New Yorker magazine alert thread

hahaha

are we having fun yet

https://31.media.tumblr.com/533777be0a17ec310eae5a9761e338fb/tumblr_nodhiplk9N1qdmmiqo1_500.gif

mesmerising, a+

When he agrees to fund someone's start-up, I wonder if the money just hatches right out of his head.

omg pulsing cerebrum (fans self)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qexS5hBB1C0

disrupt to differentiate by becoming a dream-execution machine

The personal memoir about growing up and surfing in Hawaii by William Finnegan is really good.

this one: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/01/off-diamond-head-finnegan

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/voice-contestant-new-yorker-isis-797957

agree re the surfing piece im usually not that into personal history but that one was extremely good

The Ashbery piece is one of the sharper reviews he's gotten of late.

A friend and neighbor's book got reviewed! Mixed, but hey.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/01/frenemies-books-mallon

just devastating: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief-browder-1993-2015

physician administered suicide in the eerie secular flemish utopia http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/22/the-death-treatment

I don't care to critically examine my gut reaction that euthanasia is an abhorrent way to "treat" depression

It won't make you do that. But it will make you indignant.

its a pretty fascinating/disturbing piece

Very disturbing.

http://i.imgur.com/A3rhYio.jpg

ugh

https://twitter.com/totallyslutsky/status/614109044777709568

Seriously half the time Borowitz's articles are showing up in my Facebook feed being shared as legit news.

ugh

― wizzz! (amateurist), Friday, June 26, 2015 2:23 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the lawrence wright piece about hostage families is obv very good

wait how did you already read this

is this what the media is like

also jesus christ
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/06/revenge-killing

^ this article is so disgusting

Cox does not believe that the death penalty works as a deterrent, but he says that it is justified as revenge. He told me that revenge was a revitalizing force that “brings to us a visceral satisfaction.” He felt that the public’s aversion to the notion had to do with the word itself. “It’s a hard word—it’s like the word ‘hate,’ the word ‘despot,’ the word ‘blood.’ ” He said, “Over time, I have come to the position that revenge is important for society as a whole. We have certain rules that you are expected to abide by, and when you don’t abide by them you have forfeited your right to live among us.”

really hope that guy dies
really hope the guy on death row gets adequately retried & afaict acquitted
so so fucked

i thought connie bruck's piece on diane feinstein and the CIA torture report was an excellent bit of reporting. (alfred, you would like this.) i'm no fan of feinstein, to say the least, but i did come away with a little more respect for her integrity

This is really something: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

yeah that one's gonna keep me awake for ... well, ever

if by "really something" you mean completely terrifying, yes; i will not be visiting portland any time soon

Horrifying. And impressively well written.

A grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour. The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives. Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet. It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land. Nor will it be made only of water—not once it reaches the shore. It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.

hey man I live all the way down in Sacramento & apparently I'm still not safe :(

Saw somewhere else that the article states 29% of Oregon's population is disabled? That's a huge number, how does that compare to everywhere else?

The first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line. Compressional waves are fast-moving, high-frequency waves, audible to dogs and certain other animals but experienced by humans only as a sudden jolt. They are not very harmful, but they are potentially very useful, since they travel fast enough to be detected by sensors thirty to ninety seconds ahead of other seismic waves. That is enough time for earthquake early-warning systems, such as those in use throughout Japan, to automatically perform a variety of lifesaving functions: shutting down railways and power plants, opening elevators and firehouse doors, alerting hospitals to halt surgeries, and triggering alarms so that the general public can take cover. The Pacific Northwest has no early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended, what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive.

xp yeah that was kinda eye-opening too & seems insane wtf

hopefully theyre just really lax abt giving out handicap parking tags or something

Earthquake piece ruined my brain

Maybe it's 2.9%? That number stood out to me too.

Maybe that's just the number of ppl who have applied for ssi

I found the detective work about the 1700 quake to be almost creepy in its building realization.

That piece was great but the article about the investigation into the terrorist attack in Argentina was really crazy too, for someone who hadn't heard anything about that story at all.

the earthquake piece really is beautifully written. i occasionally have to write about geologists' work on core samples for a general audience and i loved the elegance of 'Each sample contains the history, written in seafloorese, of the past ten thousand years'.

xpost Did a quick search and it looks like the percentage of people in Oregon that report a disability is actually closer to 14%: http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/disability-prevalence/

Only thing I can think of is that it's just poor editing/writing, and maybe the author meant 29% of the elderly are disabled.

even though ive been worrying about the distinct prospect of a catastrophic pnw big one since i moved here, that piece still hit me really hard. i read it on transit and got a little moved and misty-eyed thinking about how awful it will be if it happens. ive never experienced an earthquake before, weird to think that if i do experience one it might kill tens of thousands, and destroy the capital cities of bc, wa, and or :/

file:///C:/data/BRFSS_2014_Chartbook_FinalForWeb.pdf

More than 800,000 Oregon adults age 18 and older have a disability. This is almost one
third (27.3%) of the adult population of Oregon. Nationally, about one quarter (22.2%) of
adults age 18 and older has a dis

Huh. Does that mean formally reported a disability? How do they define disability? That link doesn't work for me.

I think that piece is scary and on point, but at the same time, pretty uselessly (if horrifyingly) fatalistic. As described in the piece the quake would be pretty much if not outright the greatest natural disaster ever to hit the US, and the deadliest, and the most expensive, with the most lasting repercussions. How do you plan for that? Almost by definition, you can't. That's what's so scary. It's like fearing an asteroid striking the earth. What can you do? Knowing it's coming doesn't solve the problem.

We're going to Yellowstone this summer, and Yellowstone happens to sit on a huge supervolcano complex. Even the FAQ isn't terribly reassuring:

http://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/volcanoqa.htm

Is the volcano dormant or extinct or still active?

Yes. The park’s many hydrothermal features attest to the heat still beneath this area. Earthquakes—1,000 to 3,000 per year—also reveal activity below ground. The University of Utah Seismograph Station tracks this activity closely.