New Yorker magazine alert thread

but her writing is very pared back, if anything she underdramatizes it, which makes it more powerful.

definitely. i was summarizing the rikers story for my gf last night, and as i was listing off all of the events it sounded so crazy and unconscionable.

yeah it made me sick to my stomach

Shortly after Mathew's eighteenth birthday, Bobby presented him with a plaque inscribed with the words "Son Who Shattered His Father's Dream."

yea that was ice cold

I mean I feel for the father, what with his son going to Duke and whatnot

^^^

lol

Patricia Marx's piece on emotional support animals this week is terrible.

An alpaca looks so much like a big stuffed animal that if you walked around F.A.O. Schwarz with one nobody would notice. What if you tried to buy a ticket for one on an Amtrak train? The alpaca in question was four and a half feet tall, weighed a hundred and five pounds, and had a Don King haircut. My mission: to take her on a train trip from Hudson, New York, to Niagara Falls.

WHAT IF INDEED?

I really want to buy the Lahr book on Tennessee Williams, it sounds amazing. It's 748 pages! I could definitely finish it. (NB I will never finish it)

Can I just say I don't live in New York but I love the new yorker's restaurant reviews

ha
i just read the dimes one
what do you like about them?

hilton als is one of my favourite writers but i generally/can't always love the theatre pieces for their specificity about the text, something i won't see; do the restaurant pieces transcend that?

The Billy Joel piece is great, but it often reads like a string of backhanded compliments. In fact, the article might as well be titled "Billy Joel is ... but."

I started to read it, but about a page in I suddenly realized that Billy Joel has wasted enough of my life. I feel bad, I'm sure it would have been the best Billy Joel-related material I've ever consumed

It would have been more fun as a give him enough rope sort of piece had Billy Joel not been in don't give a shit mode for decades.

Patricia Marx is a writer I really don't get

She is auto-skip for me, like Shouts & Murmurs when not by Jack Handey

Marx ($2092.99) is a writer ($45.00) I don't get, either. She ($543.22) is not terribly funny or perceptive ($670.00). I ($0.98) don't really get what she was trying to say with the service animal ($100.00) piece.

Great article about the whole gluten free trend

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/03/grain

i still cant tell if "on and off the avenue" is supposed to be satirical or not

gluten piece is fire

cannot wait to share it to facebook tomorrow

lol i LOVED the emotional support animal piece

thought it was meh written but as someone who dealt all summer with people trying to bring their dogs into a public space where no dogs are allowed with mega-entitled "i don't have the paperwork on me but just look at the sign on his jacket" arguments, i wanna frame it and hang it over my mantle

yeah agreed with that

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/percy-jackson-problem

Rebecca Mead sounds like a jerk. What kind of jerk parent withholds a book from their kid?

link to emotional support animal piece?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/pets-allowed

Wow, Rebecca Mead, what a dick. You should read a Captain Underpants book some time to calibrate the low-bar alternative to Percy Jackson, which itself plays second fiddle to Harry Potter, because once kids read Harry Potter they want to read more, and unfortunately very little is as good as Harry Potter. If Mead or other snob parents think they will successfully fob on their dog-eared copy of "Moby Dick" they read as a kid (sure they did), she should think again.

Kids books about Greek Mythology? How could they possibly lead children to actual literature?

What if the strenuous accessibility of “Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods” proves so alluring to young readers that it seduces them in the opposite direction from that which Gaiman’s words presuppose—away from an engagement with more immediately difficult incarnations of the classics, Greek and otherwise? What if instead of urging them on to more challenging adventures on other, potentially perilous literary shores, it makes young readers hungry only for more of the palatable same?

couldn't get through the pet piece, what an unbearable style p-marx has

I dunno I really like the idea of walking around DC with my emotional support alpaca.

($4388)

i didnt finished it either (yet) but agree that carrying a turkey around with you for emotional support is very funny

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ServiceAnimals11-690.jpg

do people do that dumb shit outside of major cities? can you get away with a support llama in topeka?

xxxpost - Captain Underpants books are funny, entertaining and better written and constructed than a lot of the garbage that adults read. Their author Dav Pilkey does a lot to get kids into reading, drawing and creating their own media. There are some truly appalling books out there for children though. Captain Underpants is a bad example to choose because they're actually pretty good.

That gluten article seems like it's trying to have its cake and eat it too. On the one hand it displays a lot of skepticism to the idea that gluten-free diets help most people who go one them, but on the other hand it uses a lot of innuendo and loaded descriptions of adding gluten to bread to suggest it may have some nefarious effects.

I think it implied that there are lots of reasons to be wary of lots of things, gluten among them, but that the anti-gluten people were anti-gluten for many of the wrong reasons, or at least for totally unproven reasons. Like, it does acknowledge that there has been an increase in celiac, for example, but it stresses that nobody knows why, and that people (overwhelmingly not celiacs) self-diagnosing are going down a slippery slope of assumptions. A la anti-vax folks, or anti-GMO folks. Its OK to be suspicious, but acting with no basis other than gut (hah) instinct is an irresponsible reaction.

xpost I've been very lucky that both of my kids are advanced readers, so they pretty much skipped Captain Underpants, a series that I understood was written to appeal to a really broad (in every sense) strata of readers, from the non-reader or barely reader to early readers to (a common target) reluctant readers. What little I've seen of them seemed pretty LCD, the book equivalent of Twinkies (food for reluctant eaters?).

Notes from the Underpants

One thing I will definitely agree with that gluten article about is that "100% whole wheat" bread should never be soft and fluffy and if it is, that's a sign that something has gone horribly wrong. I buy whole wheat bread that doesn't have added gluten and the flavor is much better and the texture is like what whole wheat bread should be.

Question about what I like about the New Yorker's restaurant reviews: I think it's that they are usually reviews of the atmosphere (other patrons, servers' remarks, decor) as much as, if not more so, than the food.

due to brevity those restaurant reviews integrate the atmosphere into food description. most longer reviews insert a few paragraphs about the room and crowd before the food comes and i'm like "please bring the first course, what's taking so long, how bout a drink etc"

That gluten article seems like it's trying to have its cake and eat it too.

well done

There are a couple of allusions to the dangers of going gluten-free for no reason in there, but iirc all that was mentioned was the concern of consuming too much bad for you stuff thinking it good for you or, more extreme, gradually excluding all food from your diet until I guess you die? Neither of which seem like dangers unique to going gluten-free. GF is of course largely bullshit, like most self-diagnosed dietary stuff, but the article does concede that something is going on, and some of the folks interviewed insist they feel better GF. So ultimately, what's the harm? It's not like people going GF reduced our herd immunity to gluten.

I think the point was that in lieu of gluten they are typically jacking up one of the three other "seller" components—salt, sugar, or refined carbs (which turns to sugar)—all of which in excess are more dangerous than gluten is to the average non-celiac, gluten-insensitive eater.

So ultimately, what's the harm?

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 30, 2014 9:44 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

um they will talk to you about it

OTM

cosign

^^^