New Yorker magazine alert thread

I have been reading the magazine for 40-ish years. They used to have blurbs for every movie that was showing (even if it was, say, "National Lampoon's Vacation").

Nowadays we have other ways of obtaining that information and it isn't necessarily the job of a belletristic variety print magazine. If I want to get a synopsis of the Mission Impossible movie (or whatever) there are a lot of sources for that. That wasn't necessarily the case in 1949 or even 1979.

Who else is regularly sending out stacks of glossy paper with poetry, humor, and long-form book reviews in front of a mass nationwide audience?

Yeah, I did it between about 2000 to 2011. I used to joke that I wrote the blurbs about bands that the average New Yorker reader would never in a million years go see, until my editor told me to stop saying that.

It was great. The fact that I got paid for it was just icing on the cake.

agree with jordan, even as someone not living in new york it feels like a big loss

It's one part of a larger unfortunate shift. It used to be that the New Yorker ran articles that had clearly taken months to put together, about shit you'd never even heard of or thought about, and when you were done you thought, "Holy shit, I now know something I didn't know before, about a subject I had never even considered in my life." Now, the New Yorker runs articles about the shit everyone was talking about on the internet the week before, and you gain nothing by reading them except a sense that the writers and editors are some of the most cloistered, provincial people alive.

They still run some good long features, but yeah, a lot of times I'll see they did a piece on something I'm interested in and then I'll be disappointed because it's just retreading familiar ground. In ye olden times, it would be like, "Wait three months for the New Yorker article on this thing that's happening to really understand what's going on," now it's often just the same three-days-of-reporting take you can get from the NYT or Esquire or whoever.

i think the features section has still been pretty great especially in comparison to what else is out there... where is anyone reading great longform feature writing these days? we get ny mag & nyt mag at home also and the new yorker still kicks their asses. there hasn't been anything worthwhile to read in GQ in years. the new yorker feature on the submersible explosion was prob the best of them all. idk. i still find a few things per issue i find quite interesting

Oh I agree, it's why I still pay for it. But like so many things, it ain't what it used to be.

Honestly, I think the NY Times Magazine is about as good as the New Yorker these days. Their Q&As in particular are frequently amazing. And the important thing is that they both stomp all over the Atlantic, which is just a leaking Glad bag full of rotting roadkill at this point. But the New Yorker is undeniably Not What It Was, and a lot of that is due to their increased online presence and that (content and mindset) bleeding into the print mag.

NYT mag front of book is pretty great -- marchese interviews, the advice column is great, the food column is some of the better food writing out there. their features stink tho imo

There are weeks when I read it cover to cover (except for the fiction), others when I throw out the issue after a skim. It was ever thus. Some of their reporting in the last decade has been best-ever imo.

Alfred is like me in this regard. Some weeks, everything. Other weeks, just the cartoons.

yeah I still find the magazine indispensable. the feature on the wagner group last week, for example, was the best on the topic I’ve read. and I actually really like the online stuff too, though I don’t read all of it obviously

The Eric Adams profile in this issue is excellent.

Oh, I need to read that profile!

It’s been a long time since the whole issue begged to be read - but some of that’s on me, and my level of interest and the amount of time I have to dedicate to the magazine.

the music issue from recently was a great front to back read, prob the best assembled mainstream music journalism i can remember in the last few years

yes that was great. I loved the stax article!

X-post to Jordan S -

The New Yorker week of music event calendar included music gigs in small clubs not just big shows requiring advanced purchase months in advance , so it was a way for me to discover some acts that might be coming to small clubs near me, or small ones in NY if I was visiting there. Plus as others noted upthread, it like old school Village Voice listings was a way to see what live music was happening in NY both big act and small

But like so many things, it ain't what it used to be.

I had a friend that used to work at the New Yorker (not as a writer, just doing office stuff), and once she invited me to their old offices and showed/gave me a few copies of the magazine from the good old days, and let me tell you, it was often a mess. The layout (iirc more than three columns to a page, sometimes, with tiny type and squeezed between ads), the editing, or lack thereof (dense articles that spanned 10+ pages). Maybe I am misremembering, it's been many years, but she made a point of showing all the ways the magazine had improved over what it once was. Ymmv when it comes to the subject matter, but as far as the writing and stuff goes, I generally have no complaint about the magazine as it is now, except that I get it in the mail a week after everyone else.

Josh

and let me tell you, it was often a mess. The layout

Yes but. As a practicioner myself, I will not defend the mess. However! Counterpoint: the messy layout gave them more opportunities to do those goofy things like "constabulary notes from all over" and "correction of the week."

As desktop publishing has improved, there are considerably fewer situations where the whole article is in there but you just need one more column-inch of copy. Which is, in my view, a loss for the world.

I spent most of my youth and young adulthood making magazines happen. Technological advancements have improved the overall polish - but they also leave less room for idiosyncrasies and serendipitous duc-tape solutions.

where is anyone reading great longform feature writing these days

lrb, nyrb, tls, n+1 etc etc

Those outlets all have good stuff but they're more essays than reporting. It's the reporting where I think the New Yorker just doesn't do quite as much as it used to, the pieces where you know the writer spent months digging into something, on the ground, talking to people, accumulating data and detail. They still do that obviously — the Wagner Group story, e.g. — but I read more things than I used to that feel assembled much more quickly. More like normal magazine features, less with that distinctive New Yorker depth or precision or background.

But also I'm sure it's also improved in lots of ways, not least of them being the diversity of viewpoints it offers.

You're right about both, and I miss that about the NYer too. Here's an example (from the LRB) of the sort of story they hardly ever do, and which the NYer used to just own - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n14/james-meek/who-holds-the-welding-rod

NYer is waaaay ahead of LRB in terms of diversity of viewpoints afaict

NYer is waaaay ahead of LRB in terms of diversity of viewpoints afaict

Each the product of a small island that thinks it's the center of the universe...

“But his overriding instinct is to find ways to be visible. Adams’s diary of official events seems far fuller than those of his predecessors Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg. They might have been glad to skip, say, a Croatian flag-raising, or a mayoral forum on drones. New York is now led by someone who takes deep pleasure in the pleasure people take in seeing him. Adams recently told an audience, of his visits to an outreach center for unhoused people, “If you can see their faces when they walk down the line and they’re given food—and they see their mayor!” (Adams has dismissed less responsive constituents as “naysayers,” “haters,” and “little people.”)”

Unperson made me lol

LRB is at least aware there's a rest of the world, NYRB has trouble seeing a world outside the US Supreme Court.

The world of the LRB personals ads was a sublime thing that was glorious and will likely never be recaptured.

In a past life I was in charge of personals for a decently prominent paper, so I consider myself a connoisseur of the genre.

Nowadays, dating apps have made personals ads obsolete. But for a brief shining moment, they were an art form.

The Eric Adams profile in this issue is excellent.

― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, August 9, 2023 1:45 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

it’s soooooooooooo good haha

I'm partway through it, he's even cringier than I thought (and I thought he was super cringe). The writing is funny because mostly it's just observational but the details don't need any editorializing.

sounds like it's time to let your haters be your waiters at the table of success

Yeah, it's peak understated comic writing

Monster Truck article is great. Especially the dirt logistics, lol.

Matos reflects on his time writing for Goings On About Town:
https://michaelangelo.substack.com/p/bc040-last-thoughts-on-night-life

He also links to this longer piece about how the change to that section has affected the freelancers who wrote for it: https://archive.ph/69ijY

For reasons, the NYer has drawn new attention to Bullet in the Brain, a Tobias Wolff story from 1995.

I feel like this kind of story - short, self-conscious, postmodern, a little experimental - gets a bad rap. In the 90s, literature was in dire need of fun. Barthelme, Coover, Winterson, Ishmael Reed? Not all were giants but they did bring some fun back into the enterprise.

I remember reading that story when it was first published. For some reason I had it filed in memory as the work of T.C. Boyle. Which I guess means I have never read anything by T.C. Boyle.

Boyle is in the same ballpark.

the essay over the weekend from the prison inmate who loves taylor swift is really beautiful https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/listening-to-taylor-swift-in-prison

the Hasan Minaj story is taking a beating

Wow. This is pretty horrible. Hasan Minhaj has just produced the recording of the interview and the documents he provided to the reporter, showing that The New Yorker totally smeared him.

They absolutely should not stand by the story. https://t.co/ZpU2Z69jhr pic.twitter.com/pcHp1OXHu7

— Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) October 26, 2023

The way he talks with his hands drives me crazy.

yeah I’m not sure that really discredits the story

the full video goes into more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABiHlt69M-4

looking at the whole thing, it now feels like the story did exactly what it accused Minhaj of doing - leaving out key details and context, and embellishing others to make a point. this is what happens when you pitch a story with a predetermined conclusion, and you have to bend out of your way to make the facts fit the narrative

there was always something gross about fact-checking one of the most prominent non-white comedians around, as if standup comedians have a duty to be 100% accurate. not saying hasan was entirely right and there were other points raised in the story that he didn't address, but it feels like the scale of it was greatly exaggerated

Fact checking comedians seems weird. I'm not really familiar with his work, and I didn't read that article (or the last, I dunno, 30 issues of the New Yorker? sigh), but did he have a reputation for or had he been accused of making stuff up before the article? Or did the author/New Yorker just decide to take this guy down a few pegs after the fact-checking found some discrepancies? Or did he watch some of the comedy and think, hmmm, some of these stories seem fishy, I'm going to do some research? Like, I just glanced at the piece, and in the first few graphs it seems like the author did some fact-checking before he even met with Minhaj, but why? Usually the rhythm of these things is to interview the subject, then fact check, then do a follow-up, if that's the way the author decided to go.

The very fact that comedians work and rework their material in front of audiences to see what will get laughs makes the idea of taking the material as non-fiction pretty weird.

I feel like different writer would have explored that zone better, but this one was looking for a scoop or another Jussie Smollet

I'm not a fan of his mode of comedy but yeah, it's a weird expectation that any comedian's material is literally, factually true. Emotionally true, sure, but it's not a requirement of the medium.

it's a weird expectation that any comedian's material is literally, factually true

This has been my position since this story was published. Like, OK, do Rodney Dangerfield next! "I checked the AMA directory and there is no listing for a Dr. Vinnie Boombatz. This calls Dangerfield's entire comic persona into question."

Did this start when people looked into Chappelle's story about the trans comedian he knew?

You won't believe what this Soviet Historian has to say about Yakov Smirnoff's routine