The New Yorker

There are times when a magazine is more than just a magazine. Times like springtime! The season when ideas become conversations and bylines jump to life; when the caterpillar sheds its larval newsprint and blossoms, at last, into a butterfly in flight about the zócalo. By next month, it'll be happening in twos, as the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine both put on their nice clothes and venture into the world of the living with a pair of star-studded public conferences. Each will deliver its parent publication's noted intellects in a neat, bow-topped basket of brains, all spit-shined and freshly painted. But which to choose if you've got only one weekend and, say, no more than a month's rent or so to devote to the zeitgeist hunt?

continue reading »

Today's Times offers a profile of Atul Gawande, surgeon and New Yorker contributor, which coincides with the arrival of his second essay collection, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance. Gawande—in spite of the fact that he listens to The Killers—is clearly a genius (he's got the MacArthur grant to prove it). But how did he get his start as a writer?

continue reading »

Attention, war-haters: tomorrow from 11:00 to 3:00, Columbia students will be holding a cell phone telethon for peace on College Walk. "Together, Columbia students will show that the student voice is not only passionate, but ready to fight for real, not symbolic, action to end this war." Real, not symbolic, action! Sort of like a cell phone telethon, only, you know, actually the opposite of that. Okay, but for real (not symbolic) we're happy that Columbia students are making the ultimate class-skipping sacrifice in order to support our troops, and we're sure that every penny of the $6,550 they aim to raise for UNICEF—one cent for every death caused by the war in Iraq as of March 20!—will make a big difference. We just hope that no one shows them this week's Shouts and Murmurs column, which kind of rains all over their class-skipping activist parade.

New Yorker editor David Remnick told the Daily News that the joke in this recent cartoon is that 'Zbigniew' is difficult to pronounce. But residents of Brooklyn's 'little Warsaw' beg to differ. "The people from different nations, they drink, they get drugs; so why did they make the joke about Polish people?" asked Greenpoint music store owner Anna Doda. The New Yorker's form letter response says that "the tacit assumption ... is that the child is not of Polish origin." Oh really? When contacted for comment, the group of red-faced bums who sit in a pile of their own filth on the corner of Greenpoint and Manhattan Avenues all the time getting into drunken fights, singing, and occasionally crying, were like, "Bleaarrrrrghhhhh!" So... yes? Wait—no?

Polish Joke Leads To Anger Vs. Magazine [NYDN]
New Yorker Cartoon by Robert Weber [Cartoon Bank]

For anyone who ever rolled their eyes at one of Adam Gopnik's overly precious New Yorker pieces, or had the misfortune of sitting through Paris to the Moon, his collection of yarns about living with his perfectly winsome children and appropriately acerbic wife in Paris, Vanity Fair contributing editor James Wolcott's brilliant diatribe in this week's New Republic should give you a heaping helping of vindication. It's really worth reading the whole 4,500-word piece, but in the meantime, some highlights, starting with Wolcott's opening graf:

I sometimes wonder if Adam Gopnik was put on this earth to annoy. If so, mission accomplished.

continue reading »

Ben Mathis-Lilley, last week in New York Magazine:

Just before midnight on January 21, 1998, then-federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was forced into a Lexus on 10th Street and Fifth Avenue by three teenagers. They held him overnight in Brownsville, and when they discovered January 22 is his birthday, they offered him pot and prostitutes. The next day, they released him. Alpert wrote a book about it, called The Birthday Party, which comes out this week.

continue reading »

Unless you subscribe, you'll have to visit your local newsstand to read this week's New Yorker profile of P.R. megastar Howard Rubenstein. Is it worth going out into this arctic wonderland and dropping $4.50, or is the piece, as Nikki Finke puts it, just "the usual CEO porn that [Ken] Auletta spins out on a semi-regular basis"? We donned our overcoats and headed into the freezing tundra of SoHo to find out. Here's what we learned when we thawed:

continue reading »

Today we learn, via WWD, that New Yorker editor David Remnick has a softer side. It's very soft. One might say it's made of a combination of tulle, peau de soie, and the gently-worn edges of a massive pile of ad dollars: just in time for Paris fashion week, Remnick has "suddenly . . . found a love of fashion." In a move that an "insider" calls "a little odd," he's throwing a massive Nast-funded shindig on Monday to laud the arrival of new fashion editor Susan Morrison. The quotes Remnick gave WWD did seem uncharacteristically bouncy:

It's a meet-and-greet, and I think a lot of those people don't know me at all or the magazine as much as I'd like. It's something I've never done before. I thought it would be a fun and interesting trip to make." He's also going to check out a "bunch of shows" during his Sunday-through-Wednesday jaunt.

It's not an opportunity for ceo X to talk about the ceo's company and give an annual report of their company. Bo-ring!

Fashion Battle [WWD]

We've long suspected -- okay, known -- that people who work in the troll-infested field of book publishing don't need beer goggles to find hotness in the least likely of places. It's a phenomenon we like to call "skinniest girl at fat camp syndrome." Case in point: a tip we received today about dumpster-diving British author Tristram Stuart (pictured), whose book about "radical vegetarianism" got a searching analysis in this week's New Yorker. Our tipster writes, "We're taking a poll in house; so far he's been ranked either 'hotter than my other authors' and 'my hottest author' by the editorial and publicity staffs. What's your vote?"

Our vote is "emo combover hot." But please, let us know if you disagree.

Vegetable Love [New Yorker]

If you're not in the habit of getting the New Yorker in its proper print format, you're obviously some kind of philistine for whom we have nothing but disdain. Also, you're missing out some incredible stuff that they don't put online. This week, it's Rebecca Mead's stunning portrait of Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics heir/erstwhile mayoral candidate who purchases Klimts the way some of us buy bourbon. Mead performs the classic journalistic job of allowing her subject to hang himself with his own words: Lauder comes off as a completely ridiculous figure even by the standards of rich New Yorkers who owe their fortune to the generation that preceded them. We imagine it took an act of superhuman strength for Mead to keep her jaw attached to the rest of her head during most of the interview, but particularly during this part, where Lauder muses about living in Vienna before the war:

continue reading »

TODO is one daily thing recommended for you, by us.

We were raised on the New Yorker - apart from its weekly delivery, our house was full of books like Brendan Gill's Here at the New Yorker, collections of Peter Arno cartoons, etc. - and we're of the opinion that it's still the best general interest magazine going, so when we heard about The Complete New Yorker Portable Hard Drive, we pretty much came in our Calvins. It's the magazine's entire contents (well, through April of this year) stored on a device that's about the size of a pack of Phillies blunts. We were provided with a review unit, and we took it out for a spin.

continue reading »

George W.S. Trow, the media critic and essayist, has died at the age of 63. Trow is best known for Within the Context of No Context, an article he wrote for the New Yorker (they've made part of it available here) and later expanded into a book. (Also worth a read: My Pilgrim's Progress.) Trow's thirty year association with the New Yorker ended in 1994, when then-editor Tina Brown brought on Roseanne Barr to guest edit an issue. The Times obit quotes the lacerating back-and-forth between Trow and Brown:

In his note of resignation, Mr. Trow likened Ms. Brown to someone selling her soul "to get close to the Hapsburgs -- 1913."
Ms. Brown shot back, in a note of her own: "I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught."

George Trow, 63, a Critic of American Culture, Dies [NYT]
Within the Context of No-Context (excerpt)
I Cover Carter [NYer]

Great news for New Yorker readers: Today's Observer reports that Caitlin Flanagan, the rich lady who's made a career of telling you what a bad wife and mother you are for needing to work, is no longer a contributor to that magazine. While Flanagan claims, through Atlantic dinner party buddy Benjamin Schwarz, that she's making far too much money from her book-writing career (her last tome, Get Back In The Kitchen, You Fucking Whore sold a stunning 8,700 copies), the Observer suggests it might have something to do with the fact that a piece on Mary Poppins creator P.L. Travers which Flanagan wrote for The New Yorker early this year that pretty much ripped off vast swathes of a Travers biography. Up next for Flanagan: a book "about teenage girls and the ways that they have been both served and also shortchanged by the women's movement." Cum-Guzzling MySpace Sluts should be available sometime in 2008.

The New Yorker's Caitlin Flanagan, Home Again [NYO]

Earlier: Caitlin Flanagan: Finally Someone Makes Margaret Atwood's Fiction Seem Plausible

Not content with joining every other trash mag in the world in the multiple-covers gimmick, the New Yorker is also mailing out DVD copies of Al Gore's hippiefest documentary:

For some subscribers to the New Yorker, this week's edition brought an added bonus to the customary fill of cartoons, fiction, and news features: Stuck in the middle was a free DVD of Vice President Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." The diskette, encased in cardboard and plastic wrapping, is taped to an advertisement promoting the film's DVD release tomorrow, with the tag line, "Own, Watch and Share It." A message on the inside of its cardboard cover urges recipients to watch, "share," and "donate" the film.The magazine could not confirm last night how many of its 1.06 million subscribers received the DVD, but a source said it may have been sent to a select subscriber group of about 1,500 "influential members of business, government, and the media."

'An Inconvenient Truth' For New Yorker Readers [NYS]
Thanksgiving [NYer]

This week's New Yorker features a letter from Mandee Wilton of Ringoes, NJ. Ms. Wilton writes to complain about "Landfill," a recent work of fiction by Joyce Carol Oates, details of which are "partly drawn from the case of John A. Fiocco Jr., 19, who went missing in March from The College of New Jersey. His body was later found in a Pennsylvania landfill." Ms. Wilton is not alone in her displeasure; the College has also complained about the story, suggesting that it caused pain to the community. New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman responded that, "While there is a long history of fiction drawing on factual events, we regret it if the overlap here caused any distress," Treisman said.

There are some big issues at play here: When and how is it appropriate for art to draw on real-life tragedy? Should fiction make a special effort to separate itself from actual events? Why the fuck does Joyce Carol Oates write so much, and can't anyone make her stop? Regardless, we're a little disappointed with the New Yorker's response: You'd think a magazine that published one of the greatest stories ever drawn from life might be a little more robust in its defense of the practice.

Landfill [NYer]
College criticizes Joyce Carol Oates over story influenced by student's death [IHT]
Where Is The Voice Coming From? [MIT]

• Katie Couric to narrate PBS docu on Walter Cronkite. No one ever said she's not clever. [B&C;]
• Why does Bush likes to pick on the Times? Because of the Jews, of course. [SFChron]
• The New Yorker rock critic Sasha Frere-Jones wants to be a rocker, too. [LAWeekly]
• September VF will focus on fashion, be as fat as Vogue. [WWD]

• New Yorker writers are dismissive about blogging; prefer to use their finely-honed talents discussing Bazooka Joe, bridge suicides. [NYO]
• Frank Barnako would pay to see Tom Friedman blog. Apparently it's not enough for Tom to be wrong on Wednesdays and Fridays. [Marketwatch]
• Reporter for paper no one reads leaves to take job in sport no one watches. [BG]
• MSNBC won't be renamed, even though alternate identification "The Change the Fucking Channel Already Network " has 100 per cent viewer awareness. [LAT]
• Pot remarks upon patina of kettle. [ChiTrib]