New Yorker magazine alert thread

because the Taskrabbit human is probably somewhere in Delhi doing shit like this for pennies

calling bullshit on this anecdote

what's the article related to that quote?

"There are more details in a longer report by ARC that show that GPT-4 had a lot less agency and ingenuity than the system card and media reporting imply."
https://aiguide.substack.com/p/did-gpt-4-hire-and-then-lie-to-a

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKLUojpW8AA21BL.jpg:small

lol

hahaha

Re: Delhi task rabbiter

Amazon billed its "Just Walk Out" stores as some triumph of AI. In reality, it was powered by thousands of low-paid Indian workers manually adding up items in your cart as you shopped.

How insanely dystopian. https://t.co/QAHOKFMshu

— Max Burns (@themaxburns) April 2, 2024

that's incredible and belongs in the silicon valley utopia thread maybe

Damn! They FINALLY let Brody pen “The Current Cinema”.

Eat my farts, Anthony!

Brody sucks, except as I suppose some sort of anti-consumer guide. "Sasquatch movie is a masterpiece!" raves Brody, saving me the $7.

RONG!

love brody even when totally wrong, way better than lane!

Brody knows more about film than Lane does, even when his opinions are wacky. He's more of a cinema guy, Lane is more of an arch writer guy. I prefer him, I got tired of Lane. I'm also mostly enjoying Justin Chang since he started, although he could reduce the one-liner quotient.

Agree with all of that, tipsy.

I don't miss Lane but Chiang's writing is corny.

I had no real problem with Lane (who must be old?), but change (and Chang) is good. Still, Brody (who absolutely knows tons about film) hasn't yet proven to me that he knows how to write about film for a general audience. Maybe that's why he's always been (literally) marginalized.

Lane is not as old as you think (he's 62). I think he said he wants to shift from reviews to features, like John Lahr and Emily Nussbaum did.

Yeah, see, starting out the review with references to "Barbie" *and* Bruno Dumont before getting into (checks notes) a divisive movie about Sasquatches ... I'm sorry, it's like self-parody. Like, I always read Jonathan Rosenbaum even if I rarely agreed with him, but I vividly recall him writing about a Dryer retrospective and referencing a bio, but being unable to help himself from dropping that the book was better in the original Danish. Like, get the fuck out of here with that.

Maybe you’re looking for a different magazine

Entertainment Weekly packed it in tho

I've always thought Brody's reviews were maybe interesting but kind of beside the point

But his repeated insistence that Barbie was a masterpiece put me off him completely and forever

I love Justin Chang, maybe there are some cliches in his writing, but he has great taste and is a good voice. It is a shame that the LA Times lost him to the New Yorker

honestly as a subscriber of 15+ years I’m still unclear on who the median subscriber to the magazine really is. if it’s roughly the ilx demographic then I don’t really see the issue with brody being the face of film criticism is. if they’re really so concerned about selling issues at newsstands then I suppose he’s not the most accessible choice

Next thing we'll do is miss Denby.

I assume their demo is pretty MOR, all said and done, with subjects sometimes falling in either margin (I'd say ILX typically feels more like the inverse; we're the margins looking in). Though when they're writing about "the arts" they can kind of go all over the place, because there is no specific beat, as such - that is, I doubt anyone reads the NYorker specifically for its arts coverage. I could equally imagine pieces on, say, either Taylor Swift or Merzbow, and there probably have been. But if someone brought up Merzbow in a piece on Taylor Swift, I'd also call bullshit. Stuff like that, just like name-checking "Barbie" and Bruno Dumont in the same graf, feels performative to me, stunty, even if I believe a weirdo like Brody isn't necessarily doing it on purpose. It's not that his tastes are or are not mainstream, it's that I get the sense he is so willfully blind to the very notion of the mainstream that he tends to get lost in the weeds when writing for a general audience. He sometimes comes off contrarian, but I suppose from my vantage it more often just ends up seeming confused: it's hard for me to parse his pans and praise because his baseline of what is good or not is pretty blurry to me.

Honestly, I was harsh, because I don't dislike him as a writer, I just don't think he's a good fit for the pole position.

Now Denby, that guy was a dork. Wasn't he brought down by ... porn addiction?

I often read Brody because his POV and mine rarely intersect but he's good at articulating that POV.

reviews by known movie critics are one of the things that make basic media literacy an easier concept to explain, imo. you know the source, you get a handle on their biases, and you have your lens to decipher whether something they liked or panned will appeal to you based on your differing stances

I guess some of them are unreadable or corny, though

I used to read the New Yorker to learn something new which was my main draw to Brody for all the wild references. Now I’m older and need stuff to get to the point quicker so I read the internet. I’m definitely stupider but that’s ok

Good story: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/15/the-ex-nypd-official-trying-to-tame-new-yorks-trash