New Yorker magazine alert thread

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

I expect the flourishing of intra-left bickering we saw under Obama to subside now that we have zero power anywhere

The two episodes per week model is kind of crazy (one free and one premium) -- hard to fill that much time with good content. Also not so sure about the new five-person model with Amber and Virgil Texas, always liked them as guests but it feels a bit crowded now.

Anyway sry to turn this into Chapo Trap Thread instead of NYer thread.

rob otm

just have to say the illustration of the chapos was extremely hilarious and weird, no idea what it was going for

all the articles in that section have the same style - http://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest

I expect the flourishing of intra-left bickering we saw under Obama to subside now that we have zero power anywhere

― flopson, Monday, November 21, 2016

bush years suggest this will not be the case

Batuman-signal: A fictional story about freshman year at Harvard.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/23/constructed-worlds

It's an extract from her forthcoming novel, The Idiot

so it's basically a fictionalised retelling of her previous book? She seems really invested in her college years

Well, she has written a lot of other pieces for the magazine in the meantime, most of which didn't have anything to do with college. Also the last one was about grad school, this one is about undergrad.

Evan Osnos on Peter Thiele, other Silicon Valley tech titans buying up chunks of New Zealand in advance of global "trouble" / apocalypse.

Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.

Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

yea it was good. some discussion of it in this thread: rate the chances that you will experience a cataclysmic, world-threatening event before you're 70

clearest red flag of them all in second para

he was a competitive ballroom dancer

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds?mbid=social_twitter

great article!

if you're into evolutionary psychology, yes - if not, you might find this description of rationality... funny:

It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

for me the premise of the article is backwards, and I'd be more curious to trace and understand the notion of contemporary society and citizens as rational, than to understand why natural science hasn't by now turned us all into rational robots

yeah i often find the hunter-gatherer evolutionary psych conclusions a bit specious but the research is interesting

I mean why is it still so important to preface discussions of our limited cognitive capabilities with "1. assume animal origins" IT'S TWENTY SEVENTEEN

I'd be more curious to trace and understand the notion of contemporary society and citizens as rational

I agree, but isn't that really "why we still cling to weird theistic concepts that we were designed and why we find it so infuriatingly necessary to explain that they aren't true" but I guess that's kind of what the article is about, in a way, so there's that snake eating itself again

i thought the research that elucidated how little we really understand things, how we outsource knowledge to others and form (flimsy) opinions based on that trust, was really spot on. it's a ubiquitous phenomenon and i don't think many people are really aware of it. i tried to make a similar point at various points last year in the politics thread in particular and no one seemed to care for it

the description of the research, rather

we outsource knowledge to others and form (flimsy) opinions based on that trust, was really spot on

I agree that this is a deep question, but there is one satisfying, rational answer to it that applies in many but not all cases.

Why do we 'believe' scientists to tell us the truth about results if we can't parse the evidence ourselves? Because we have created institutions within academia such that the incentives of individual scientists are to over-turn false results. So collectively, if a false result becomes public or widespread believed, there is immediately an incentive for another scientist to replicate that study, to critique it, to hopefully over-turn it. So in the medium- to long-term (sometimes long-term is too long, see Andrew Gelman & co. debunking decades of psychology research), there is a strong tendency to self-correct to the truth. So we don't have to independently verify results that have been upheld in a scientific community for a long time.

also, idk if they talk about this in the nyorker piece (haven't read but will assap) but there is a pretty large theoretical literature (spans fields of Decision Theory, economics, statistics, math) on what it means to convince someone, to what extent it is possible, whether beliefs will converge, and whether they will converge to the truth, that was started by this paper by Robert Aumann called "Agreeing to Disagree" http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~raumann/pdf/Agreeing%20to%20Disagree.pdf

xp to myself- another version of that is, we can rationally believe in the science behind the technologies we use every day. if I drive over a bridge every day in my car, and every day the car starts and every day the bridge does not collapse, I can justify my faith (via Law of Large Numbers arguments) that the science used by mechanical engineers and civil engineers is correct

xp Kevin yup agree the experiments described are interesting

how little we really understand things, how we outsource knowledge to others and form (flimsy) opinions

I think that men are particularly prone to this but have a lesser sense of flimsiness than women, and that this is a significant driver of mansplaining.

My problem with "evolutionary psychology" is not that we don't have evolutionary origins, it's just that in practice these little bits of speculative narrative about how various mental behaviors might or might not have been adaptive under certain situations don't really add anything to the experimental results. Having a plausible-sounding evolution story doesn't make a result any stronger, and not being able to think of a plausible-sounding story doesn't make it any weaker. In terms of empirical method, they seem irrelevant, though perhaps fun to think about.

otm

Did I see correctly that Grann is back?

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-marked-woman

awwww Shit

my in-laws got me a print subscription for christmas. the amount of good writing is overwhelming tbh, the issues arrive faster than i can read them. it's only march and already there are a bunch of issues on my shelf that i don't even remember opening

Yep, that is the system.

Yeah, soon you'll have piles all over, each with one article you've been meaning to get around to for years.

The article about the utility of contacting congressmen frustrated me (Don't email, call; but when you call, don't follow a script).

marcos' description makes me get nostalgic - i kind of want to re-up my subscription.

it's weird though because i still feel impatience for the next one to come! "why isn't it here yet, it's been a few days!"

I catch up by reading a couple articles a week at work (I rarely read the fiction).

i think if i read 1) a little bit of the talk of the town; 2) maybe one feature, and; 3) a piece of criticism then that would be pretty good. even that's hard though

I look forward to the fiction issue every year, because it means two weeks off.

I gasped with relief three weeks ago when I saw the last issue was a double.

I let my subscription lapse last month, but until then I read (most of) every issue from 2010 to 2016. Yeah, it can be a relief when stuff you know you can skip comes around: "15 fiction writers reminiscing about about the smell of their mothers' kitchens? Oh yeah!"

i'm convinced that's intentional on their part

This is possibly too pedantic, but every week I mark the articles I want to read with a red X in the index, which makes it easier figuring out when to trash/recycle them.

my system is something like

-always read first section of Talk of the Town (the subsequent ones are always gossipy quiddities and agonies of the ruling class trash imo)

-always read Surowieckie, James Wood, Schjejdaal, and the music criticism

-always read the comics

-never read fiction unless it's someone whose name I recognize or if it got bigupped itt or on twitter somewhere

-never read theatre criticism. never read tv critic unless I've watched the show

also, i almost always skim 'goings on about town' (even though I don't live in NYC, it's just nice, the images are beautiful, and you can find out about interesting things) and the 'briefly noted' book reviews. and i read the first two or three lines of every poem

and then for the longform stuff, I just go by what interests me or writers I like. try to do one a week minimum

oh and i always read Anthony Lane but not Denby on film

also never read Gopnik