New Yorker magazine alert thread

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

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