Remember the vogue for depression nostalgia in the 1970s?
There actually was one, with The Sting; Paper Moon; and the various post-Bonnie and Clyde films like Boxcar Bertha etc.
― Josefa, Saturday, 21 April 2012 06:48 (twelve years ago) link
gun control piece was my fave this week
― congratulations (n/a), Wednesday, April 18, 2012 10:38 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
I thought it was ok but could have been done better. The stuff on the history of the second amendment, the NRA etc. is very well done, but I thought she could have made the case for gun control a little better than "here are some examples of shootings." Some of the descriptions of guns were also so martian-visiting-earth that I pictured a conservative gun advocate reading them and laughing.
― i don't believe in zimmerman (Hurting 2), Monday, 23 April 2012 15:37 (twelve years ago) link
I mean I didn't think even the New Yorker's key demographic need explanations like this: "A revolver holds a number of bullets in a revolving chamber, but didn’t become common until Samuel Colt patented his model in 1836."
― i don't believe in zimmerman (Hurting 2), Monday, 23 April 2012 15:41 (twelve years ago) link
I thought some of the subtle cues were well-done like letting the faucet run for a long time after shooting etc.
― dayo, Monday, 23 April 2012 16:12 (twelve years ago) link
i don't really know much about guns or gun control so ymmv i guess. but mainly i liked the stylistic mix of really dry factual/historical writing with the occasional writerly line, it was a very readable piece.
― congratulations (n/a), Monday, 23 April 2012 16:14 (twelve years ago) link
> like letting the faucet run for a long time after shooting etc.
I thought that was not subtle at all, actually.
The parts about gun ownership as a percentage of individuals declining (from 50% to 20%) over time while the number of guns in circulation increased was interesting. Also, the part about Yemen having the second highest rate of gun ownership -- and that rate being 1/2 of the US -- kinda blew my mind.
I would have thought there could be more to say about the influence gun industry in the NRA than the decrease from that of otherwise reasonable sportsmen. Seems to me that the NRA has become a marketing/propaganda/scare group instead of actual gun owners. Like, despite all indications otherwise, the line has become "the government is going to take away your gun -- you must buy more." Mass marketing to paranoid, anti-government types seems like a really bad idea, but I guess if you're livelihood depends on it, you gotta do what you gotta do.
― john. a resident of chicago., Monday, 23 April 2012 16:47 (twelve years ago) link
yeah I think the fact that gun ownership is more and more a crazy old white guy thing is important
― iatee, Monday, 23 April 2012 16:48 (twelve years ago) link
the raw milk article has me wondering if it's the 1st time the phrase "bathtub cheese" has been printed in the nyer
― johnny crunch, Wednesday, 25 April 2012 15:39 (twelve years ago) link
i keep thinking abt how that guys say raw milk and blood tastes just like ice cream
― lag∞n, Wednesday, 25 April 2012 16:07 (twelve years ago) link
that is a startling fact
― Lamp, Wednesday, 25 April 2012 17:31 (twelve years ago) link
Two sort of complimentary things I learned from recent New Yorker articles that I probably should have known but did not:
1) The ANC's struggle to end apartheid was extremely violent, and2) Bob Marley's appeals to love and peace were backed up by his actual political peacemaking, unlike the frat guys who sing redemption song on their stoops
― i don't believe in zimmerman (Hurting 2), Thursday, 26 April 2012 14:43 (twelve years ago) link
well sometimes they make peace w/ other frats
― iatee, Thursday, 26 April 2012 14:45 (twelve years ago) link
and nerds
― "in this super-sexy postracial age" (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 26 April 2012 14:58 (twelve years ago) link
i watched part of marley last night
― lag∞n, Thursday, 26 April 2012 15:26 (twelve years ago) link
would watch, based on that review
― i don't believe in zimmerman (Hurting 2), Thursday, 26 April 2012 15:41 (twelve years ago) link
its p good, cool facts
― lag∞n, Thursday, 26 April 2012 16:38 (twelve years ago) link
rita marley i like
― lag∞n, Thursday, 26 April 2012 16:39 (twelve years ago) link
the new yorker comments on its use of the diaeresis:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/04/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis.html(more like diarrhesis, am i right, guys?)
― congratulations (n/a), Thursday, 26 April 2012 21:17 (twelve years ago) link
wasn't jose canseco recently asking about diaeresis?
― Mad God 40/40 (Z S), Thursday, 26 April 2012 21:21 (twelve years ago) link
ends with an esis...
― "in this super-sexy postracial age" (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 26 April 2012 21:22 (twelve years ago) link
Elif Batuman alert!
― Pot Leeedom (Leee), Sunday, 6 May 2012 23:58 (twelve years ago) link
the women's boxing article was great
― (Name Withheld to Avoid Hassle) (forksclovetofu), Monday, 7 May 2012 01:34 (eleven years ago) link
Feel like a bad Jew for getting drowsy every time I see another "Obscure Jews of X" article
― Scott, bass player for Tenth Avenue North (Hurting 2), Monday, 7 May 2012 01:37 (eleven years ago) link
you're not alone. in fact: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2009/12/jewspotting.html
― Mordy, Monday, 7 May 2012 01:44 (eleven years ago) link
haha
and to be fair, it's mostly Jews responsible for all the Jewspotting. My dad is an incorrigible Jewspotter!
― Scott, bass player for Tenth Avenue North (Hurting 2), Monday, 7 May 2012 01:50 (eleven years ago) link
I was pretty surprised about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_China
― dayo, Monday, 7 May 2012 01:51 (eleven years ago) link
Yeah. Nice to see Ariel Levy get to report on something that afforded her the opportunity to exercise some nice prose styling, too.
― Pot Leeedom (Leee), Monday, 7 May 2012 02:48 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/CVC_TNY_05_21_12_no_date.jpg
― o s– man (Autumn Almanac), Friday, 11 May 2012 22:21 (eleven years ago) link
(http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/05/cover-story-spectrum-of-light.html)
― o s– man (Autumn Almanac), Friday, 11 May 2012 22:22 (eleven years ago) link
Really liked the piece on the (possibly) hidden Indian palace treasure. Also liked the surprisingly lite piece on drones, which approached the subject with a note of absurdity tempering the awe.
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 11 May 2012 22:30 (eleven years ago) link
enjoyed the piece on clayton christensen
― balls, Saturday, 12 May 2012 02:02 (eleven years ago) link
The treasure piece was good but felt either somewhat underresearched or somewhat badly written and i couldn't tell which
― (Name Withheld to Avoid Hassle) (forksclovetofu), Saturday, 12 May 2012 04:04 (eleven years ago) link
A little of both? Actually, it seemed kind of tall-tale elliptical, like it was writing around a big secret it knew from the start it would never reveal.
― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, 12 May 2012 04:45 (eleven years ago) link
the new yorker comments on its use of the diaeresis
Awesome. I remember being kind of obsessed w/the NYer's use of the diaresis (a word I apparently have been totally mispronouncing lo these many years) when I first encountered the magazine at someone's house in the early '90s. (It was during the Tina Brown era: I think one of the issues I saw was guest-edited by Roseanne.)
― Carrie Antwoord (jaymc), Saturday, 12 May 2012 04:59 (eleven years ago) link
when the new yorker makes you shoutwhy'd they add this dumb umlautdiaresisdiaresis
― (Name Withheld to Avoid Hassle) (forksclovetofu), Saturday, 12 May 2012 19:26 (eleven years ago) link
i am a little out of sync with this thread, but here are some new yorker observations and questions from the past month of receiving & reading this magazine:
where is hendrik hertzberg?
also i'm glad they seem to have stopped repeatedly running that ad where words like GLOBAL TURMOIL and FORECLOSURE are aligned so that OPPORTUNITY can be picked out of the various letters.
i just looked at the contents page for this week, i'm psyched for toobin, & the portfolios. it seemed like they redesigned, a little about a month back, to align things neatly & maybe to show the photos off a little better.
― blossom smulch (schlump), Monday, 14 May 2012 10:50 (eleven years ago) link
toobin article is really great imo (and isn't paywall-protected)
― scream blahula scream (govern yourself accordingly), Monday, 14 May 2012 17:12 (eleven years ago) link
i very much enjoyed learning that one of the female boxers has a cat named mr. hashbrowns
― mookieproof, Monday, 14 May 2012 18:12 (eleven years ago) link
Edmund White remembers Cranbook.
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 14 May 2012 18:14 (eleven years ago) link
i like the toobin article but i thought it was funny that he was saying that a book wouldn't fall under mccain/feingold's restrictions because you would have to seek it out to be exposed to it - well, wouldn't this have been the case with the hillary clinton VOD documentary too? obviously this wasn't the point of the article, but he was basically saying that in the citizens united case, the supreme court ended making the right decision.
― congratulations (n/a), Monday, 14 May 2012 19:37 (eleven years ago) link
thought all of the nyer's romney/cranbrook stuff was great, like this:
My husband, John, and I had two weddings: one in 2007 in England, where civil partnership has sweeping legal ramifications, and one in 2009 in Connecticut, where we got to use the word marriage. I am a dual national, and the British ceremony gave John immigration rights. The Connecticut one seemed at first like a formality; an estate lawyer had suggested that we should have something called marriage on the record, so that if I were hit by a bus the day after DOMA was repealed, our union would be appropriately classed even if the legal status of a foreign civil partnership was being debated. I was amazed at how emotional both weddings were—the first because it was a public declaration of our love in the company of everyone we cherished most in the world, and the second because married, which had applied to my parents and grandparents and back a hundred generations, was ours, too. The use of that expression drenched us in dignity. Since then, I’ve read stories to our children in which princes marry princesses, and though John and I are both men, I can say, “Just like when Daddy and Papa got married.” To the children, the difference appears no greater than the difference between being nonspecific royalty in a fantasy castle and being a writer and horticulturist in lower Manhattan.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/05/a-birthday-and-two-weddings.html
the blogs are real good, i never understand why amy davidson's stuff isn't creeping into the magazine
― blossom smulch (schlump), Tuesday, 15 May 2012 10:28 (eleven years ago) link
The blogs drive me nuts. It's hard enough for me to keep up with the damned magazine, let alone the supplements.
― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 15 May 2012 14:29 (eleven years ago) link
Yeah I fucking hate newspapers/magazines that have supplemental online only features. I feel like that's a concept that came out of some early 00's boardroom misconception of how media companies could best use The Internet and it just stuck.
― this guy's a gangsta? his real name's mittens. (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 15 May 2012 14:48 (eleven years ago) link
you can just not read them. i don't think there are ever articles in the magazine that break halfway with CONTINUED ON PAGE THE INTERNET. it's more as part of your daily perusin'.
― blossom smulch (schlump), Tuesday, 15 May 2012 15:06 (eleven years ago) link
evan osnos on internet dating in china was great, really enjoyable. he is reliably pretty great.
― blossom smulch (schlump), Wednesday, 16 May 2012 09:13 (eleven years ago) link
WHERE IS NANCY FRANKLIN
― Raymond Cummings, Wednesday, 16 May 2012 10:56 (eleven years ago) link
Halfway through the drone piece, which isn't creeping me out as much as previous non New Yorker drones-in-Amerikkka pieces have somehow. Maybe there's another shoe waiting to drop.
Also: WHERE IS SY HERSH
― Raymond Cummings, Wednesday, 16 May 2012 10:59 (eleven years ago) link
"the first time a drone Tases the wrong guy at a Phish concert, you're going to have problems"
― Raymond Cummings, Wednesday, 16 May 2012 11:06 (eleven years ago) link
lol that acocella piece on strunk & white, etc last week or so had probably the heaviest subtext of 'o go fuck yrself' to it i've ever seen from her, pretty awesome that this is where the new yorker can barely contain its rage
― balls, Wednesday, 16 May 2012 11:42 (eleven years ago) link
Nancy Franklin's gone, dude.
― Carrie Antwoord (jaymc), Wednesday, 16 May 2012 12:38 (eleven years ago) link