

OK a TA I had in college had a poem published a few issues ago, woah.

the whole Jan. 11 issue is worth picking up, the aforementioned freud in china article is amazing and hilarious, and it also has decent articles about belgium and why stieg larsson is so fucking popular

i know the concept of 'worth picking up' is still valid, even for subscribers, in translating to 'worth retrieving from the well-intentioned pile of unread NYers', BUT in general it's still worth remembering how insanely valuable subscribing to the magazine is when compared to buying a newsstand copy. like forty bucks, for a year, for it to be mailed to your house, which is the cost of like seven newsstand issues.

haven't read it yet but i'd say the exact same about her Alice Munro piece in 2024

about halfway through this profile of Peter Navarro tips into hilarity, he's just an epic grifter dumbass:

Navarro’s romance with Nucor was first evident in 2009. In his book “Always a Winner: Finding Your Competitive Advantage in an Up-and-Down Economy,” he gushed that Nucor was “the safest, highest-quality, lowest-cost, most productive, and most profitable steel company in the world.” He praised Nucor’s “uncanny ability to profitably navigate through the up-and-down movements of the business cycle.” (In fact, Nucor had lost half of its value in the fifteen months before the book’s publication.) Navarro’s mother gave the book four stars, but not five, on Amazon.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/29/peter-navarro-profile

yeah that was a great read

This is classic New Yorker, eccentric dudes and extreme situations in nature, exactly what I'm looking for.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/01/19/the-backcountry-rescue-squad-at-americas-busiest-national-park

Chotiner's interview with the cinematographer Dante Spinotti about his work on "Melania" might be his most passive aggressive interview yet:

https://archive.ph/qO8QW

Lol

One thing reporters try to do is to spotlight ideas or news stories, and what you’re trying to do is spotlight her face and its beauty. I do see a real similarity there.

Holy shit, didn't know Dante Spinotti shot that!

He’s one of three cinematographers, and says in the piece that he only worked one day of the 20-day shoot.

you've got to be careful with the pedantry, man. it took me a second to realize it was just a factual correction and not "well, he wasn't THAT involved. only there for one day"

that said, it's quite a feat to have "shot part of the propaganda documentary" come off as secondary to "my friend Brett is really a good guy, he's just misunderstood" from that interview

This is classic New Yorker, eccentric dudes and extreme situations in nature, exactly what I'm looking for.

Agreed this was a lot of fun especially if you have any interest in wilderness survival.

I guess this is typical for the NYer but the picture/title/layout of the article made it look a lot more boring than it was.

I'm very interested in uncomfortable situations that I hope never to be in myself.

This Weike Wang article about friendship from 2024 just popped up for me in some feed and I quite enjoyed it:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-trouble-with-friends

If I didn't visit this house in 1989-91, I visited a very very similar apartment. I definately ate the "beans and rice and tofu, and the food was horrible, honestly," but I think if it was the same house Tracy Chapman had lived in, that would have been revealed to me. Yet it's all so hazy-yet-vivid, I can conjure a memory of one of the roommates sitting on the shag in the living room, explaining Chapman had lived there. I visited a lot of similar apartments across New England college neighborhoods for sure, but this recollection really captures the specifics of Cambridge/Somerville, ever so subtly distinct from Allston or Providence or Northampton.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/09/living-in-tracy-chapmans-house

so the New Yorker ran what is by my count their third Tucker Carlson feature.

Loved the wilderness rescue piece, thanks for the recommendation, Jordan!

xp there's been a wearying amount of trump ghoul profiles lately -- russ voight, loomer, rubio to just name a few

RKFJR too, yeah it sucks

annals of naïveté

https://i.postimg.cc/Mp7Zst7P/annals.jpg

I see David Remnick has decided that the Iran crisis is so important that only he is allowed to speak about it. Remnick watchers will be aware that this is never a good portent. pic.twitter.com/xQj5mZQ0tb

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) February 27, 2026

Those are both segments from the New Yorker Radio Hour, for which Remnick is the host. Every NYRH segment on the New Yorker's website is indicated as "With David Remnick." In those two segments, Remnick is interviewing other people with expertise on Iran (foreign policy analyst Karim Sadjadpour and reporter Cora Engelbrecht

I was not impressed with Sadjadpour on the TV this morning.

xp Correction: The Engelbrecht segment isn't an interview. So, Remnick only "speaks" in that one to introduce it.

The entire episode (with both segments): https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/articles/what-could-go-wrong-or-right-in-a-war-with-iran

Tempted to get back on Twitter just so I can yell at that guy

Please do, he keeps a far closer eye on these things and the outcome will be beautiful to watch.

what are "these things"?

New Yorker/liberal media warmongering wreck.

*dreck

well he clearly doesn't understand the New Yorker

xyzz Elvis Bunuelo is you isn’t it?

You guys with your New Yorker subs

used to have good jazz writing

not a NYer subscriber nor an eagle-eyed 'remnick watcher' like this Elvis man but pretty easy to scroll down past the headline and find words such as "disastrous precedent", idk maybe that means something different to people who still post on X the everything site

chotiner: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/trumps-reckless-decision-to-pursue-regime-change-in-iran

Jon Lee Anderson is fairly grim on the present/future of Cuba.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/30/is-cuba-next

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/style/patrick-radden-keefe-london-falling-new-yorker.html?unlocked_article_code=1.X1A.F3ZB.TWhkD3ToBCXm&smid=nytcore-ios-share

enjoyed this brief profile of patrick radden keefe. new book out soon called “London Falling”, expanding on that great story from a year or two ago about the kid from london who got involved with the underworld there and died mysteriously. also some light gossip that he may be in line to be next EIC

He has written some proper bangers tbf to PRK. Articles and subsequent books.

I also enjoyed his podcast investigating the rumor that the CIA wrote the Scorpions' "Winds of Change."

That was really good for sure. The book about Chinese people trafficking was also good, Pinhead.

think you mean snakehead

Last week's Anthony Lane essay on plagiarism was enough for me to recommend him for waterboarding.

lol to be fair it did say Anthony Lane on it, caveat emptor and all.

(have not read it or anything by him in I don't know how long)

think you mean snakehead

lol sorry yep. i haven't rewatched hellraiser or whatever.

he can't even stay in his Lane

sorry but grim lol @ "london falling"

also some light gossip that he may be in line to be next EIC

i'm sure prk would be a fine editor, but i am saddened if this meant he'd be doing less long form investigative journalism

yeah he’s settled into the david grann role pretty well

The animation accompanying the new story about Sam Altman is creepy as hell, and I don't see an artist credited anywhere. I'd love to know who made it and how much AI was involved.

Ah, attribution added, with a "generated using A.I." note.