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.

lol I bracketed that bit too.

I'm curious what you think of the book when you finish it.

I am blissfully unaware of most of what appears in the NYer, but I honestly don’t give a fuck what any rich white person has to say about partying or raving. At least she isn’t trying to do theory like that abysmal Wark book from a few years back, which was astonishingly embarrassing to read.

(I mainly follow this thread in case anything actually good comes up— once or twice a year, it happens!)

is Emily Witt rich?

I mean maybe not, sort of seems like it tho. I also just assume that anyone who has been able to “support”
themselves writing articles and has an obvious PR machine behind them has some amount of wealth

I didn't know the Wark book you meant but I looked it up and lol no thank you. "From k-nights spent on Brooklyn’s and Berlin’s junkspace dance floors, McKenzie Wark abstracts a life practice of ressociation in a dance of autoconceptualization and allotheorization. In crossing toward the stranger’s gift of ‘letting go of ourselves as private property,’ Raving is nothing less than Wark’s femmunist manifesto, her tractatus on techno’s blackness, her treatise for a twenty-first-century trans ethics.”

the new yorker pays its writers enough money to live in new york without them qualifying as rich (tho it doesn’t give them health insurance)

Maybe a decade ago (?) I remember reading that staff writers were paid $90k a year — which seemed fine but not exactly luxe. (That's why they all write books or take TV gigs like Toobin.) Presumably it's gone up since, but maybe not as much as you'd think. Conde Nast has not been flush.

Once again I remind everyone that some people on this board have rarely, if ever, broken the 50k mark. 90k would be a lifechanging amount of money.

As far as the Wark book is concerned, it’s pretty basic: it completely elides the Blackness of techno in favor of a queer erotic auto theory. it’s nasty shit.

ok but…. 90k does not qualify you as rich in any major american city these days certainly including new york. you can say she has the privilege of a good steady salary (and i have no idea what her family background is)… but the word rich does have meaning

i maybe know one person who makes that much money. and i don’t know any writers who make that much money. maybe back off

literally have no clue what that has to do with the definition of rich by the standards of 2024 living but i don’t intend to engage in this convo any further. just gonna post what i had typed before this

there are plenty of rich white collar gay guys who go to the parties she writes about — much fewer than at parties in manhattan, so it’s not like your instinct is of. there’s all sorts of finance ppl and architects and creative directors and senior marketing executives crawling around bushwick raves. they all make way, way more than $90k a year

is off*

whatever J0rdan

I’m rich, bitch

they all make way way more and they all deserve the guillotine

I was there for a good amount of places/times/parties she writes about and am glad she did. I didn’t. I never knowingly crossed paths with her but she gets right the lived feel of Bushwick then. This thread reminds me of the Pfork guy who boasted of some dumb high salary plus bennies.

fwiw Emily Witt’s father was endowed chair of a journalism department at a state school in Georgia.

(also i know that my personal metrics for what “rich” is don’t line up with actual figures, but i have been struggling financially for long enough that i see any number over 60k and my mouth starts watering, so sorry if i come off as an asshole, it’s because i have deep class antagonism even toward people who arent making that much money in the grand scheme of things; in fact, this probably explains much of my crabby demeanor on here in general.

i do apologize. hopefully this will get better when i get a better job in the next few years, fingers crossed)

I am blissfully unaware of most of what appears in the NYer, but I honestly don’t give a fuck what any rich white person has to say about partying or raving. At least she isn’t trying to do theory like that abysmal Wark book from a few years back, which was astonishingly embarrassing to read.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

respect to that. thinking about it, yeah, i guess i do give a fuck what traumatized rich white people have to say about partying or raving. i'm a white trans woman without much in the way of social skills or life experience living in a notoriously white city, and a lot of my social circle is navigating parties and trying to make sense out of myself and my world while surrounded by other white trans women with trauma who do a lot of drugs and partying. i read wark critically, but i do read her. all my life people have treated me like a Clever White Boy. god, if i could've been the Clever White Boy they wanted me to be. and the only thing i failed at was "boy", so now i've got clever, though not as clever as i was taught to _think_ i was... or at least not clever in the _ways_ i was taught to think of myself as clever... and "white", which exists, which constantly affects me and the people around me, whether i will it or not, and which isn't something i feel like i can meaningfully speak about. for good or bad, the writing of people like wark does inform how i try to make myself socially intelligible.

I mean, I don’t hold Wark’s prior body of work against her, fwiw, and even like a bit of it— but that book was really horrible, just glaringly bad in its dilettantism and erasure.

I think that's the heart of the matter: if it was good then we might not even consider the part that wealth had to play in sustaining the writer.

I think that's the heart of the matter: if it was good then we might not even consider the part that wealth had to play in sustaining the writer.

― xyzzzz__

i think for me that is the heart of the matter! i haven't read the work in question by wark, so i guess my main consideration is witt - the new yorker excerpt and that interview. like, is witt's writing bad writing on a _moral level_. like, does she have an essential duty as a writer that she's failing to fulfill. table, that's kind of what i hear in what you're saying about witt's writing on dance music and drugs. if that is what you're saying, i accept that!

and at the same time i accept that as true, i also believe that in a different sense, her writing is _good_ on a moral level. i say that because i'm a woman and an abuse victim, and witt is a woman and an abuse victim writing about her experience as a woman and an abuse victim. none of that excuses or mitigates any ways in which her writing fails. i think her writing is _worthy_ of publication, though. i'm glad i had the opportunity to read it.

there are some people who... i think it's bad that they have a public voice. that they get paid to say the stuff they do. matt walsh, for instance. and i'd differentiate that from wark and witt. when they do erasure, it's important for that to be addressed. and i still think it's good that they can have careers as writers. i don't think that should be at the expense of other people's careers as writers, people who can write about the things they write about without being _bad_. but even if witt's writing is bad, even if she's a _bad writer_, i think it's good that she can make a living as a writer. because to me, she's also a good writer.

fwiw you can get a good sense of new yorker salaries at their jobs page https://www.newyorker.com/about/careers

seems like high five figures to low six figures is the norm

What a good Wark book to start with?

What a good Wark book to start with?

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

honestly i just know her as a journalist

her wikipedia article says this:

Both these studies grew out of Wark's experience as a public intellectual who participated in public controversies, mainly through her newspaper column in The Australian, a leading national daily. She developed an approach based on participant observation, but adapted to the media sphere.

i'm deeply skeptical of the figure of the "public intellectual". i mean nowadays that's called "discourse". she does "discourse". she was one of those, you know, wired magazine people in the '90s. i actually wouldn't defend any of her work. i more defend her as a person. she's a 61-year-old trans woman who transitioned later in life, just a little before i did. i mean me as a trans woman, a lot of the role models i have are shitty role models, in a lot of ways. being trans _is_ diy... i don't know if i mentioned it or if i took it out, but the piece of hers that had the most impact on me is her review of grace lavery's _please, miss_, where wark talks about autodidacticism as a "trans fetish". i think wark, for better or worse, does sort of embody the trans autodidact, someone who makes it up as she goes along despite having shitty role models. that one sentence of hers, it also resonates with me because it acknowledges that fetishism _does_ play a role in transness, just not the one people think it does, not in the way people think it does.

mostly, though, if you look at trans people, we're fucked up people in a lot of ways, fucked up people who do fucked up shit. i mean elagabalus is a trans role model but she was also a genuinely awful emperor, perhaps genuinely The Worst Emperor. reed erickson, a crucially important figure in trans history, was a literal fucking cult leader. trans people's work, _particularly_ white trans people's work, is just filled with really bad takes. julia serano's "whipping girl" is really influential on me, was really influential on a lot of trans people, but she _doesn't_ have a humanities background, she's a biologist, and the limitations of that are _very apparent_ in her work. whipping girl has a lot of bad takes. "whipping girl" erases non-binary identities, erases gender non-conformity out of the constructed category of "trans". i think that's a problem. i don't think that's an excusable problem, and at the same time i _do_ think whipping girl is worth reading, worth reading critically. on the other side of the equation, kate bornstein, her writing on gender treats non-binary identity like it's _better_ than "binary transness". i think that's bad too, and i still think her work is important.

to me, i think the best writer, the writer who i think has had the most positive influence on me, is someone like jules gill-peterson. i would recommend _a short history of trans misogyny_. i think it's best and least, uh, _problematic_ book on transfem theory i've read. it was also published this year, haha. _histories of the transgender child_ was published in '18, and i didn't hear about it, and the last time i tried to read it it wasn't intelligible to me. _a short history of trans misogyny_ is an academic book and as such it was hard for me to read, since i don't have an academic background, but it was worth it.

having said that, i mean, i don't think the entire weight of intersectional transness _should_ fall on people like gill-peterson. as a white trans person, i have tried to learn from gill-peterson, have tried to take on experiences outside the specific area of "trans woman". at the same time, "trans woman" is a culturally coherent and meaningful identifier, an identifier that carries with it a unique experience of marginalization, and so yes, speaking as a trans woman, the writing of other people who also describe themselves that way, belong to that group, has a unique importance to me.

unfortunately the way that it's often used, the shit that trans women, particularly white trans women, sometimes talk, what happens is that Discourse happens, systemically i think it's encouraged for marginalized groups to be put in situations where we're competing with each other. and i fucking hate that. for me, not doing that is hard fucking work. sometimes my interests as a member of a marginalized group _do_ conflict with the interests of people who are marginalized in different ways from me. those conflicts cause a _lot of trouble_.

the thing that vexes me the most, the thing that causes me the most trouble, is that Discourse often involves conflict between transfems and transmascs. this is on my mind because i was just playing this interactive fiction game, LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST ... by the way i'm only through act II but i'd recommend playing that game more than i'd recommend reading mckenzie wark. if you're ok with absolutely filthy writing with a transmasc protag. because, i mean, to really understand trans people, i feel like it helps a lot if to be willing and able engage with the absolute filthiest, kinkiest shit in a totally non-judgemental way. (it's even better if you engage with it and say "well shit this is super hot"). that loops back to wark because i do know that wark published her correspondence with kathy acker in 2015 as _i'm very into you_, and apparently there is a lot of sexual content in those letters. and personally LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST interests me more than those letters.

damn i wish i could deconstruct the walls of discourse between transmascs and transfems do the way valentine and artemis do. by which i mean laughing at how stupid it is and then doing kinky shit to each other. but instead, i start hanging around transmascs and i get super insecure, i get hung up on the stupid shit some transfems say and the stupid shit some transmascs say and gah.

but they're going to say stupid fucking shit. like it's an important part of it, trans people say stupid fucking shit sometimes and it doesn't invalidate the stuff we say that isn't stupid fucking shit. it's just, like. hard work. i don't know what i'm doing, most of us, i get the sense, don't really know what we're doing here.

so tl;dr, don't read wark, read jules gill-peterson's _a short history of trans misogyny_ and/or play the interactive fiction game LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST and recognize that a lot of us fuck up and we're trying not to.

fwiw you can get a good sense of new yorker salaries at their jobs page https://www.newyorker.com/about/careers

seems like high five figures to low six figures is the norm

― 龜, Tuesday, September 24, 2024 9:47 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

none of these are staff writer positions though

big dawg dunno what to tell you https://i.postimg.cc/tJdGXPgH/shrug2.gif

looks promising (is there a better thread?)

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/say-nothing-fx-first-look-awards-insider

loved the book

IN SOLIDARITY NEWS: 100 of our 101 New Yorker union members unanimously voted YES (one abstained) to authorize a strike should the bargaining committee deem it necessary

— “holden” “seidlitz” (@jock__derrida) October 3, 2024

Who was the one

This guy

https://newyorkerstateofmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/5179758-2011_02_14.jpg

no resistance libbo but if anyone is looking for something to maybe pull themselves out of post-election despair, i enjoyed reading alexei navalny's prison diaries that were published earlier this month. there is a lot in there about why people should continue to summon the energy to stand up to despotic leaders, if that's your bag today, but his writing on the purpose and methods of essentially choosing happiness even in the face of grave darkness (and he faced some of the gravest) really rang a chord w/ me, for reasons not related to politics, but today kinda works for those purposes too

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/alexei-navalny-patriot-memoir

the greg jackson short story this week strongly was reminding me of something that i couldnt place… until i did… the beginning of novel explosives by jim gauer.. very similar conceit of a man w/o memories trying to piece things together in a hotel / isolated setting

https::/twitter.com/parul_sehgal/status/1857464284462109039?s=46&t=XlsbhgknQH65_CH00_uPqw

this is a bummer for me — she’s probably my favorite popular literary critic

I am afraid to ask about this new Ideas Franchise

what’s this in reference to?

the thing that Sehgal is returning to the NYT for

The world does not need another Aspen Ideas festival. It does not need even need the one Aspen Ideas festival

it's not a festival. it's just the name of a weekly feature in the paper: https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/ideas

idk why they call it a "franchise."

Once again marveling at the fact that Calvin Tomkins is still publishing reported features in the magazine. (The latest is a profile of artist Rashid Johnson in the Dec. 16 issue.) He has been on staff since 1960 and turns 99 tomorrow.

yep everytime i see his byline im awed

I read the Rachel Aviv article about Alice Munro and her daughter’s sexual abuse. Phew. Great story, told with clarity and sensitivity. It can’t really answer its most urgent underlying questions, because it sees that there aren’t good answers to them, only bad ones, partial ones — and in a way, that becomes the answer. The first way to understand HOW this happened is to accept that it DID. (Which of course could be an insight from one of Munro’s own stories.)

I skipped it because, while I like aviv's work, I'm unfamiliar with munro's. silly reason and https://buttondown.com/lastweeksnewyorker/archive/last-weeks-new-yorker-review-december-30-january-6/ makes a good case that it's worth reading regardless.

Yeah, I'm not super-familiar with Munro's work (I've read maybe a couple of stories years ago), but the Aviv article is very good.

Some familiarity probably makes it hit harder, but I've probably only read a half-dozen stories myself. One thing that gave me a bit of a chill was the reference to her story about the woman going to visit in prison the man who killed her children, because she still feels connected to him. I remember reading that one in the New Yorker when it came out and being a little shook by it — my kids were quite young at the time, for one thing, and for another it felt so dark and strange. Now becomes clearer where it was coming from.

Netflix documentary forthcoming, in conjunction with the magazine's centennial: https://archive.ph/ZT9jT

What the world needs now is Gary Shteyngart going deep on capybaras

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/02/03/how-the-capybara-won-my-heart-and-almost-everyone-elses

knausgard piece in this one too