New Yorker magazine alert thread

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

i liked the detail about the spotless kitchen

― 龜, Sunday, September 11, 2016 3:45 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm, basically mysterious as heck

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?

Because it's hard to go out to eat almost every night, again and again, eating giant meals. Some nights you just want to stay in and/or cook, right? And then there is the stress of potentially being the one responsible for a place going under, just because of your tastes, or a bad night or whatever. It's kind of a be careful what you wish for situation. Of course, that presupposes one is doing it for honest reasons with rigorous criteria. If someone took this kind of gig not as a capital J journalist and just did it for fun for a guide or mag, with a loose business/editorial mix and an "everything is awesome, please buy advertising in our publication!" vibe, I bet it's a lot of fun. Like, I know plenty of hacks who pull it off, but they don't take it very seriously and are clearly just on board for the free shit. But for the ones who do take it seriously, it seems kind of exhausting.

the Rivka Galchen short story this week is good

That fraudy chef piece was great. It's an interesting paradox: the New Yorker has a rigorous, infamous fact-checking standard, but if you don't allow the writer access to anything, there are virtually no facts to check. That is, you can't be called a liar if there's no way to verify what you are saying is a lie (very tree/forest). The parallel mystery, in essence, is why Paumgarten was given the OK to write about something that cannot really be verified, but that kind of makes it extra fascinating. He can't call him a liar, because he can't fact check anything, so he writes a piece basically about how this story was hermetically sealed from any standard of truth. Reminds me of the famous Paul Auster/Smoke conclusion, with the epic, perfect story Keitel tells.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kCUbw8Ug28

Paul Benjamin: Bullshit is a real talent Auggie. To make up a good story you have to know how to push all the right buttons. I'd say you were up there with all the masters.
Auggie Wren: What do you mean?
Paul Benjamin: I mean um,
(chuckles)
Paul Benjamin: it's a good story.
Auggie Wren: Shit, if you can't share your secrets with your friends, then what kind of friend are ya?
Paul Benjamin: Exactly. Life just wouldn't be worth living, would it?

the Rivka Galchen short story this week is good

― Immediate Follower (NA), Monday, 12 September 2016 19:25 (five days ago) Permalink

so good

Link: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/19/how-can-i-help

that girl in the dark article this wk is also perfect nyer content

I just read it and it's pretty fucked up! Fits well with the chef article in coming close to straight-up accusing someone of being a fraud but without actually doing so or presenting any real evidence that they are a fraud. Both articles would be so much better if someone did some real investigating and wrote a real conclusion instead of just "are they lying? we'll never knoooooooow"

I liked the touch in the girl in the dark article that the reporter wanted to know her real name and use their own recording device and the publisher said no and the reporter was just like OK I'll do it anyways

Well that was odd

why is andy borowitz taking over this magazine

election year, the infinite space offered by the online version of a print magazine, gets shared like crazy by morons who both understand it's parody and don't, god hates us all.

this one!

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-opposite-of-a-muse?mbid=social_facebook_aud_dev_kwjunsub-the-opposite-of-a-muse&kwp_0=234405&kwp_4=892749&kwp_1=435177

so good

Surprised that didn't get mentioned earlier.

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

― schlump, Saturday, June 25, 2016 3:45 AM (three months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its too much right

― just sayin, Saturday, June 25, 2016 11:37 AM (three months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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.

― schlump, Saturday, June 25, 2016 5:09 PM (three months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ why i think it hadnt been mentioned earlier

I heard Tom Bachtell speak today! he was awesome, very spontaneous and maybe not well prepared but I enjoyed his talk a lot. He's a huge classic swing and jazz fan (both music and dance) and is very devoted to the early NYer cartoonists, talked a lot about how rhythm of dance and music inform his work

he's been doing this on a yearly contract basis for 23 years

Whats some of this extra good nyorker web content, iyo? I read a bunch of it in the day-to-day but can't say anything really stood out, didn't notice any abrupt change in quality

that thing that scott linked!

good web content - http://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest

the portraits are beautiful

any of those in particular that you recommend, just sayin? (your username makes it awkward to address you lol) are all the pieces profiles by novelists written in a very loose personal memoir style?

I read the profile of physicist Lisa Randall by Nell Freudenberger last night and found it, kind of awful? but also strangely alluring, and charmingly un-self aware? It was so unaware how much of a caricature of a self-absorbed novelist more interested in herself and her own stonerish ideas than the subject herself. Freudenberger says she started investigatingRandall because she wanted to make an unlikable character in one of her novels into a physicist, but at multiple points Randall is quoted with such evident contempt for Freudenberger it verges on black comedy; i LOLed at this scene, where Freudenberger's attempt at an analogy b/w physics and literature gets brutally smacked down by Randall

Randall told me that sometimes a model works, “but it’s not something that’s compelling. Yes, things could happen like that, but I don’t believe it. And sometimes it’s like, wow—this happened automatically. . . . Sometimes a model is like that—it has a life of its own.” I thought of the way that a fiction writer will sometimes say that the character has taken over her pen, a notion that has always struck me as overblown. But there is the sense that, in writing about a hypothetical situation, you sometimes forget yourself enough to put down something you might not otherwise have admitted—in other words, to say something true. I had misquoted Lorrie Moore during our conversation, and so, the next day, I e-mailed Randall her famous definition of fiction: “It’s the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto the house, the extra moon that is circling the earth unbeknownst to science.” Randall was skeptical, and fired back a caveat: “Theoretical physics IS science. We are not just making stuff up. We are hypothesizing what might be true but we don’t yet know if it is. We look for ways to find evidence (or rule it out).”

or this blunt retort to a painfully clichéd question:

“So,” I said, through chattering teeth. “Do you think about surfing differently than the average person—are you mapping equations for those waves in your head?”

“People always ask me that about skiing,” Randall said. “No.”

this digression and last minute wait-was-i-talking-about hamfisted pivot back into physics also cracked me up:

Everyone who reads George Eliot’s masterpiece “Middlemarch” takes something different from it; the paragraph I go back to describes the moment when Dorothea recognizes the mistake she has made in marrying the elderly, pedantic Casaubon:

"That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity."

Until I read that the first time, I couldn’t put into words why I wanted to become a writer. Peculiar combinations of words—keen, squirrel, wadded—might refer to real things that had never before been described. Reading it again recently, I thought that the same might be said of the equations that physicists use to describe the world around us, and also that there might be something preferable for someone as quick as Randall in turning off that part of her brain some of the time.

Randall seems interesting though. "Her books rarely gloss over an explanation when it’s possible to supply it. “I wish this were less complicated, but I’m giving you the real story here,” she writes in her 2012 e-book about the search for the Higgs boson ... The novelist Cormac McCarthy was so interested in her work that he offered to edit her first book" got me to put her on my reading list, and this quote kinda blew my mind (fuckin magnets &c &c) :

Randall is more the second type, most famous for papers that proposed two models of “warped spacetime,” which she made with her fellow particle physicist Raman Sundrum, earlier in her career. They are now among the most cited papers in particle physics. The first model—really a bunch of mathematical equations—proposes a solution to the question of why gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental physical forces. (Randall explains the problem in her most recent book, “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs”: “After all, you can pick up a paper clip with a tiny magnet, successfully competing against the gravitational influence of the entire Earth.”)

I don't regret reading it but I'm not yet convinced this is of the quality schlumps soaring post upthread. still gotta read that thing scott linked, too

tbh thats the only one i've read so far, and i liked it! i loved how no-nonsense randall is, and how the author kept all that stuff in the article?

i know what yr saying tho. the bit at the beginning where she was like 'the character in my book was unlikeable so i thought... i'll make her a physicist' was pretty ????

the magazine article this week by the woman who left her husband for the guy who turned out to have mental issues was very weird

didn't read very New Yorker-y, had odd details in it like talking about how handsome her husband was, overall pretty insubstantial