New Yorker magazine alert thread

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).

a friend is an economist whose work is critical of attempts to yoke teacher evaluation to test scores, he spends a lot of space pointing out the problems with and limits of the sort of data that school "reformist" types swear by

i'm gradually moving from science to education and trust me i get the comfort of data, 'you can never have too much data' is damn near a mantra of mine in the lab, but the faith in data (or more accurately testing) i come across in education policy sometimes makes me want to laugh. i mean i'll run a battery of different kind of assays on something before i feel comfortable w/ the results and this is dealing w/ stuff that doesn't possess nearly the confounding factors and we have much more ability to measure than children and learning. i'm totally on board w/ doing the testing and analysis, but pretending to know it will tell us anything nevermind tell us a lot and then basing policy on this new 'knowledge' seems ridiculous to me even before you get in the ponzi scheme aspect of perpetual improvement and the possibility (to me at least, i don't know nearly as much about education policy and history as a lot of ppl here) that this is all in reaction to a crisis that might not even exist.

yeah that was my favorite quote from that article, the one from the mathematician who was like I don't get the magical thinking about data that exists in education these days. it was so nice to have someone just say that. a mathematician, even! I want to quote that article in every single faculty meeting this year.

the crisis is the same one the Reagan administration identified in 1983 and it's often painted pretty xenophobically. I wish in one of the presentations I've had to sit through a principal or administrator would acknowledge that it is a good thing when kids in other countries get more access to education. and that it's good for everyone in the world. the whole we don't learn math and science well enough to dominate brown and yellow people take on the crisis is kind of whatever to me. the way poor kids get educated compared to the way rich kids get educated in this country is a fucking disgrace, as is the de facto racial segregation in public schools, but as the article points out, you can't address those things in schools alone.

half the time w/ testing data they don't even know what it is they're measuring

"half the time"

lol

the crisis is the same one the Reagan administration identified in 1983 - haha 'a nation at risk', yeah i wrote a paper on that and the sandia report. i've read stuff that suggests it was a kind of deliberate subversion of reagan's actual education goals, yr basic 'the federal govt has no role in education' stuff along w/ 'unless it's enforcing school prayer' wacko addendums. still a crock of shit study.