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When I was a kid I was obsessed with making funny captions for the images on the back of The New Yorker. There was a competition where you would send in your funny caption and there was a chance it would appear in the next issue. I never won.
My love for this magazine was reignited recently when I read an excellent profile piece on Fiona Apple. It was published just prior to the release of Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020) and written by one of my favorite TV critics, Emily Nussbaum. Piece can be found in the attached link.
More recently I've been going through the lists what the magazine considers the best media of the year. Movies, books, records, most of them are good. It's great to get out of an internet bubble where all people do is listen to shit posted on /mu/, and bolded on rym; to listen the experts as it were.
Dec 15, 2023
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My friend Jay recently mentioned in passing a 2010 story in The New Yorker, "Sleeping With Weapons" by Tad Friend, about the totally batshit feud between the actor and musician John Lurie and his protege John Perry. It's like 8,000+ words of mayhem and mental illness and I can't believe the magazine ran it or that I'd never read it, especially since there was a whole controversy afterward, including a hunger strike. It reminded me that there's just an endless array of weird old stores from 10 years ago, from 50 years ago, from last year, and you can just mainline them in one subway ride for no money. I always go back to stuff like Nancy Jo Sales on the Pussy Posse or the Golden Suicides, or Chris Heath's Fiona Apple cover story for Rolling Stone from 1998, or Tom Wolfe's "The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!" or Ta-Nehisi Coates on MF DOOM. (Use Pocket to get around paywalls.)
Nov 9, 2022
I really like reading the New Yorker and have done so for about a decade. I no longer live in New York but I still read the Tables For Two section excitedly first thing every week and try to get through the majority of the articles. However, there are sooooo many more in the backlogs and the iPhone app is actually quite optimized with previous published pieces so I like to sift through the internet to see what people recommend from the past, and also use their Sunday Archive emails to delve into old writings. It's cool to see people like J.D. Salinger or Truman Capote writing articles for them back in the day. One I recently loved was the original publishing of the Brokeback Mountain short story in the fiction section. As a Wyoming native I found the descriptions of the landscape and energy to be so richly written.
Sep 24, 2024
I have always wanted to be the “kind of adult who reads The New Yorker”. I’ve signed up for and canceled the subscription multiple times over a decade, feeling guilty as the unread magazines stack up on my coffee table.
But here I am, in my mid-30s, actually reading the long-form articles because I’ve replaced scrolling with reading about The Knot scamming bridal businesses and deep sea treasure hunting. It’s no stretch to say I get a lot of my information and quest for curiosity from reading this mag in digital form. And if you don’t want to splurge for a subscription, you can access the magazine digitally through your library and the Libby app. Join me in living out your aspirations!
Apr 9, 2025
Top Recs from @grillbert
Jan 6, 2024
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everything i have heard about this man has been against my will, but he knows how to shoot motorcycles really well so ill give him that.
Dec 13, 2023
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Why pay money when libgen is free? The more questionable action I engage in is pirating regular books, I'm sure Nabokov won't mind if his publisher loses out on 20 bucks because I wanna read Pale Fire.
Dec 15, 2023