New Yorker magazine alert thread

I like my travel stories bland. reaaaaal bland

I didn't mind Gopnick's Camus article so much but I wanted more aphorisms from Camus' notebooks crowing about how hot he was.

The fact that they rebranded the travel issue as "Journeys" is even worse.

― i don't believe in zimmerman (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 11 April 2012 19:24 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this sounds like classic nyer to me, is it def new

Nicholas Lemann's omnibus review of several books addressing inequality. It's a classic New Yorker review: patient, expert at synthesis.

Gopnik's piece on forty year nostalgia is really lame (cherry-picks a few cultural phenomena from each decade which are supposed to support his dumb point and ignore everything else.)

a Hawaiian describing himself as "just a guy who has three acres of land, living in a shipping container house"

Gopnik's piece on forty year nostalgia is really lame

lol as soon as i saw that piece i laffed - "not today new yorker! not today!". i think the only thing i've read w/ a gopnik byline recently (ie since he returned from france)(should not be read as repping for his 'i am le wacky americain living en paris like ze valerie bertinelli and ze david sedaris oui?' pieces btw) is his lame piece on dogs only cuz i'll read anything the new yorker prints on dogs cuz i am part of the problem.

lol didn't mean to add to gopnik pileon. but while i'm here: http://www.tnr.com/article/smugged-reality

Nicholas Lemann's omnibus review of several books addressing inequality. It's a classic New Yorker review: patient, expert at synthesis.

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, April 16, 2012 5:48 PM (4 hours ago)

yeah looking forward to this. this week's issue looks especially strong

i was reading it off my iphone while traveling so i may not have given it the attention it deserved, but i thought that lemann review was kinda shallow

http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/hidden-protestations-in-plain-sight

I've always liked Nicholas Lemann a lot

that Gopnik Camus article, yeesh. I ran out of bathroom reading and started to slog through it, totally worthless.

i think i have received three of the last five or six new yorkers

fucking post office

that gopnik article is very well-reasoned. as just one example:

Our own aughts arrived with the sixties as their lost Eden, right on schedule. That meant too many sixties-pastiche rock bands to mention (think only of Alex Turner, of Arctic Monkeys, sounding exactly like John Lennon),

the important group everyone cared a lot abt who sounded just like john lennon the arctic monkeys

gopnik you monster

well to be fair Arctic Monkeys WERE conceived as a Plastic Ono Band tribute

The Interior Life of Noel Gallagher: A Speculative History

ILXORINTHENEWYORKER alert (self promo alert lol): My boyfriend's taste in ties gets a shoutout in Alex Ross' review of our concert of John Cage's music at Carnegie Hall in this week's New Yorker. Ross also describes me doing thirty pushups and taking off my clothes onstage. It's in his review of the "American Mavericks" series of performances.

i thought that lemann review was kinda shallow

well most NY essays are!

I know that the rep for style/fashion articles is that they tend to be rote, but I thought the Prada/Schiaparelli article is pretty engrossing!

still vividly remember how much i despised lemann's article about 'pluralism' back in 2008, tho tbh i'm not eager to reread it to find out exactly why.

Looking forward to the nostalgia piece so I can revel in the transcendent wrongness of anything Gopnik has to say about (among other things) pop music. Hope that Arctic Monkeys argument is just the tip of the iceberg.

Love the Wolcott review - "I sometimes wonder if Adam Gopnik was put on this earth to annoy. If so, mission accomplished."

Has anyone here read the Renata Adler tell-all that Wolcott quotes from? Is it as juicy as it sounds?

Adler quote about Gopnick: ""I had learned over the course of conversations with Mr. Gopnik that his questions were not questions, or even quite soundings. Their purpose was to maneuver you into advising him to do what he would, in any case, walk over corpses to do."

A+

gun control piece was my fave this week

Walcott is so mean!

Is that Adler book the one that blames everything on Pauline Kael?

dear god why does this thing come every week, how are they all sitting around in my room

i've got 3.5 piled up now :(

it's not even the reading pile that vexes me, just that when it comes to my losing battle against entropy they are on the side of the enemy

3.5 is NOTHING! I have, like, 3.5 DOZEN waiting in the wings.

13 here

you know what would make the New Yorker even better?

crosswords

omg you're blowing my mind over here

that's what harper's tries to be

true but half of Harper's pieces are dire leftist jeremiads which I don't need much of in my life.

harpers word thingies are like way too hard

wow the gopnik thing on nostalgia is just

I thought of like 20 counter-examples to his *theory* in the time it took me to read it.

but just imagine the aughts without the arctic monkeys

hope they're still alive to reap the rewards in 40 years

the wave of arctic monkeys-pastiche bands

Remember the vogue for depression nostalgia in the 1970s?

sheesh that wolcott takedown is endless. like bashing someone in the head long after they are dead.

yessss

that gopnik 40 year thing...i just couldn't even penetrate the levels of incomprehensibility. i kept staring at random paragraphs and couldn't bring myself to start at the beginning and read it all the way through. i felt like a puzzled arctic monkey sniffing a rotten banana. i kinda want to pick it up....but no it's terrible don't do it!

otoh i am 40 and the spinners are grebt, so

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/02/120402fa_fact_sedaris

really enjoyed this brief essay by david sedaris - kind of an andy rooney-like recounting of his experience with french health care that politely mocks the things we are used to and expect from our doctors and our health care system here.