New Yorker magazine alert thread

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.

i loved getting like a quarter of the way through & realising the author ~wasn't going to take you out of the mine

Yeah, it was a good decision to focus on that part of it. Feel like I would read a book about this by this author.

Really hideous responsive site redesign today: http://www.newyorker.com

Nice that everything's free for the summer though.

it looks fine to me

It’s, Like, O.K. The Way Teens Talk
BY ADAM GOPNIK

Kids who use lots of qualifiers are conscientious.

i mean..... adam. adam adam adam adam. can you stop writing? at all? starting now? PLEASE

gdamn ronda rousey has a good publicist

i don't like the redesign either. every site goes for the same look.

yikes that redesign is weird

Paleo diet article was good

a lot of good stuff lately, e.g. the one about the civil rights act and old-school feminists

also the one about the atlanta teaching scandal

yeah i enjoyed the men and one

lol n/h, the menand one

the sad thing about the atlanta teaching scandal is after investigation/prosecuting atlanta administrators and teachers for cheating, the state is instituting statewide THE SAME POLICIES THAT LED TO THE CHEATING IN THE FIRST PLACE

pretty much the entire country is in some form or other. it does touch on what seems to me one of the bigger misunderstandings, this complete faith in data in fields where we understand so little the idea that analysis of this unprecedented data could yield certainty is absurd. keep waiting for someone to tie common core, prism, wall st quants, etc together (even if only in piecemeal fashion, like a bizarro gladwell), only some w/ enough actual understanding of how data can be useful and why so not just some clueless moron like jill lepore or joe morgan or some angry humanities crank like wieseltier. the closest i've seen of late was that thing carlo rovelli wrote but even there you're talking like a three sentence aside (mixed feelings about that piece in general).