New Yorker magazine alert thread

very hard 2 use google

I don't think those articles are available online.

o

the transplant one isn't.

can someone summarize it for me then

http://cdn.fd.uproxx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Nic-Cage-Face-Off-Gif.gif

http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/image_full_width_scaled/hash/2c/f7/2cf7c8d5c96d30d3ef264ce5385ec1c7.JPG<-pre accident
fucked up go nowhere dude on a cherry picker whacks his head against a live power line, burns his entire head down to the bone. loses his teeth, his eyes, his lips, his nose, his cheeks, ears, chunks of bone, chin, everything. They reconstruct to "Melon Head", click here if you're comfortable seeing that.
Pioneering surgeons take the face off a donor and we go through the process and history of transplants. Dude seems to be taking to it well. He reembraced god; very supportive family. real nightmare situation and dude came out with some semblance of profoundly damaged normality on the other end.
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/05/09/DallasWiens-AP110509018062_540x405.jpg
Dude can smell again, is getting feeling in his face and regaining some fine motor control. It's heavy heavy shit.

they talk about the face that they transplant on to him as being "the size of a hubcap".

that's a good story

well obvs there's a lot more to it than that

They talk about connecting the carotid artery to the detached face like plugging a dead battery into a power source.

this is getting into tldr territory

what are you guys doing not subscribing to the nyer anyway tho

I don't want to die when the unread stack topples over and blocks the only entrance out of my apartment

One of the reasons I subscribed is that my boss subscribes and I respect his opinion. Yesterday he told me his subscription was a gift, he never reads them because he doesn't have time, and every few weeks he dumps a pile in the work kitchen, only for the cleaners to bin them.

gotta go sometime xp

I'm.....terrified of reading Franzen's essay on Edith Wharton.

Maybe he's mimicking Edmund Wilson's "Justice to Edith Wharton"?

Oooh, I'm excited, a writer who makes me want to vomit writing about another writer that makes me want to vomit.

I love Wharton: her short stories are underrepresented in anthologies. And The House of Mirth is a masterpiece of cruelty.

why do you dislike wharton so much mr. que?

Alfred, have u spoken on ilx before about your Wharton love or did I just somehow always know u loved her?

her writing style just bores me to tears

i also find myself enjoying narrative in fiction less and less, so this is a personal problem

I've mentioned it casually in other threads.

ive never read wharton & dont have a high opinion of franzen esp his non-fic/criticism but i really liked it & learned a bunch

Oh, and Amy Davidson's post re Eastwood's Superbowl commercial was brilliant!

ty for yr posts, dow
& i've read a couple of AD things recently that have been not-amazing, but she's one of the best commentators i think, her prose is exquisite & she always appropriately, accurately directs her anger

This double ish is pretty solid. Even the Mayer, which is yet another in a recent series of "powerful right wing agitators who will not go on the record" pieces. Face piece is amazing, plagiarist piece great. Kids TV essay pretty well-timed. Ross on Glass fair and fresh for such a frequent subject.

Article on the plagiarist was good, though I found myself wishing it had gone more into the role of the Internet in plagiarism detection. There are so many books on Google Books these days, all searchable to some degree, that modern-day plagiarists are taking a bigger risk than ever.

Or maybe that's just taken for granted.

the plagiarism thing is intersting because everyone wants it to be some high art thing or at least a hilarious prank but its just some sad man w/very conventional motivations, in that way it is a metaphor for life

http://www.austinkleon.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/steal-cover-3d.jpg

Wow, that face transplant piece is truly profound - and profoundly ironic - on so many levels. Here's this kid with nothing to live for whose face gets burned off, down to the skull, by an electric line. While in the process of essentially dying, he claims he sees Hell, and his religious rebirth gives him the faith and strength to persevere through multiple surgeries that even with their unlikely, surreal successes have left him blind and only with partial sensation. And even then, no one knows how long his new face will work for. And beyond that, there are all these psychological implications of a face transplant, from the different feel (both internally and externally) to, say, difference colors eyes, a borrowed identity helping him restore his own identity. Plus the ironies of his faith in a God that would allow him to be painfully disfigured in the first place yet who simultaneously gives him strength to survive said ordeal. Just incredible all around. And then there's this other aspect, of the implicit link between the practical miracle of science and the more nebulous magic of God, that his faith in God and religion complements these radical surgeries which in turn ratify man's incredible command of the human form (which was created, of course, as the story goes, in God's image). And so on. Truly remarkable stuff. I can barely fathom how I would cope with such an ordeal.

& i've read a couple of AD things recently that have been not-amazing, but she's one of the best commentators i think, her prose is exquisite & she always appropriately, accurately directs her anger

I actually find some of her rhetorical formations -- particularly how she'll stretch a GOP talking point to an absurdly literal degree -- to lack empathy and generosity, though why I feel this way when she critiques Republicans I have no idea.

Here's this kid with nothing to live for whose face gets burned off, down to the skull,

tagline 4 ghost rider

Josh otm; that article has been haunting me a bit.

The Atlantic, but a really good companion to Lizza's "Obama Memos": http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/obama-explained/8874/

That Jane Mayer piece scared the shit outta me.

Article on the plagiarist was good, though I found myself wishing it had gone more into the role of the Internet in plagiarism detection. There are so many books on Google Books these days, all searchable to some degree, that modern-day plagiarists are taking a bigger risk than ever.

― jaymc, Friday, February 10, 2012 4:01 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Or maybe that's just taken for granted.

yeah, i assumed that everyone was just googling lines/passages from the dude's book and poems. although it did mention a plagiarism-detection program that is used in academics, i wonder if that works off of a database or just goes through search engines automatically (i presume it's the latter).

xpost Yeah, me too. At first I thought it was, yeah, another story about evil and powerful right wingers who won't go on the record, but I think the message was bigger than that.

xp TurnItIn actually attracted some controversy because their ToS give them an unlimited license to use work submitted to the service as part of their corpus for further plagiarism detection, and students were required to use the service in their classes, I think there was a lawsuit.

Anyway technically speaking what TurnItIn probably does when you upload your paper is check a bunch of n-grams (chunks of words a few sentences long) and checks its index for matches. When it finds matches on an improbably long chunk of words, it flags it.

Basically types in random phrases to google but advanced and automatic.

imna reverse engineer it and sell a product that can write papers for people

im gonna sell people chunks of words

i will sell them dream words and nightmare paragraphs from a red factory in a dead town

that does sound like a pretty good business model

at the very least it's better than the groupon business model

I would not buy a groupon of the groupon business model no

someone help me find that piece from a while ago about duels

I actually read the face transplant story and found it too long, technical stuff got boring after awhile. also if I were blind I wouldn't have that surgery, I prob wouldn't care. I would be much more bummed out by the blindness than not having a face.

most of my life at this point is just staring at computer screens, having a face is kinda overrated. having eyes v. important.

its cool to have both imo