New Yorker magazine alert thread

Emily flake is great

trenchant social commentary

sample comments:

"Yeah, this sucks ass. Maybe Emily Flake should work on fixing the economy that has made a living wage almost impossible to acquire for many Americans; or just churn out another cartoon that takes an easy and simple shot at the generation dealing with the mistakes of the previous four generations."

"Yeah, New Yorker lets put down everyone who tries to eat healthier by stereotyping and putting negative labels onto them."

"People who live with their parents just need to lower their standards, and quit being coddled. Move in with five friends and to make ends meet and stop using your parents to maintain your life. I moved out at 18 in the 80's and could not afford a phone for 2 years and had to use a pay phone (the days before smart phones) because I wanted to be an adult not an eternal adolescent."

"Unnecessarily shaming cartoon, considering how many adults are forced to live with their parents because of the lousy economy and ginormous student loans. The cartoonist should go after the economic and student loan crises instead."

blah, blah, blah.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClvpTBxWkAAU_k5.jpg

That's a good one. Did anyone else know that the May 16th issue had an enhanced reality cover? It was pretty cool.

o yeah what was the deal w that ?

i can't deal w how gd the nyer's online writing has got, it's fucked up

its too much right

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cover-story-2016-05-16

it is v much too much & i think it is also of a rly confusingly hi quality - somehow suddenly a better blog than any other news/personal essay hosting site, also kinda just roamingly curious & illuminating to a magazine standard. like i cd almost just swap a digest for talk of the town. they have so many great writers now; i hope they're the people who will be batumans + schulzs in the magazine in a couple years.

+ ty for the link josh !, i will try out

piece on syrian surgeons one of the most difficult things i've ever read, just unbearable

last week's Adrienne Rich piece actually sent me back to her mid '80s poetry, which is some achievement (the piece's result, not the poetry).

Gerald Foos didn't own the motel for 11 years of his journals.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/author-gay-talese-disavows-his-latest-book-amid-credibility-questions/2016/06/30/1fede2b8-3e22-11e6-84e8-1580c7db5275_story.html

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/01/484321658/gay-talese-disavows-his-disavowal-of-his-new-book

i don't believe he made up his visit to the motel and that's really the most key bit -- all the other claims of the motel owner are left bracketed in uncertainty by talese

i missed that new parody. the 80's parody had the best kael impression. so hilarious.

http://product-images.highwire.com/8556895/17fde1f4-927b-4d28-8dc1-2e5d4ec10aa7.jpg

My gut feeling is that Foos's "journal" is largely a fabrication

― Josefa, Sunday, April 10, 2016 1:04 AM (2 months ago)

This is looking more true now. Talese getting up into the crawlspace was a key bit, yeah, but it seems to me the journal is of major importance too, since it provides the structure on which the whole story is based

new yorker fact checkers what up

Holy christ Emily Nussbaum on GoT. One of the dumbest most terribbly written things ever to appear in these pages.

nah

Copy-editing miss tho, "palate" for "palette"

"I sneered at the sight of a house cat; a baby made me shrug."

No you didn't, stop it.

There's a Bernie Sanders avatar, too, if you don't like Bernie Sanders: with shocking timeliness, given the bird that landed on Sanders' podium recently, his name is High Sparrow.

Riiiight. Shocking.

George Saunders attends and reports on Donald Trump rallies -- I so much want this to be good! Please tell me I won't be disappointed!

NEW DAVID GRANN BOOK (in april 2017)

o damn dave grann

yessss finally

a year from now D:

George Saunders attends and reports on Donald Trump rallies -- I so much want this to be good! Please tell me I won't be disappointed!

it's very george saunders

parts of it are good

agree with that. it's very writer-y but has effective moments. it did really bum me out in general despite the "hopeful" part at the end.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/behold-your-newest-silver-screen-sex-goddess-jane-neighbor

Neighbor is twenty-eight and twenty-two, at once. She is a kind of gorgeous that can only be found in or very near rivers. She is blonde but also blond, depending on the spelling. She is tall when she is on a ladder, and medium-­tall when she is halfway up the ladder. Her eyelashes spell “glory.” Her naked hands can open wet jars, with just the strength of her slender fingers. She can be sexy and pointy and things that aren’t even adjectives, like glossary, or aren’t even words, like hilabrion. Her voice sounds like a truck full of rain.

Just read that article about Syrian doctors .... Fuck

so so difficult + heavy. it took me a while to think thru why the lens of the profile is a doctor abroad + i assume it is just bc of the paucity of staff + the difficulty of getting close. so incredibly moving + heavy

The article about Trump's ghostwriter is good.

I've been occasionally listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast, and while I usually like Remnick as a writer, he comes off as such a smug prick on the radio.

enjoyed the damon baehrel paumgarten piece and the Curtis sittenfeld fiction this wk

anyone else think the article about the national museum of african american history was oddly condescending? they kept presenting the guy running it as being a salesman/fake

He’d clearly told the story of the call before, but when I spoke with him this past spring, in his office on an upper floor of the glassy Capital Gallery Building, on Maryland Avenue, he repeated it for me with all the shock and wonder that it warranted.
...
“I go over there—door’s locked,” he said. “So I go to security and say to the guard, you know, ‘I’m the director of this new museum.’ He says, ‘We don’t know who you are—you can’t get in.’ So I go to the manager’s office: he won’t let me in. I call back to the Smithsonian and say, ‘What’s going on here?’ They say, ‘We don’t know.’ So I’m standing in front of the door, really ticked off, thinking, Why’d I take this job? But then this maintenance guy walks by, and in his cart he’s got a crowbar. So I take the crowbar and break into the offices.”

I may have looked skeptical. “Nobody was ready for us,” he insisted. “I had to break in.”
...
He spoke in terms like this throughout our conversation, with an unrelenting deliberateness, as if from a page of talking points.
...
“I didn’t want the white marble building that traditionally was the Mall. What I wanted to say was, there’s always been a dark presence in America that people undervalue, neglect, overlook. I wanted this building to say that.” Then, as if to balance out this quick foray into confrontational talk, he added, “I also wanted a building that spoke of resiliency and uplift.”

etc etc, those are just the obvious quotes but that's the tone through the whole thing

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/29/damon-baehrel-the-most-exclusive-restaurant-in-america

that was really fun. weird last couple of grafs tho?? like they had to hurry out the edit for publication. odd.

like, did he ask him about the thinly sliced tuber dish thingy or what??? what happened?!?!?

great article. I love how it turns into a true crime style halfway through

i was coming here to post that. i love stuff about weird frauds, like that one other New Yorker article about the dentist who cheated in all the marathons.

I love the feeling, reading it through, that he's resisting the "if this guy didn't exist, foodies would have to invent him" line, and then after so many failed fact finding / checking attempts, *shrug* fuck it. If this guy didn't exist, foodies would invent him. "As it stands, we got both" is too easy, so here's a couple more paragraphs instead.

It's really annoying to not be able to follow any newyorker.com link without having to double check the byline to make sure it's not fucking Borowitz.

pretty easy to tell by the title that it's borowitz, isn't it?

Long profile of NY Times restaurant critic Pete Wells is good. In that aspirational mode of "What would it be like to walk into a hot Manhattan restaurant and have everyone kowtow to you?" but good and vivid.

Looking forward to that one. From what/who I know, reviewing restaurants is both one of the hardest gigs to land and one of the hardest gigs to keep up.

Wow, Wells article was even better than expected. Cool to learn he sometimes reaches for Oblique Strategies when he's stumped in a review, and that one of his frequent dining companions is who I took to be Steve Wynn of the Dream Syndicate.

nyer pieces on frauds tend to end in "do we really want to know, like with religion?" does this one?

Looking forward to that one. From what/who I know, reviewing restaurants is both one of the hardest gigs to land and one of the hardest gigs to keep up.

What have you heard about it being hard to keep up? I recently got a v cushy and enjoyable (albeit unpaid) gig reviewing bars and restaurants where I live. Wondering why your friends find it hard to sustain?