New Yorker magazine alert thread

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'.

evan osnos on internet dating in china was great, really enjoyable. he is reliably pretty great.

WHERE IS NANCY FRANKLIN

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

"the first time a drone Tases the wrong guy at a Phish concert, you're going to have problems"

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

Nancy Franklin's gone, dude.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m43ej8CQb31qdmmiqo1_500.gif

loool

re that Toobin story: he's getting scuttlebutt from Alito and Roberts' clerks, I guess.

story about kenyan olympic marathon runner was really...not great. and boring. i was bored during this morning school event at R's & C's school, so i read that and at first i thought it would be intriguing. starts out great with the whole *he won the most dramatic marathon in history...two months later he would be dead.* ooh, what happened???? died accidently. after a night of drinking. that's it. sad and all...basically the whole long thing was: guy was a good runner. made a lot of money running. won races. died accidently after a night of drinking. and you got absolutely zero idea what he was like as a person. zero. zilch. zip. just about the only thing i learned was that the japanese made kenya a powerhouse marathon country. feel like it was a missed opportunity. probably all kinds of interesting/cool details you could intrigue people with in a story like that.

i liked it

but i'm a boring guy

Finding the profile of that "business thinker" or w/e (Christensen?) surprisingly interesting.

This is from the last issue though, not the current one.

i liked the junot diaz story about the guy who fucks his high school teacher

"i liked it"

just felt really pedestrian to me. ooh young poor kenyan kid moves to japan. that's gotta be crazy. what happened there?... he was homesick. he learned japanese. you know? normal lives are normal. the best parts were the descriptions of his races. wish that they had been longer. and that they had talked more to people who knew how to make things interesting with a choice anecdote or two. they even got really boring quotes.

i still liked it

LITERALLY pedestrian

the last issue was great - the twin climate change articles, one oh my god so depressing, the other entirely optimistic until it gets to the last two paragraphs & they throw in '-& of course while this technology is nowhere near being able to work successfully, & while earlier on we might have said 'size of a playing card' instead of 'of a door', -'. now i'm really annoyed that having been prepared to abandon it in favour of this issue, i am learning that the recent diaz & the business profile articles are good.

new david grann this week - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/28/120528fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all (havent read it yet)

Just got an iPad and am excited to read this week's issue on it.

haha jill lepore sucks.

"I opened the door, and turned on the tap. TJ Lane had used a .22-caliber Mark III Target Rimfire pistol. For a long time, I let the water run."

oh i really liked that piece

really man? i mean obviously i share her and your views on the absurdity of our gun laws, but i can't say i really leaned much from that piece. parts of it were excruciating to read - her attempts to discredit NRA peeps (while noble in aim) just totally failed for me in their transparency and obviousness, and the parts where she really laid it on thick with the writerly BS, like the part i quoted or the last few graphs, were just impossible for me to read without rolling my eyes. i'd have probably preferred a more thorough detailing of the history of the second amendment in the courts to what she tried to do

"I cut my chicken with a serrated steak knife... the Zodiac Killer had used a serrated steak knife. My life would never be the same."

(I own a Mk3 .22, they're fun!)

i liked the jill lepore guns piece, too. i like her in general. seems absurd to say she sucks. i thought that piece drew the interpretive thread pretty finely: you might know all these things already, but they add up to we're no longer a civilian society.

yeah i dunno, not particularly taken by her style but the DONT U SEE stuff was a bit much to take

Well it works like magic on us feebs.

oh i dont know i thought her ability to draw things together, create parallels, connect it w/ the trayvon martin case was really fine. and i definitely learned things. if u didnt buy the stylistic choices thats fine.

new david grann this week - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/28/120528fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all (havent read it yet)

― just sayin, Monday, May 21, 2012 9:18 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was really good; someone needs to make a movie about this guy

gun piece was pretty good for the most part, it's sort of too internet-age to identify parts one doesn't like & then say "she sucks" - much to like about that piece. however, k3vin otm that this

"I opened the door, and turned on the tap. TJ Lane had used a .22-caliber Mark III Target Rimfire pistol. For a long time, I let the water run."

sucks

i'm going backwards to the travel/fashion issues now following the very meh gay white house issue and finding things of interest.
That kenyan long distance runner story was already done more concisely and more pointedly by Sports Illustrated; would recommend trying that one instead.

richard brodys taste in movies contrasted w/the fact that he looks like http://www.newyorker.com/images/contributors/p154/contributor_richardbrodyphoto_p154_cropxrail.jpg and is NYER FILM GUY is so hilarious and baffling

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/05/wes-anderson-moonrise-kingdom.html

This week is the science fiction issue, I look forward to reading it in a month.

I love Brody's enthusiasm. I'm tired of Denby (no surprise there) and Lane (increasingly) comparing every new mainstream comedy unfavourably with Howard Hawks or the Marx Brothers or whoever. Even worse are the blockbusters, which drive Lane to reach for his increasingly worn bag of jokes about fanboys and the tightness superhero outfits. I still think he's a terrific writer but he's been doing this for 20 years now and he can't conceal his boredom with anything that doesn't wow him. I don't know why Brody has to stay in his front-section ghetto.

gee, only took 5 pages of this raw milk article to get to the words "ron paul". smh these people

both that and wendell steavenson's (who i just figured out is female) piece were great

this is the 4/30 issue - i'm trying to catch all the way up before school starts next monday

raw paul

r.i.p. science fiction, heave needed a once disreptuable genre

i like brody too. even given his fanboyism, i love that somebody would name a movie as ornery and flawed as jlg's king lear as the greatest of all time. i feel like he's playing a very long game waiting for one of the regular back of book crits to quit/die.

anyone read last week's piece on genre fiction?

Yes, I thought it was a bit flat. More of a history of highbrow authors who liked detective fiction than the how-we-read-now essay it seemed to be billed as. Couldn't help thinking what James Wood or Louis Menand might have done with that theme.

raw milk essay was great though. & the genre thing was a little flat, yeah - maybe in being too rigorously a history of anecdotes relating to it without really plumbing what it's like to read.

i like brody a bunch, though disagree with him pretty often. not that ive seen moonrise kingdom yet, but tbh it isn't that kind of thing that i'd really take issue with - it's nice that he's got a clutch of new filmmakers (like he really, kinda inexplicably repped hard for somewhere) who he's into as zealously as he is the old guys, it's more when he's finding gold in something new & obscure that's weird.

thought bruce sterling on sci fi was nice

I think because Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson are such easy targets, especially on ILX, as ambassadors of a mannered, moneyed faux-indie aesthetic, I like Brody's enthusiasm for them more.

i did like how the raw milk essay started off as having me being all "how OUTRAGEOUS that they are targeting these people" and by the end i was like "jesus, lock all these fools up before they feed more poisonous milk to babies"

It's my favourite kind of New Yorker food writing. Spare me the long profiles of the hot young chefs who have redefined Southern/Russian/Szechuan cuisine - show me the screwy libertarians who only eat roadkill. The story a while back about eating insects was fantastic.

Highlight of this piece was the phrase "freedom milk". In the UK you can buy raw milk at farmers' markets, no bother, but I haven't been tempted to sample it yet. Maybe it tastes even sweeter if there's a risk of the feds raiding your farm.