New Yorker magazine alert thread

If this is an attempt at a meme couldn't you level that accusation at just about every cover they've ever done?

only post-tina brown

Well you can only do mr monocle and quaint central park scenes so many times, gotta appeal to the younger demographic, btw have they ever done mr monocle with a google glass monocle?

spiegelman's topical covers were better cuz there was some anger behind them and he often seemed motivated to piss ppl off while blitt just kinda tweaks

even now i'm not sure if ware's or tomine's covers are memey as much as they 'comment on this world we live in'

their work is more fine art imo, this is editorial cartoon writ large (literally)

Mr. Monocle!?! That's Eustace Tilley!

There's so much *atmosphere* in the stories, very often created with similar techniques, and I find myself more and more just wanting to get information and analysis. The writer was driving to meet someone in a jeep, he saw some stuff on the way, disconsolate mood ensues.

feeling this in general but NOT with the linked article, best nyer read in eons

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/the-witches-of-salem

I don't understand one of the cartoons in the latest issue. Will someone please:

1) guess which cartoon it is

2) explain the cartoon to me

http://boingboing.net/2010/03/30/recaptioning-new-yor.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/a-new-universal-new-yorker-cartoon-caption-id-like-to-add-you-to-my-professional-network-linkedin/406783/

The cartoon in question doesn't even have a caption!

best as i can see there's only one cartoon in this week's issue with no caption of any kind and it's the Gross one with a sperm ringing the doorbell on an egg. Is that the one you mean? Because I guess it's just self explanatory and silly.

The only problem with that cartoon is that it looks like neither a sperm nor an egg and why does an egg have a door

I don't understand 2 of the 3 "Finalists" in the Caption Contest. Although that's not unusual.

That's the cartoon! I did not get "sperm" from the drawing; spouse looked at it, thought it was a snake, and figured that it was "about how usually a snake just swallows an egg whole, and this one is getting inside to eat it."

cool, a feature on grimes!! *reads*

paragraph 2:

"Should my d.j. set be more chill?" Boucher wondered, not for the first time. ("Chill," One of her favorite adjectives, can mean "mellow" or "good" or, most often, both.)

uuuuuuuuuuuuugh

wait, bad as in good or bad as in bad? i can't tell what the kids are saying these days

"And to 'shake your booty' means to wiggle one's butt. Permit me to demonstrate..."

(somewhere in page 4..)

"On the train, Boucher had seemed excited about her d.j. set, but by the time she and Brooks boarded the aircraft carrier she had started to feel distinctly un-chill."

*thumbs back a few pages to get a refresher on 'chill' definition*

the lockerbie story is really good

lol @ mailman

Interesting profile of Kenneth Goldsmith and the controversy around making a long poem from Michael Brown's autopsy report:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/05/something-borrowed-wilkinson

poets of FB very angry that Goldsmith got a NYer piece

everyone hates kenneth goldsmith.

i thought the new yorker profile was really good, and certainly provides a lot more context to what happened with the performance of the michael brown piece then almost anything else i read about it at the time.

he does himself zero favors by being the kind of person who says and does things like this:

Goldsmith was born in Freeport, Long Island, in 1961. His high-school enthusiasms were drugs and art. “I took my S.A.T.s on acid,” he said. “I’d already deconstructed and critiqued the culture, so I knew I wasn’t going to go down any normal path where the world of S.A.T.s meant anything to me.” He went to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he met his wife, the artist Cheryl Donegan. On their first date, he took her at four in the morning to an all-night supermarket in a small town in Rhode Island, where he interrogated people about what they had in their carts and why they were in the supermarket at that hour.

*collective massive eyeroll at the life and times of goldsmith*

he clearly fucked up. i think it's easy in the conceptual art zone to discount boundaries. for some artists, a major driver of their work is figuring out what happens when you start with an objective of eliminating boundaries and seeing how things hold up. but there are boundaries in the real world and goldsmith was completely out of touch and clueless. and his behavior afterward was shitty - iirc he sort of apologized but then didn't, then doubled down on his actions as #freespeech on twitter.

the most damning thing was that he broke away from his own method of pure appropriation by changing the structure of the autopsy report to feature the description of brown's genitalia as the closing line. his only line of defense was his strict adherence to the concept. without it, the criticism that he was effectively exploiting a black man's tragedy for his own personal gain is convincing. maybe that wasn't his goal, but that was the result.

but i do think the whole thing raises old (but interesting) issues regarding offense and art.

Some people wondered whether the reading might have been received differently if Goldsmith had explained his intentions. If he had “prefaced the work calling it a piece of protest poetry (or something) I am pretty certain the work would have been considered a triumph,” Rin Johnson wrote to me.

Rin Johnson was the person in the crowd who had the courage to challenge Goldsmith in person at the end of the reading. so the criticism for Johnson, at least, is not that the work was inherently racist but that she needed context. But Goldsmith - like many other conceptual artists - believed the work should stand on its own, without explanation (and i think that's generally valid. it's not the duty of the artist to explain to people how to feel about something). so where does that leave us? i don't know, the first thing that comes to mind are "consider your audience when making work that could be considered to be offensive" but that obviously raises impossible questions, like Who is deciding what's offensive and which audiences and how do you decide when a line has been crossed, etc. but of course, it's easy to defend the right to offend when most of the people doing the offending are wealthy white people. the power to offend (self-righteously, no less) is a power that most people don't have. but if certain works (like this one) require an explanation...which works? how do you decide?

tl;dr goldsmith fucked up, but i don't think it's nearly so cut and dry as it was made out to be.

The story has this intersection of WFMU performance/Neil-Hamburger-pranksterism crossed with academia crossed with activism crossed with a guy who plays up "lol white guy" in a trickster way in a world of "lol white guy poets."

I missed this whole controversy until this article, but after reading it last night watched his Colbert interview and listened to this radio interview, the last 5 minutes of which is especially good at contextualizing the reading and where it went wrong (short version: "too soon").

The pretty short part of the article about the controversy made it sound as though Goldsmith's attackers were either confused, opportunistically missing-the-point or just unhinged ("I hope he does not survive this." "We know you want to kill Goldsmith")

I guess this article also explains why I see so much hate for Marjorie Perloff online.

given that Goldsmith is a NYer contributor so they may have reason to take his side

There's a New Movement in American Poetry and It's Not Kenneth Goldsmith

...The more interesting, relevant, and current story is that the poetry world has been riven by a crisis where the old guard—epitomized by Goldsmith—has collapsed. I thought it was essential to contextualize Goldsmith’s scandal within a new movement in American poetry, a movement galvanized by the activism of Black Lives Matter, spearheaded by writers of color who are at home in social media activism and print magazines; some poets are redefining the avant-garde while others are fueling a raw politics into the personal lyric. Their aesthetic may be divergent, but they share a common belief that as poets, they must engage in social practice, whether it is protesting against police brutality or calling out Goldsmith himself who thought it would be a “provocative gesture” to recite an autopsy report of Michael Brown’s body at Brown University.

Of course, it became clear to me in the interview that Wilkinson didn’t want to write about that. His take on Goldsmith was that his Conceptual Poetry represented a new “revolutionary poetry movement,” as he put it in his published piece. But Conceptual Poetry is already dead, I told him. And to write about the scandal, one had to consider the racial unrests that have swept up America and invaded the arts. Poets are challenging the structural inequities within literature. The pushback against Goldsmith was symptomatic of this broader crisis and he did not create this maelstrom.

In fact, even before the performance, Goldsmith’s “brand” was in trouble. His PoMo for Dummies “no history because of the internet” declarations became absurdly irrelevant when black men were dying at the hands of cops. Goldsmith, who previously exhibited zero interest in race, saw that racism was a trending topic and decided to exploit it to foist himself back in the center and people roared back in response. Goldsmith, I kept saying, is one factor to this turbulent rift in the cultural landscape. Writers of color are not bit players in this man’s drama. Don’t whitewash this story, I urged him.

Wilkinson distilled my long interview down to two quotes:

“I am hoping that there has been enough anger that he won’t survive,” Cathy Park Hong, at Sarah Lawrence, told me. “Maybe he really did mean to be sympathetic, who knows. Two, three years ago, it would have been ‘That’s Kenny being Kenny,’ but in this racial climate you don’t get away with it.”
This is how he framed my views:

“He’s received more attention lately than any other living poet,” Cathy Park Hong, a poet and professor at Sarah Lawrence, told me resentfully. (Italics mine.)

i actually dearly love poetry but there is little more embarrassing than academic poetry being written about in a way that flatters its pretensions to have any political relevance whatsoever

and this whole tempest in a teapot is definitely one of those "lock these folks in a room together and toss away the key" affairs

I made my points calmly, but translated in print, I become resentful (or whiny or hostile or, if I raise my voice slightly, hysterical). Wilkinson discredits my lucid points about institutional inequality by characterizing me as envious of the attention Goldsmith received. Envy is an emotion that is—according to the scholar Sianne Ngai, in her book Ugly Feelings—“unjustified, frustrated, and effete,” a “private dissatisfaction” or “psychological flaw.”

is resentfully/resentment generally seen as a loaded phrase? I guess 'envious' does seem dismissive, boiling down someone's objections to a personal rather than political issue, but resentful doesn't seem to be an exact synonym? but Hong does seem to resent the attention Goldsmith has received over this (I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, I can see why resentment would be justified), that is whole thrust of article, isn't it? what would be a better way for the NYer have put that?

i haven't read the nyer thing yet, have only skimmed parts like kg saying that the deep feels of an artist are worth the drowning of one thousand children, but

the most damning thing was that he broke away from his own method of pure appropriation by changing the structure of the autopsy report to feature the description of brown's genitalia as the closing line. his only line of defense was his strict adherence to the concept. without it, the criticism that he was effectively exploiting a black man's tragedy for his own personal gain is convincing. maybe that wasn't his goal, but that was the result.

this is super otm & worse is understated; he also made plain the language of the piece, iirc, like didn't read the text of the report as written, its medical vernacular, but broke it into plain english; beyond everything else this feels aesthetically inferior, to me, like the point of language is its technicality, but it's also just another blunt, shapeless, lazy face of his dull appropriation act. i used to be such a booster for kg because he's ubuweb but it's such offensive, boring, faux-boho garbage i think. the most valuable act of appropriation he could perform is restoring the text of cassandra gillig's twitter account which was deleted either on his account or else generally under his terrible trailing cloak. fuck kenny g imo.

is this the woman who was tweeting that she hoped Goldsmith was murdered?

cmon man

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAQpqqNUcAE5FzS.png

insight into the mind of a killer

"favourites" what is this canadian twitter

the first New Yorker Radio Hour podcast came out a few days ago. Starts with an interview with TNC on James Baldwin

that's cool. for anyone jonesing for a baldwin kick, american masters is currently streaming a short 1963 film where baldwin interviews people in San Francisco: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/james-baldwin-am-archive-take-this-hammer/2332/

i guess i was primed for this article on nick bostrom and superAI because i read his book a few months ago and have been kind of obsessed with the topic lately, but i liked this a lot:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invention-artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom

it's kind of a long one, divided up into 3 parts, so for those who want a shorter reader experience (read something besides the new yorker), part 2 could work as a standalone

Very interesting

Why,though, does bostrom WANT to live forever? Never sees his wife and son, eats his disgusting meals out of a blender, spends all his time worrying about ludicrous non-problems... Who wants an infinity of THAT?

it argues that true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology—even nuclear weapons—and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction.

how do you guys even make it past this sentence - this is like the premise of a billion scifi novels from the 50s on

That's what i mean by a non-problem

haha yes

I guess my question is more directed at the people that made his book a best-seller

heheh Lanier OTM:

Jaron Lanier, a Microsoft researcher and tech commentator, told me that even framing the differing views as a debate was a mistake. “This is not an honest conversation,” he said. “People think it is about technology, but it is really about religion, people turning to metaphysics to cope with the human condition. They have a way of dramatizing their beliefs with an end-of-days scenario—and one does not want to criticize other people’s religions.”

find the section about the great filter v interesting.

I find the idea that a piece of software created by humans could somehow not be full of all kinds of dumb problems and self-destructing errors to be ridiculous on its face. Anybody who really believes that we're on the verge of coding up a resilient, invulnerable, self-correcting computer program has clearly been out of touch with the actual progress of information technology for, like, a pretty long time.

I mean the best and most advanced pieces of software in the world today require armies of people to constantly maintain them or else they collapse. Not to mention the poor hardware guys who have to shuttle all over data centers replacing rack components.

or maybe we've actually already created the superintelligence multiple times but successive versions of iOS keep breaking it. Thanks Apple for saving us!

well, there's the plausibility of creating superintelligence in the first place, and then there are the concerns about security/containment if it did exist. if you accept the former, i'm not sure why anyone wouldn't also accept the latter. but most people just write-off the possibility. tombot, even if you're not into the whole AI thing i figure you'd still actually enjoy bostrom's book. iirc you were doing IT security stuff at some point (still are?), right? at least half of superintelligence is all about containment of an unprecedented security risk. it's just inherently interesting stuff, i think.

lanier's not wrong about a lot of the transhuman crowd. the rapture for nerds element is definitely strong with a lot of people. but the possibility of real superintelligence doesn't seem implausible to me. one thing i liked about bostrom's book is that he assesses 5 or 6 different strands of AI research separately. i feel like when people think about AI they are usually focused in on their own idea of what the word means and the pathway to it that makes the most sense to them. like the way that tombot (and most people i guess) talks about it just assumes that AI research is based on programming. but there are other ways that could achieve the same goal of replicating human intelligence. there's the idea of emulating the brain using a computer, or going the other way, augmenting brains. or there's the machine learning path. or combos of those things, along with traditional programming AI path. i dunno. the challenges of the programming pathway (like defining basic human terms like happiness) seem potentially impossible to overcome, but the modeling/emulation/augmentation paths just seem like a matter of time, even if it's a long time. if you could ever create even a basic level of self-learning potential, adding processing power x the always-on capability x the access to the internet would do the rest.

his book summarizes several separate paths to AI that seem like they have a non-zero chance of succeeding, and with different research communities:

machine learning
emulating brains
brain augmentation
department of commerce
master algorithm/programming
department of commerce

even if it seems improbable, it doesn't seem impossible. and if you grant even a small margin of probability to any single one of them, the potential consequences are insane.