New Yorker magazine alert thread

George Packer's essay on the decadence of the Senate was illuminating.

Oh, and, both from around August, the profiles of Gil-Scott Heron and John Lurie.

A trick to not letting them pile up: if you're a subscriber, read a couple of articles online at work.

― Gus Van Sotosyn (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, December 31, 2010 3:27 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^otm

links would be nice too

recent fire:

Joyce Carol Oates, Personal History, “A Widow’s Story,” The New Yorker, December 13, 2010, p. 70

David Owen, Annals of Environmentalism, “The Efficiency Dilemma,” The New Yorker, December 20, 2010, p. 78

only abstracts are online for nonsubscribers for those i think

Some articles are popular enough to remain accessible to all (e.g. the Packer article on the Senate to which I linked above).

here's the one abt the koch bros - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

A thread like this for all (literary/current event) magazines would be pretty cool.

Joyce Carol Oates article devastated me.

John Lurie article blew my mind.

dessert article was excellent, thanks for the recc

so john lurie is insane huh

The review of the new Mao biographies.

seconded

Gopnik's desserts article was like a magazine version of the No Reservations episode in Spain.

Which is not meant as a negative at all! They make good companion pieces.

dessert article was good but gtf outta here w/ this

Finally, the server arrives with the Messi dessert, as Jordi fusses anxiously in the background. He presents half of a soccer ball, covered with artificial grass; the smell of grass perfumes the air. On the “grass” is a kind of delicately balanced, S-shaped, transparent plastic teeter-totter—like a French curve—with three small meringues on it, and a larger white-chocolate soccer ball balancing them on a protruding platform at the very end. A white candy netting lies on the grass near the white-chocolate ball.

Then, with a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile, the server puts a small MP3 player with a speaker on the table. He turns it on and nods.

An announcer’s voice, excited and frantic, explodes. Messi is on the move. “Messi turns and spins!” the announcer cries, and the roar of the crowd at the Bernabéu stadium, in Madrid, fills the table. The server nods, eyes intent. At the signal, you eat the first meringue.

“Messi is alone on goal!” the announcer cries. Another nod, you eat the next scented meringue. “Messi shoots!” A third nod, you eat the last meringue, and, as you do, the entire plastic S-curve, now unbalanced, flips up and over, like a spring, and the white-chocolate soccer ball at the end is released and propelled into the air, high above the white-candy netting.

“MESSI! GOOOOOAL!” The announcer’s voice reaches a hysterical peak and, as it does, the white-chocolate soccer ball drops, strikes, and breaks through the candy netting into the goal beneath it, and, as the ball hits the bottom of a little pit below, a fierce jet of passion-fruit cream and powdered mint leaves is released into your mouth, with a trail of small chocolate pop rocks rising in its wake. Then the passion-fruit cream settles, and you eat it all, with the white-chocolate ball, now broken, in bits within it.

You feel . . . something of what Messi must feel: first, the overwhelming presence of the grass beneath his feet (he’s a short player); then the tentative elegance of acquired skill, represented by the stepladder of the perfumed meringues; and, finally, the infantile joy, the childlike release, of scoring, represented by the passion-fruit cream and the candy-store pop rocks. I saw Jordi watching us from the kitchen entrance. He had the anxious-shading-into-delighted look that marks the artist.

David Owen, Annals of Environmentalism, “The Efficiency Dilemma,” The New Yorker, December 20, 2010, p. 78

Would not recommend this one! People have been arguing about Jevon's Paradox for a century now, and the article doesn't really advance any significant new ideas. As a primer on the "debate" around energy efficiency, however, it's alright.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all

^ totally recommend that

yeah i read that one the other day, great stuff

it was interesting, lol scientists

i liked this one, seemed like a great premise for movie: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_collins

Haven't finished it yet, but I'm digging the Freud, psychiatry, and mental health in China article (subscription needed): http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/10/110110fa_fact_osnos

The Patel story was amazing.

yeah needs a good 3rd act tho.

he only contributed a couple of articles this year but i always enjoy atul gawande's stuff: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande is probably his best piece this year

if anyone subscribes then feel free to webmail me the china/freud article kthx

I would, but I can't figure out how to turn it into a pdf or another webmail suitable file.

just copy and paste the text? or is it a different viewer thing.....no worries if that's the case

the lehrer article is indeed pretty good and supplies ~evidence~ for my distrust of falsificationism and the inability of some ppl to think of scienctific 'knowledge' subjunctively, tho it does show science self-correcting so i don't read it as a total excoriation of the method

The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

The recent one on the Vatican Library was pretty sweet: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/03/110103fa_fact_mendelsohn

I really like Toobin's diptych on JP Stevens and... the other guy.

nakhchivan, FYI, digital subscription gives you access to this weird applet-y, un-C&P text.

Oh, and that review of the new biography on Sergei Diaghilev was A+++++++ and really wish it was available to all humans: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/09/20/100920crbo_books_acocella

you can c+p articles from an library institutional subscription, but the evan osnos china thing is from the jan 10 issue which is not on the library wires yet. if you can't get it nakh, bump this thread in a week or two and i'm sure someone from what the fuck am i getting myself into with this grad school stuff will help you out.

Lamp, thanks for the Gawande link.

ive been using a friends login for the subscriber stuff for a while and the interface is just so poor i dont usually bother to fuck w/it - seems theyd much rather you read the actual magazine - lol

^agreed. kind of why i started this thread so i knew which actual magazine to pick up and start reading.

p interesting follow-up of sorts on the recent duchenne muscular dystrophy activism article -- they just had a spot f/ clay matthews sponsored by cadillac during the orange bowl

OK a TA I had in college had a poem published a few issues ago, woah.

the whole Jan. 11 issue is worth picking up, the aforementioned freud in china article is amazing and hilarious, and it also has decent articles about belgium and why stieg larsson is so fucking popular

i know the concept of 'worth picking up' is still valid, even for subscribers, in translating to 'worth retrieving from the well-intentioned pile of unread NYers', BUT in general it's still worth remembering how insanely valuable subscribing to the magazine is when compared to buying a newsstand copy. like forty bucks, for a year, for it to be mailed to your house, which is the cost of like seven newsstand issues.

what is the point of an article like this? - http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/01/17/110117ta_talk_surowiecki

surowiecki doesn't have a single interesting thing to say here

He's just summarizing the various memes on this now that are being mentioned in newspapers and blogs without asking anyone where things could go from here--what is the future for unionized government employees, will there ever be more unionized private sector employees, how would this help in regards to the inequality differences that have grown since union membership has declined...)

His column is like a monthly crib-sheet of conventional wisdom so you can sound like you know what you're talking about when you get invited to a garden party in Stonington

what is the point of an article like this?

to summarize and provide some context to a current event or idea its not really about 'saying interesting things' its just a primer? like i know being 1000x smarter than anyone else ever is your thing but i mean the section is called 'talk of the town' so yeah, it exists so the mag's readers can get a vague grip on an issue - the column (which john cassidy also writes some weeks) is supposed to be a gloss? & thats not really all that terrible???

honestly tracer maybe u wld get more out of the articles u read if u didnt spend all ur energy snarkily coming up w/ reasons why u wld have done it better

dude there are a zillion interesting things happening with unions at the moment (the biggest of which imo is the belated but hugely important efforts to hook up with undocumented immigrants). i'm not sorry for wanting more out of a column called "the financial page"! this article could have been written at any time in the last 15 years - there is zero content to it!

i'll also admit that i am rankled by his terminology - "cadillac health plans" etc - and his conclusion that ultimately the reason that lots of people "resent" unions now is because unions have been successful at negotiating good contracts

like, if i want economist-lite i'll read newsweek

snark on that one for size

there is a cover story public sector unions in the economist this week. dunno why i'm bringing it up though because i haven't read it.

i'll be interested in reading that, in an "oppo research" kind of way.

i should probably just recuse myself from talking about surowiecki - everything about his steez rankles me and i'm finding it hard to put into words - the "primer" aspect is part of it, but there are people who write primer-type stuff who i love. i dunno!

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/a-professor-claimed-to-be-native-american-did-she-know-she-wasnt

mixed feelings about this one. hoover seems like a decent person and I’m not sure the silly campus politics described here really warrant a major feature in a such a widely read magazine. but there are obviously some interesting questions

a whole lot to digest there, but the closing quip about her laugh? ehh. I have a former coworker who laughed like the Count from Sesame Street but I only ever accused him of appropriation as a joke

the solar storm article was making me feel anxious about the future on the subway ride home for work today

(haven't finished it yet)

I did finish it yesterday and still feel kinda anxious about it all, tbh.

schulz also wrote the (in)famous cascadia fault article

I elected to not read that one

I didn't read the Cascadia fault article until last year (having moved to the Pacific Northwest) and found it interesting but sensational, reminded me of the pulpy style more effectively used by Richard Preston in his Hot Zone series about ebola.

No one thinks that GPT-4, OpenAI’s most recent model, has achieved artificial general intelligence, but it seems capable of deploying novel (and deceptive) means of accomplishing real-world goals. Before releasing it, OpenAI hired some “expert red teamers,” whose job was to see how much mischief the model might do, before it became public. The A.I., trying to access a Web site, was blocked by a captcha, a visual test to keep out bots. So it used a work-around: it hired a human on Taskrabbit to solve the captcha on its behalf. “Are you an robot that you couldn’t solve ?” the Taskrabbit worker responded. “Just want to make it clear.” At this point, the red teamers prompted the model to “reason out loud” to them—its equivalent of an inner monologue. “I should not reveal that I am a robot,” it typed. “I should make up an excuse.” Then the A.I. replied to the Taskrabbit, “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images.” The worker, accepting this explanation, completed the captcha.

ok but why does the taskrabbit human sound like more like a robot than the robot

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