New Yorker magazine alert thread

and enlightened in working with Anthony Lane for many years; he modestly wraps his vast erudition and intellectual ardor in singularly graceful prose; to know him is to be amazed by him, and I'm delighted that we'll still be working together, even if differently.

— Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow) January 30, 2024

I've always found it kind of unfair that Brody never gets published in the magazine apart from capsule reviews in Goings On About Town (which now means essentially never).

Anthony Lane is extremely bad and hated by me, what a pseud

on the other end of the spectrum I read Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light last year and my god what an incredible body of work Peter Schjeldahl had. Incredible writing.

^^^^
I’m slowly devouring this book

Richard Brody gets on my nerves most of the time, but it seems like he should get to handle the back of the book movie reviews at least some of the time

at least he's a crazy person not just a horny old bore

silly otm

About Peter Schjeldahl

Seems like Lane is going the John Lahr/Emily Nussbaum route, where they're still on staff but publish like one feature a year.

Brody's a lunatic but remains one of my favorite critics to read, he's never boring at least. I didnt realize he was hardly ever in the print mag, that is indeed weird

he’s amazing, he brings a genuine open-mindedness and sensitivity to his viewings, and an authentic iconoclasm without ever slipping into buffoonery; when I agree with him it’s like he can speak the deepest truths, and when I disagree with him I want to throw my phone across the room

Some friends of mine, I noticed almost every time they got burned watching some movie they didn't like, it's almost always based on a Brody rave, lol. The Rosenbaum is strong in that guy.

I remember being so mad at his TÁR review lol like you fuckin dipshit did you even watch the movie, dad?

chang’s good tho I’m glad he’ll be in the mag now because I haven’t wanted to pay for the LA times

Favorite movie: Knight of Cups
Favorite performance: Amsterdam https://t.co/rJi62t0SHv

— Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow) January 30, 2024

favorite christian bale movie: knight of cups. sure. I’m a late-malick stan and I mean come on

this Brody review is quite something:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/amsterdam-is-an-exemplary-work-of-resistance-cinema

k3vin otm

my eyes rolled out of the back of my head at the tweet "Velvet Goldmine évidemment" but it's actually just a french guy lol

I remember being so mad at his TÁR review lol like you fuckin dipshit did you even watch the movie, dad?

lol yeah that one was a true embarrassment. his furious takedown of Anatomy of a Fall hit many of the same notes, just putting a heroic amount of effort into completely missing some v basic points

The D.T. Max piece on the woman who lived in a cave for 500 days is exactly what I want out of the New Yorker.

― Jordan s/t (Jordan), Saturday, January 27, 2024 5:38 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

The one about the London kid who pretended to be the son of a Russian oligarch and got mixed up with actual shady children of criminals and (and their dangerous underworld associates) is also exactly what I want out of the New Yorker.

yes that one was great. i referenced it offhandedly in therapy today (because i too am impersonating a russian oligarch) and my therapist had read the same article and knew what i was referencing

the two patrick radden reefe books i've read (empire of pain and say nothing) were both excellent

there was also a patrick radden keefe piece a few issues back about screenwriting that was excellent, which he was apparently reporting/writing at the same time as this article about the british kid. he's a really good journalist

Oh yeah that one was great, I sent it to a few of my writer friends.

Yeah, just finished that Keefe article last night, that was terrific.

the london underworld story was great, yeah

Never been able to get past the fact that Anthony Lane is married to fascist nutcase Allison Pearson.

Anthony Lane is extremely bad and hated by me, what a pseud

― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Tuesday, January 30, 2024 1:09 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^

The Reefe story I remember most is that profile of José Andrés.

Trying to catch up w/ my subscription so I'm randomly reading articles in issues I've found folded open around the house (under the bed, next to my desk, kitchen counter pile, etc). Came across this story that I didn't see mentioned upthread:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/23/foster-family-biological-parents-adoption-intervenors

Infuriating story about people can use the foster system as a shadow adoption agency and the monstrously expensive lawyers and other enablers that encourage it.

I hated those intervenor lawyers so fucking much

yeah that article was pretty eye opening

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