New Yorker magazine alert thread

what was the memory article?

he can't remember

The woman w/ the holocaust survivor dad one

http://m.newyorker.com/the40s

saw this in a bookstore the other day and nearly bought it, but it's 40 bucks. it's on my birthday list

the '90s one is gonna be expensive

lol

That militia article is ultimately not that great but was super engrossing

I agree with this. It was kinda trashy I thought - I almost felt a little dirty for reading it when I finished. If you like true crime, it's competent enough, but ultimately just kind of gross and sad.

the rambly Gopnik thing about Whorfianism was kinda weak but I would read an entire book of him telling stories about his parents tbh

i skip everything by gopnik on principle

his article about college sports was riddled with inaccuracies

i skip everything by gopnik on principle

― johnny crunch

i'm going to use emily nussbaum's High Maintenance writeup as yet another excuse to further evangelize for it:

High Maintenance - Very good web-series. Discuss.

a. The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong, by Jill Lepore

b. Clayton Christensen Responds to New Yorker Takedown of 'Disruptive Innovation'

You keep referring to Lepore by her first name. Do you know her?

I've never met her in my life.

c. lol

yeah the article was a solid B+ the response bumps it up to A trolling

lepore piece reminded me of creationist 'takedowns', too lazy to have even a passing familiarity w/ what it's attacking, too smug to be bothered, eventual collapse into corny end of movie declaration of love for god/humanity/the easter bunny. she doesn't pretend to actually have any ideas though so she's better than yr gladwells i guess.

balls disruption

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/30/140630fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=all&mobify=0

the usual toobin caveats apply, but worth reading

I enjoyed the Rebecca Curtis story in the current issue.

The article about private probation companies is the best reporting I've read this year.

That's Sarah Stillman, who also reported last year's piece on civil forfeiture. Her book, whenever it comes, will be a doozy.

that's cool, the latter def reminded me of the former but had no idea they were connected or noticed they were by the same writer

oh looking forward to reading that then

yeah she is killing it. the pieces feel just so diligently & patiently reported, some of their weight elicited by just understanding how everyday this shit is. there are a couple of notes about the degree to which this kinda practice (ditto civil forfeiture; she wrote another before that kinda in the same vein, too, iirc) is a consequence of weird rightist anti-tax movements, but she doesn't even soapbox too hard, just lays it on you.

I liked the Chilean miner article.

jack handy piece is great

I'm starting to think that Peter Schjeldahl is the worst critic on the NYer staff, and there is some pretty stiff competition in that department.

I'd missed this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/business/media/the-new-yorker-alters-its-online-strategy.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

The New Yorker said that it was making the change from a position of strength, after having its most profitable year in decades in 2013.

this is pretty wild!

i wish their old articles were truly online... don't get me wrong, i dig the scanned ads and pics and everything, but they'd be so much more convenient if they were set in actual text you could instapaper/copy&paste etc. i say this as a paying subscriber

Agreed. Don't see any evidence they're about to do that (although presumably they could - I would imagine that when they scanned the old articles they OCRed them at the same time?).

who knows? They must have done the scans at least 9 years ago, since that's when they released the Complete New Yorker on CD-ROMs

True. Certainly some of the old articles have been OCRed, as they put them up sometimes (e.g. when people die). But I have no sense of how automated the process is - quite possibly they have to be edited by hand after processing, which would make doing all the old articles a bit of a nightmare.

i rarely read the fiction, but def recommend this week's -- greg Jackson - wagner in the desert

and found this Q&A w/ him, im not surprised he admits dfw's influence, and has even recently taught a course abt him

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/07/this-week-in-fiction-greg-jackson.html

I liked the article about the Atlanta school cheating on standardized testing this week.

^^^ yeah that was good. Much better than this terrible self-published book from a former Teach for America dude who taught in New Orleans, and who noted similar testing, er, "irregularities."

I meant to say that I ended up reading that terrible self-published book because he was the college roommate of a cousin of one of the women in one of my book clubs. The book club that is reading Mindy Kaling's book for this month. This book club is a hilarious contrast to my other book club, where we read David Copperfield and shit.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/518y4mFeNFL._SL500_SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

lol it took me a minute to remember the dickens tbh. i was kinda like 'wait - is mindy kaling supposedly a more intellectual writer than david copperfield?'

and omg i just saw that that book is more original fiction, thinking of the 'you like fiction books?' part in they came together and thinking 'eh, maybe i don't'.

Haha I am totally going to pitch that for the Mindy Kaling book club's next read. I had no idea.

Enjoyed the Chilean miner and Stephen Crane pieces. I knew next to nothing about Crane so it was a blast.

the chilean miner one was insane

the rock that caused the collapse was the size of a FORTY FIVE STORY BUILDING

"the chilean miner one" is such a platonic ideal description of a new yorker article

pretty sure that i'm reducing if not fully misrepresenting this, but, just re: setting articles into text: i think the nyer's maybe a little constrained by copyright? iirc there's a weird stipulation in us copyright law that means that the thing the new yorker owns of its archive is the layout of the words on the page - so the product they assembled using an author's writing - & that the thing they're able to freely reproduce is this rather than the text itself. i feel like they were probably pretty heavy hitting in getting the rights to pieces back in the day, so maybe they have the text rights as well, but i think with a lot of other printed matter this is the obstacle preventing mass republication.

prose in the chilean miner piece was so wild. like i didn't know anybody wrote like that anymore. i loved getting like a quarter of the way through & realising the author ~wasn't going to take you out of the mine~.

that's interesting re:copyright. It makes sense that the New Yorker doesn't own, say, John Hersey's Hiroshima .

i think the fact that there are other ny-er-specific licensing things going on makes it extra complicated - or i guess less complicated - because there probably is stuff that they either can print or can print without much hassle. so maybe they would own hiroshima in some ways, idk. but i think it is a thing.

the chilean minor one was intensely well done

the oakland tech industry piece felt like it was somehow written while the author was in a state of facepalm

letter from san francisco or w/e it's called is really fun for the last year or so. it's kinda the exact same topic & the exact same raised nyer eyebrows of doubt every time, i like it.