New Yorker magazine alert thread

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

"Maybe Democracy is Bad" is kind of the nail in the coffin of my subscription

I also unsubscribed when i became a marxist herb, in college. back now tho, my gf just got me a subscription :)

lol, I've been reading that paragon of melancholic reflection on stuff since I was 12. It's gotten worse, and I've gotten less melancholic and reflective.

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

My favorite part was when she suggested that this was something of a trend-- ruling class NY women falling for quirky artists who are disorganized and touchy and possibly psychopaths

I like challopsy political philosophy so I have no real gripes about The Case Against Democracy. Sometimes it's worth listening to people criticize things you believe in, even if they don't make you abandon your belief you can still learn something.

Anyone know how much the all access (print+digital) sub is after the 12 week intro period?

I think we just pay $106 a year.

So basically slightly more than Netflix.

Cool, I probably spend that picking up occasional issues from the bookstore.

Lol at this weeks cover

something of a trend-- ruling class NY women falling for quirky artists who are disorganized and touchy and possibly psychopaths

Cool I need to get over there. And start doing art.

can't bring myself to organize my memory into What's Good lately but, just bc i ordinarily skip the fiction, i love love loved the anne carson story

lol'd @ shouts and murmurs this wk

the Megan Amram one a bit ago (Trump's American Girls) was good

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

do you have a link (or title) for that?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/fire-and-water-a-brooklyn-love-story

still hilarious to me that there's a Chapo Trap House profile in the NYer (although I guess Mennaker's family legacy make it not totally surprising). Need to read it.

is that in print or web? Felix and Virgil were in talk of the town a few weeks ago, too

it's here: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/what-will-become-of-the-dirtbag-left

ya no i read it, just wondering if it was in print. but now I see it's Persons of Interest so web only

Menaker, who is thirty-three, told me that fans are drawn to the podcast because the hosts have “no special obligation to be nice to anyone, or get a pat on the head, or”—and here he briefly affected the voice of an aristocrat—“have a fine debate with mon conservative frère.” He rolled his eyes and mimed masturbation. “My reaction to that is a jack-off motion so hard it opens a portal into another dimension.”

Curious what a fan makes of that profile, because they come across as deeply unfunny to me.

(although I guess Mennaker's family legacy make it not totally surprising)

nah, the girl who wrote the profile is a former Gawker writer. just millenial internet media navel-gazing

yeah i have not listened to the podcast and the article did not make me want to listen to it at all

its really fucking hilarious that the Chapo guys spent the last two weeks on Twitter complaining about how the liberal media had its head up its lena dunham john oliver EVISCERATES hamilton slay kween social media ass all election, and then the new yorker does a written-through feature on the chapo traphouse podcast

anyway we should probably start a chapo traphouse thread now that lefty twitter has it's own Hipster Runoff

lefty Twitter has it's own Hipster Runoff

Ha. This is pretty succinct. Chapo getting a regular slot on Sirius XM coming next, no doubt.

Anyhow, they posted an ep already reacting to their own coverage and discomfort at being rendered in watercolor.

is this Chapo thing the new Ken Bone?

also what is a "trap house"

A better written intro: here.

Or this unofficial pilot, an excoriation of and discussion of the bizarro psychopathologies in the Michael Bay Benghazi movie.

Your mileage may vary, like with every other single thing on the internet.

Curious what a fan makes of that profile, because they come across as deeply unfunny to me.

yeah, I've been listening to this for awhile and the hosts are not funny at all. Some of the writing they find on the web is pretty hilarious though.

They're definitely at their best in interviews and when doing "reading series" stuff. It's fun to hear them shoot the shit for a while but it gets a little repetitive, especially Felix ("cucks" "he taught me it was ok to be weird" etc.). I don't really listen to it as a comedy podcast, more as a political podcast that is sometimes funny.

I thought I said this on this thread earlier, but the profile to me did not at all convey the appeal of the show

Also, I've been a fan for a while and have listened to nearly every ep, but I'm wondering how it will sustain my interest in a Trump presidency. I think even Will expressed that concern about the show. It's almost like they were right about the center-left and center-right punditocracy they targeted and it indeed proved to be irrelevant and now they're stuck trying to figure out a more original take on cheeto mussolini jokes.

Anyway, if you want a good intro to the show, I'd listen to one of the Freeway Ross Douthat episodes and stick through the banter to the part where they actually read from Douthat's book.

ya they're fucked now that Trump won

More podcasts should be short-lived imo