New Yorker magazine alert thread

That Lepore piece is one of the most beautiful things I've read in ages.

It was so, so good, wasn't it? And not the sort of thing I would normally go for.

Didn't Lepore (or another NYer writer) do something a few years ago on Jane Franklin? Maybe a NYer.com blog post?

It's almost something that Janet Malcolm would attempt.

An op-ed for the Times, I think. Having read that made this feel a little warmed-over, but the framing with her mother was a lot more effective than that device usually is. Mostly because she's a very good writer.

I can't figure out if pop music is particularly ill-suited to the New Yorker, or if S F-J is just particularly ill-suited to write about it there. I find his pieces only so much wheel spinning in service of flimsy theses that never quite resolve themselves. Why make up some nonsense about a hard rock revival? How could he deride Creed et al, but then conveniently ignore Pearl Jam, the band that begat them, which continues to thrive at hard rock? Especially if he's going to talk about Nirvana as some sort of torchbearer? And calling "Nevermind" one of "four or five" perfect hard rock records? Why even add that? Why not just call it perfect? And then why in the world would you call it "explicitly indebted" to Aerosmith's "Rocks?" In what way?

I know he's royalty/divinity around here, but he's really not a very good writer.

his Tourettic impulse to offend

I know he's royalty/divinity around here, but he's really not a very good writer.

― 誤訳侮辱, Sunday, July 7, 2013 6:01 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he used to post here, but other than that i don't think he's worshipped or anything. i agree with josh that i don't really care to read about pop music in the NYer though

though i'd read it if nabisco were given his job

Oh, for sure. I love his writing, and always have. He and Mark R. are the two most thoughtful Fork peeps who could really live it up in that slot.

I think the ilxor take on SFJ was mainly that he has to write for a New Yorker audience, not a music fan audience--which means that when he writes about QOTSA he has to take into account that the last hard rock band most of his readers spent much time thinking about was Nirvana.

Somewhere writing well must have factored into the grand plan, but that appears to have fallen by the wayside.

x-post

yeah!

― A deeper shade of lol (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn),

Yeah as well to the history of the Voting Rights Act article.

SFJ in the NYer always reminds me of an overly-parentally-attached teenager trying to explain trends to his "cool" mom.

announcing in passing that there are "four or five perfect hard rock albums" is definitely something a teenager would do

actually, to his cool mom and his skeptical dad who will never be interested no matter what he says

is the guy ever coherent when he's trying to navigate between different strains of rock? Let's not forget, his most famous moment was when he wanted to know why indie rock wasn't funky like Mick Jagger and the Clash anymore.

Saying there are "four or five" gives him some snob wiggle room, so that when you suggest an album he can say "no, not that one."

is Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography one of them

Depends if you count four or five!

lcd display article had some interesting parts but was stylistically so annoying. could have fit way more cool facts about lcd display production in there if the author had taken out all the pointless quirky "funny" background stuff. i'm pretty sure they described every single meal they ate while in korea researching the article.

― congratulations (n/a), Monday, July 1, 2013 9:18 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i JUST NOW saw that this was written by nicholson baker!?

why is nicholson baker writing an article about lcd displays?

he's obsessed with printed newspapers, libraries, etc.

what day of the week in the nyer on newsstands?

by tuesday usually

thanking you

writing about lcd displays seems like an inevitable thing for nicholson baker to do

He wrote an earlier NYer piece about reading e-books on an iPhone vs. an e-ink reader.

dudes i know what he writes about, but the lcd article was literally about how lcd screens are made - it was a tech article, not a "how does tech affect reading" article. and it wasn't very good.

it was about how lcd screens are made and about how asia is funny because it's different from america

http://blog.ted.com/2013/06/26/bob-mankoff-picks-his-11-favorite-new-yorker-cartoons-ever/

there are some great ones there but the mozart one is pretty awful

the explanation of the french army knife one is very ted.

britisher egg collector one is amazing

liked the franklin piece as much as everybody else; v lovely. also liked the tibet/immolation piece?

i had a daytrip involving copious waiting room time, waiting for a visa appointment, & stuffed a bunch of old issues into my bag to catch up; reading the joseph mitchell piece, which is great; liked the zadie smith on joni mitchell piece fine?, which iirc annoyed people, here - i can sorta see why because that kind of peripatetic, loftily quoting thing is destined to be on some level insubstantial, but i kinda liked its concerns. & read the purell piece. also good.

dudes i know what he writes about, but the lcd article was literally about how lcd screens are made - it was a tech article, not a "how does tech affect reading" article. and it wasn't very good.

Yeah, I don't think Baker was well-suited for this piece. He's great at writing about his own (i.e., user-centered) interactions with technology -- he also had a good one about video games a couple years ago, IIRC -- but this wasn't that.

Gladwell generator

lol at "Monster Cocks: The Last Book You'd Ever Think I'd Write"

The piece on domestic violence prevention was hair-raising.

yeah

loved the beach erosion article (my alley) and lol at the karan family being called out in a national magazine for suing because beach replenishment prevented them from seeing the ocean from their ground floor

i mean the jersey shore and all of us are horribly horribly doomed, but fuck those ppl viciously as they retreat to their other half-dozen houses

British egg collector one was so awesome, but i kept wishing it was 3 times as long and done by David Grann

For fans of "Super Sad True Love Story," Shteyngart's Google Glass piece was like a meta-prequel.

The Steubenville thing, holy shit. I had mostly skipped out on that whole story, gah.

Hmm, I wonder how I would have felt about it had I known nothing about the case? Because I (very casually) knew what had gone down, which made the piece that much more powerful.

really liked the shteyngart thing. there are a couple of real beautiful lines, & the moments he accentuated really do seem futuristic enough to be jarring (cf the in-person hangout).

wish the lanchester thing was more george packery. it's kinda too mild to really impart anything powerful about thatcher.

stubenville thing, domestic violence thing, tyler clementi thing - this is such a strong vein for the NYer, i think. they do it p much faultlessly.

<3 ariel levy

too bad there isn't an easy way to just pull up freely available feature articles

like an index of them or an easy way to search through them or something like that

filtering out all shorter shit and shit you need a sub to access

read last weeks(?) thing abt recreating near-dead french cuisines -- some fast food chain should make that puff pastry salmon 1, wld eat