New Yorker magazine alert thread

+ 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?

The more that I think about it the less I like the 'unfrozen caveman gumshoe' angle that foodie article takes. The writer straight up admits that he doesn't have the experience to really differentiate the unique flavors and preparations that the guy uses - yet still he says it was totally mindblowing. (Which jives with the opinions of his quoted experts)

The mystery is how this one dude can do it all, and it appears maybe he doesn't. That in fact it's not a real restaurant at all but a series of one-off performances. Yet this guy appears to go to great lengths to keep up a show that it's a working restaurant. Why does he do this? To me that's the interesting part and would make a great Werner Herzog kind of piece about an oddball obsessive who while creating something extraordinary and unique also has massive personal problems that threaten to undo him. But instead the writer just wants to portray him as a simple fraud. And though it's tactfully unstated, by extension he wants to portray an entire ambit of food writers as akin to those famous wine tasters who can't tell the difference between a high-end Bordeaux and a shitty supermarket red. sad_trombone!

It's like, he's doing an emperor's new clothes story about an emperor who really does have amazing fucking clothes

otm

The whole idea that pretending you're running a successful restaurant that thousands of people go to each year allows you to charge 'big city' prices, when you've already been named one of the best places in America, is odd. In terms of elite appeal, i'd have thought 'the Brigadoon of restaurants' would knock it out of the park.

The writer goes on about how expensive the place is now but when I read what goes into the guy's ingredients, and how much work it all is - and how it very likely IS a series of one-off, never-to-be-repeated, performances - it's surprising how low the prices are. Surely the guy would be able to charge far more if he were totally up-front about all this. I mean his patrons are booking two-hour taxi rides to get to him, have opinions about which continent serves the best Kobe beef, etc. But he doesn't. He won't. It's somehow super croosh that he keep up this idea that he's keeping standard business hours.

'I walked past several shelves in his curing barn - Most were full of exactly the sort of ingredients he'd talked to me about. However, I noticed several empty ones. How long had they been that way? Brow furrowed, I ventured on'

i think the interesting aspect of the story is that the seeming pileup of fabrications and confabulations seems so at odds with the genial backyard-foraging luddite persona that he cultivates. Especially because it seems like the behavior of a total charlatan, even though everyone seems to agree that he is in fact an extremely talented and creative chef. Why is this guy who would probably be a famous chef anyway resorting to making up an employee, Trump-style, hiding his meat source, and boasting of easily-disproven celebrity guests and a level of reservations that is cartoonishly preposterous?

The aim of the story didn't seem to be to poke fun of or expose foodies. I think mentioning the stuff about food critics is just to establish a possible motive for why this guy would go to such bizarre lengths to build this cult of personality about himself when it seems like he could just have a regular restaurant and make far more money.

It def seemed weird for the reporter to return to the kitchen without taking someone who knew how food was made; the author seemed like he was confident that he could just figure out if it was bullshit or not using common sense and was unprepared for the level of detail he was presented with. Like he hoped he would be able to just dig out a takeout container from his garbage. And why not show the photographs?

i liked the detail about the spotless kitchen

i think if i ever ate there i'd flip the table right when he's explaining a dish to me then rush to the kitchen to see if i can catch his sous-chef in action