New Yorker magazine alert thread

haha i went on space mountain sometime shortly after it opened. i was not into rollercoasters at that age, and it was dark, and i was unhappy. and then my dad unbuckled my belt a smidge too early and i hit my head on the bar as the car jerked one more time. he still feels bad about it.

Free fall rides are the worst rides. Just watching those videos gave me unpleasant anxiety and nausea. Also, and I don't want to look it up because it really upsets me, but somewhere in North Carolina a girl lost a foot on one of those rides in a really gruesome way and I hate being the kind of person who disregards statistics in favor of irrational terror due to one aberrant event, but I am totally being that kind of person here.

ughhhhh supreme scream, i think that's the most afraid i've been on a ride ever. like the actual falling part is pretty awesome, but they hold you at the top for SO LONG that you start thinking "oh god, this motherfucker is going to break down with me up here, i am beyond the reach of human assistance, i am going to die."

even worse was when my high school held its winter formal at knotts berry farm, so you were up there in the dead of night in fancy dress, except barefoot so you didn't accidentally drop a heel and kill the ride operator.

Still making my way through the article (no paywall!) on Rwandan cyclists. It's not without some cringe-worthy white man's burden segments, but it's really fascinating all the same.

*unreads this revive*

Actually, roller coasters have fewer injuries a year than merry-go-rounds, mostly because very few people try to jump off of roller coasters.

this probably belongs in a putin thread, but just as an interesting counterpart to the video posted after ariel levy's burlusconi article:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/new-weapon-in-putins-army-flashed-boobs/

"pop a boner for 'bama"

after noticing i hadn't really touched last week's i just started & was finding v interesting the thing about asylum in the us, but now i just want to skip to 2/3 of the way through the bin laden thing

this is popcorn-eatingly fascinating btw

halfway through Bin Laden article. Great stuff.

yeah, i enjoyed it too. it mostly steers clear of anything except for a walkthrough of the operation itself, and is pretty fascinating.

it mostly steers clear of anything except for a walkthrough of the operation itself

so neatly arranged, though; the CLIFFHANGERish section that ends with the helicopter crashing was really effective

Haven't read the OBL article yet, but it's getting some pushback: http://www.registan.net/index.php/2011/08/04/the-schmidle-muddle-of-the-osama-bin-laden-take-down/

damn that piece owns him pretty hard

I thought the nyer was pretty famous for its factchecking

I finished that piece today just as I heard about the helicopter crash in Afghanistan on the radio, early reports of which made it sound like some of the SEALs from the bin Laden mission had been killed.

In hindsight it does seem unlikely that they would have had the time or inclination to be interviewed at great length, which you'd need for the level of detail in the article.

That's a serious slapdown of the article in question.

I love how indignant and self righteous professors can get sometimes

the bin laden assignation piece was p weak regardless

wow who was his lover

yeah honestly i got this issue + thought it was p much garbage mb cuz i dont really care about 'how it all went down' but also just like 'oh, great, a piece by patricia marx about shopping and look! adam gopnik on owning dogs as pets!'

blech

yeah it was just sort of a weird military play by play, tho maybe the fact that its fake had something to do w/it not grabbing me

I liked the fact that it was laid out so plainly. Not liking the fact that it's fake so much.

did anyone read the ben marcus story/does anyone want to talk about it. it felt so wholly like 'contemporary' 'american' 'new yorker' 'fiction' that i thought it might be innaresting to discuss.

Thought Alex Ross on Oscar Wilde was pretty great.

^^^ was gonna post it last Thursday. He's right about the Ellmann biography too -- one of my favorites.

Yeah, Ross' piece was great.

did anyone read the ben marcus story/does anyone want to talk about it. it felt so wholly like 'contemporary' 'american' 'new yorker' 'fiction' that i thought it might be innaresting to discuss.

Read it last night, wasn't terribly impressed. I think your 'contemporary' 'american' 'new yorker' 'fiction' description was perfectly otm, as in it was like paint-by-numbers. Dysfunctional family issues? Check. Barely hinted at buried personal issues for the narrator? Check. Sexual edginess through gently poking taboos? Check. Technology-laden ennui? Check.

yeah. i actually, totally in isolation from the rest of the piece, loved one of the sexual edginess through gently poking taboos (gently poking taboos) sentences, the one including 'hand sex'. but i don't know that i didn't like it, because parts were good, and well observed - the guy who couldn't be described as handsome, only serious, &c - but it was more that it was totally reaching for that stuff, and spoken in the same voice as so much other stuff - like such an unchallenging franzen, eugenides, laugh at the end of the paragraph tone (calling this 'laff-a-graf' from now on). & with that i wondered, is that just because it's plainly spoken?, in the parlance of our times?, and that's how modern thought is best represented?, but i don't know that it is - think it's more an appealing and popular schematic voice. and the territory, though kinda more disdainful - it's a long time since i've read the corrections, to the point that i might be getting his name wrong, but chip, the errant son self-loathing and self-destructively sharp - it's him, right? like not that franzen should get the monopoly on depressed guy territory, lest fiction crumble and die, and nor should people feel compelled to do something new or anything, but you sorta feel like it wrote itself in those parts. a franzen family kind uncomplicatedly counterbalanced by true, redemptive, intimate and small-scale love.

i read part of the marcus notable american book a while ago & then stopped & i guess i was slightly surprised by this for being so straightforward.

marcus had another short, straightfwd piece in the nyer back in march. i dont recall anything abt it tbh but upthread i said i liked it. do ppl know if they are excerpts of his forthcoming novel?

i also liked the recent one. enjoyed how w/e had previously transpired w/ his fam was kept as subtext & unexplained, the reader somewhat has the perspective his wife would have if she came along...i almost hope it's not part of a longer thing cuz i feel like explaining it wld be hard 2 do well

apparently they are not part of the novel -

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/08/this-week-in-fiction-ben-marcus-1.html

re. the New Yorker article on Bin Laden, I would argue that the response linked to upthread isn't really that much of a slapdown. It reads like the peevish critical comments made by an academic reviewer when someone else has got their work published first.

re. the New Yorker article on Bin Laden, I would argue that the response linked to upthread isn't really that much of a slapdown. It reads like the peevish critical comments made by an academic reviewer when someone else has got their work published first.

Having read both the original article and the supposed takedown, I mostly agree with badg. Although I'll grant that Schmidle baldly misrepresenting his linguistic abilities and the fact that the article gave the impression that he had interview access with the SEALs are both red flags and enough to give me pause, the response doesn't bring up anything substantive enough to dismiss the article outright. She mentions those two things to try to undermine his credibility, then starts in with innuendo and circumstantial evidence, before adding some cheap polemics.

yeah i think that's true, that some of the criticism indicts the author but not the piece, such as the bragging about understanding urdu elsewhere. i don't think that there's a huge clash between what the guy reported and the fact of his limited access, provided that there isn't subsequently a rebuttal to those claims - ie that he might have heard it through a secondary source is okay provided that source is reliable; i guess a disclaimer on his limited contact might have been appropriate?, idk, but i don't know how strong an impression of close contact or him being embedded i actually got while reading. the main impression i got, at least just from remembering the article, is that the analysis of the operation having mainly been contextual, relative to other seal team six or covert operations or w/e, rather than specifically about this one operation. so talking to high-up guys who do this kind of thing elsewhere and understanding how it fits with that line of work, rather than specifically looking at how this one was treated by people on the ground.

i guess maybe this part would be controversial if it's accrediting opinions to the actual team involved rather than gauging general policy:

“There was never any question of detaining or capturing him,” an unnamed Special Operations officer told him. “It wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_greenblatt

This article on Lucretius’ poem “On the Nature of Things” is excellent.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/15/110815fa_fact_lizza

Marcus Bachmann plopped down on the seat next to me, in the back of the plane. He pointed at my laptop and asked if he could take a look. “All I want to know is what they’re saying about me,” he said. “Newsweek came up with the word ‘silver fox.’ Tell me what ‘silver fox’ means.”

“Do you want me to tell you honestly?” I asked.

“Oh, don’t tell me it’s something gay!” he said. “Because I’ve been called that before.”

love elizabeth kolbert, loved her article on neanderthals and DNA

reading & loving this right now ^^, fascinating.
the bachmann piece is good, too - pretty dogged but so much shit to get through.

i love the ipad app-- wish they'd make one for iPhone

Neanderthal article is so readable, loved it. (By comparison, the Bachmann felt haphazard and ultimately depressing, but hey, I'm blaming the subject.)

(By comparison, the Bachmann felt haphazard and ultimately depressing, but hey, I'm blaming the subject.)

i thought it was good; i think i'm always slightly surprised when something has a pre-agreed-upon countering tone, so is forwardly correcting facts & inventorying ammunition, etc, rather than ostensibly playing it levelly, but it was still fascinating and pretty efficient. but yeah SUPER depressing, or more worrying, really.

Hah, worrying indeed. Although I wouldn't call the Bachmann piece slight by absolute measures, it did feel slight compared to other similar profiles, e.g. Lizza's article on Darrell Issa, which is more in-depth and comprehensive, and Lizza's awesome article on Obama's foreign policy, which I found a very thoughtful and analytic corrective on more popular journo tropes.

I do love the bit where Lizza trolls Marcus Bachmann though, that is a keeper.

i'm a few weeks behind everyone per usual but holy shit that piece on Neanderthals-- I could read a book about that dude/ his work/ideas

def kind of left it hanging

lane's reviews this week are particularly bad

after 2 years of scrounging & sucking old issues i kept from before my dad moved & reading free articles online i'm finally resubscribed, read everything this issue with such gusto lol

Dana Goodyear's article on eating bugs is great, and funnier than any "Shouts & Murmurs" I've ever read, which admittedly is not a high number nor a high bar, but you get the picture.

Good piece on Clarence Thomas in last week's

it was kind of disappointingly uncritical but i enjoyed the law history aspect of it a lot

I thought it was critical enough without coming across as an overly targeted piece on him. I mean, it was enough to depress me for quite a bit after finishing the article.

There were a lot of subtle digs in there that were pretty artfully done I thought. Besides, I think the point of the piece was partly that maybe people ought to take him a bit more seriously, even if as an enemy.

otm