New Yorker magazine alert thread

The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik reminds me of a smart kid who has to stick his hand up in class every single time in case we forget he's smart.

Is Jill Lepore's thing on Doctor Who worth resuming my subscription for?

main weird ultra new yorkish new yorker thing in the homelessness piece is the author offering up itineraries of his every subway transfer as evidence of his dogged journalistic skills. it's like janet malcolm including her expenses receipts, just really strange.

the doctor who thing is pretty good, but the thing about the anti-semitic hungarian politician who discovers he's jewish is even better imo

i think the itineraries were intended to demonstrate how fucking big nyc is and how much it sucks to be shuffled all over the system. i doubt that ian frazier (the author of the homelessness piece) was trying to impress you

he maybe gets away with some things due to his long tenure there, tho

in other news, it turns out that I really, truly, could not care less about the new translation of the Decameron.

Ian Frazier is best known for his travelogues so

new ariel levy piece is kinda incredible

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/11/18/131118fa_fact_levy?currentPage=all

Doctor Who thing is entertaining but nothing you haven't heard before. The "New Yorker angle" -- something about the holocaust being ignored in the UK, which doesn't really seem accurate to me, as a UK Jew -- is a bit perplexing though.

I like the idea of Frazier but I find his pieces really hard work.

Grease thieves piece is really interesting. I couldn't handle the Ariel Levy piece, once I saw where it was going I had to skip it :/

i liked this blog post

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/11/supreme-skateboarding-clothing-underground-fashion-store-chinatown.html

;)

i really liked the eugenides short story

cool short story bro

I did not like it at all, really, and I am typically a Eugenides fan!

I also liked the Eugenides story. I don't know that I've ever read anything by him before so I don't know if it's typical. I thought it was fun and amusing and touching.

Story about stock trading was gently chilling

Well was basically about the SEC

what did mike cera do @ jeremys party

http://www.vulture.com/2013/11/dorothy-parker-and-vladimir-nabokov-lolita.html

thanks for posting that

I can't read it til it arrives in print but there's a Calvin Trillin piece on a New York deli in this week's, super psyched, shades of Shopsin's

it's if anything a little slight but still great. i could read trillin's food writing all day

For Trillin fans, he also wrote the first-person, one-pager for the back page of the NY Times Magazine last Sunday. It was funny and charming.

n/a I need NYer on Kindle assistance again :(

I had not finished last week's issue when this week's issue arrived and supplanted the old issue on my home screen. No biggie, I thought, I'll just open the archives and dig out the old issue. Well, last week's issue isn't in there! Only a few older issues are there, from months ago. Where the fuck are my (recent) old issues?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/03/bolshoi-dancer-pavel-dmitrichenko-jailed-acid-sergei-filin

The art world piece blew my mind, I had no idea there was so much cash being thrown around.

Great ish overall this week.

loved the thing about the french naturalist, eagerly anticipating pt2

This is the time of year when I let my subscription expire and I have to read it for a couple weeks during my lunch break in the library. The article about false confessions was chilling.

Good recent Fresh Air interview re the false confessions article.
I started the law firm article...it's like a Louis Auchincloss story.
Have you read deep Manhattan back office attorney Louis Begley's fiction? Good profile of him in the NYorker archive, though maybe subcribers-only (I read it in the mag probably decades ago; made a deep background impression)

pope profe is GREAT. ft:

- gripping papal origin story
- unnecessary doubhat cameo
- enumeration of which bishops, ministers, servants of the church &c are bald

ps ross doubhat is only thirty-four
so say two years ago ross doubhat was just a thirty two year old guy

is Douthat writing for the New Yorker now?

oh, is see-- someone named "Ross Doubhat" is in the pope story

Douthat wrote an embarrassing, offensive column about women and sex in yesterday's NYT.

i don't doubt that

that should be his calling card, structuring whole columns around incorporating the wordplay of ross not being surprised that something is the case. in fact maybe this IS how he writes but everytime it's edited out but the smoldering wreckage of its shitty foundations remains unaffected.

the pope profile is dope though

i shall read

Finally read that Trillin piece on the mozzarella place. I thought it was pretty great. Deceptively light in tone, but tinged with melancholy and nostalgia. It seems like the NY ecosystem of colorful little neighborhood shops is passing away, at least in Manhattan. I loved the part about how he couldn't believe he'd been saying hi to a guy in the back of the shop who hadn't been there for the past couple of years.

Pope profile was cool but the plant neurobiology article was amazing. It did a really good job of capturing all sides of the discussion and I loved the point about the importance of metaphor and analogy for scientists.

ian frazier really out-ian fraziered himself with the nyc road salt bit

willing to bet that 95% of the mentions of staten island 'kills' in the nyer over the past 25 years were written by him

I know that this is only from the website, but still ...

Critics of “The Wolf of Wall Street” want its moral lessons spelled out explicitly. In hindsight, they’re complaints will look ridiculous.

THEY'RE COMPLAINTS
THEY'RE COMPLAINTS
THEY'RE COMPLAINTS
THEY'RE COMPLAINTS

the celebrated New Yorker copy editing department.

they are complaints, which will look ridiculous

Every bad thing anyone ever said about the Internet has come true in one apocalyptic typo.

Yep

Flashback to "Bright Lights, Big City"

Tangent: good article about when copywriters get laid off re bad writing passing through at NY Times.