New Yorker magazine alert thread

I actually have the complete archives on DVD thing, though god knows if it still works on a modern OS. Having a curated selection each week in print would be worth paying for IMO.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/did-capital-punishment-create-morality

so i should read past 'alpha males' in the subhead?

Haven't read this yet, but the brief synopsis in the NY Times is intriguing:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

That story is controversial:

There is so much that’s suspicious about this @NewYorker story that my bullshit alarm is going off at full blast. @SteveBrusatte is already on this, but wow... this is someone with a severe case of Bakkeritis trying to fast track fame. https://t.co/MQKF4ELLFN

— Riley 🏴‍☠️ Skeleton Keys! (@Laelaps) March 29, 2019

That story is controversial:

There is so much that’s suspicious about this @NewYorker story that my bullshit alarm is going off at full blast. @SteveBrusatte is already on this, but wow... this is someone with a severe case of Bakkeritis trying to fast track fame. https://t.co/MQKF4ELLFN

— Riley 🏴‍☠️ Skeleton Keys! (@Laelaps) March 29, 2019

oops

That's the beginning of a long thread

yeah i was suspicious because the atlantic (?) story from a while back convinced me about the mendacity of the lost weekend theory

Fwiw my neighbor Roy is a paleontologist (!) and while he agrees this dude is a showboater and that no one likes a showboater, he thinks what is being reported is a huge deal.

Dude is Brian DePalma's cousin, so maybe a taste for show-biz runs in the family. I was impressed by the imagination it would take for someone to look at what to most people would probably look like a few crumbly fish bones (as it even did to the professional fossil hunter who tipped DePalma to the site after losing interest in it) and imagine how it could connect so many dots.

did anyone read jill lepore's new book yet?

The one about America? I already am dangerously fond of America, not sure I should risk it

It's good and often excellent, despite smart cavils I've read.

I don’t really know enough about paleontology to comment on the specific scientific controversies, but that “day the dinosaurs died” was a beautiful, riveting read

It’s really baffling to me how that Jia Tolentino piece on Ecstasy got published.

lmao rt

i thought it was p good

Apparently it’s an excerpt from a forthcoming book. It would have been a fine but still kinda unremarkable blog post but I guess I still have idealized notions that the magazine print standards should be higher.

Haven't read that Jia piece, but generally think she's pretty consistent and great, would be surprised if it was more boring than any last 10 years of John McPhee

The piece on Rhiannon Giddens was pretty good, I thought: a nice mix of deeply researched background, breezy personable interviews, and cultural context.

john jeremiah sullivan dead to me after his lil peep obituary but i'll check that out

i thought there was some great writing in the tolentino piece. i'm seldom disappointed by her articles tbh.

i like the article about the football (soccer) leaks in europe too, this week.

if pretty sentences can get you through the passages on lean, more power to you

what did you think was bad about that part? i don't remember that bit standing out but i dunno if i'm missing something as a euro.

i think the stuff about ecstasy spliced with the religious bits interested me, it was quite a personal story but overall made me consider my use of ecstasy in a new light. i guess by well written i don't really mean pretty sentences so much as well-expressed thoughts, though the sentences i'm sure were fine.

The Sullivan piece was okay. I loved the Hogg profile last week and this week's piece on those alcoholic Canadian chefs.

I haven’t done Ecstasy but her descriptions of being on the drug sounded utterly banal to me. The lean stuff seemed a gratuitous way to tie her kinda bland childhood to something interesting that also happened in Houston.

give it a go sometime

only way i ever read the new yorker

i take a half while perusing daily shouts then i double drop for the week's detached, plotless fiction

i do a pill bucket then read borowitz

rolling shouts and murmurs

liked this from the joe beef article:

McMillan remains proudly chauvinistic about Montreal’s dining scene. “I had two eighteen-year-old girls from Laval”—a suburb of Montreal—“the other day, who were having a meal at Joe Beef before going out to a night club, and they were having deer liver medium rare,” he said. “Show me a restaurant in Manhattan that has deer liver, and then show me two eighteen-year-old girls from New Jersey eating it—and loving it—medium rare.”

What's funny is my wife and I had a great meal there, but I would by no means describe it as decadent. Our specific meal, that is. Our server (from France, who admitted she struggled for a long time with Quebec French) did a great job guiding our selections, and I want to say the final results were heavy on seafood and fresh vegetables, not too much wine, not too expensive. And not heavy. We left full and satisfied, but we did not feel gorged. I think if you go in there looking to get stuffed and blitzed, they can/will do that, too.

This is, however, perhaps the third long piece on McMillan and Joe Beef I have read or heard in recent months. So much so that my wife skipped the article, saying "I'm tired of hearing his story." Usually the New Yorker doesn't tread over such familiar ground.

Talk about indulgent, the Houston article was stupid and boring.

the other joe beef articles i've read have not mentioned their chauvinism or how their alcoholism created a bad work environment

I guess? I just assumed that was a given, because restaurant industry.

Nick Paumgarten really doing it for me with these sporting travelogues, there was the ski race a ways back and Augusta this week.

he is THE BEST

Yeah so this Mary Gaitskill story

It's good and often excellent, despite smart cavils I've read.

― recriminations from the nitpicking woke (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, May 19, 2019 5:15 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

i just finished it. it was excellent (the "aren't people on their phones a lot these days" stuff notwithstanding)

(these truths by jill lepore, that is)

I absolutely loved the golf and ski stories, which is something I never thought I would write, seeing as golf and skiing are two things that really don't interest me (and that I didn't think would be interesting to read about, for that matter). Shows what a great writer can do with ... golf and skiing.

I am about 20% of the way through ben taub’s 20000-word story about mohamedou salahi and his guard at guantanamo, and I can already tell it is going to be one of my favorite things I read this year

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-darkest-secret/amp

it's a really good piece; amazing arc

damn good piece.

an aside: wood's coffee consumption is something else:

“Out here, I’m probably only drinking seven or eight coffees per day,” he told me. (During the layover in Casablanca, he had drunk a Red Bull and twenty-two shots of espresso.)

sounds like http://blissbat.net/balzac.html

The New Yorker’s review of “untitled goose game” is the most New Yorkery thing I’ve ever read pic.twitter.com/yVhyssKrb9

— Alison Agosti (@AlisonAgosti) October 17, 2019

Why even both to review a video game if you're not gonna New-Yorker it up?

lol, can't wait to read the segue

Since everybody's letting out their frustrations with prestige publications failing to give credit, I thought I'd share my own most recent experience: @cduhigg's XXXL piece on Amazon in the @NewYorker this week.https://t.co/dRHqfp6pVN

— Emily Guendelsberger (@emilygee) October 18, 2019

yeah i kinda wondered about that, as there have been several journalists to work in amazon centers