If you have not read Louis Menand’s massive, 857-page study of the arts in America from 1945 to 1965, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, you are missing, not an intellectual treat but an intellectual feast of the highest order. A more accurate title might be New York in the Fifties,…
Tag: New Yorker
The New Yorker doesn’t know what “ephemeral” means, together with other considerations
Over at the New Yorker, there’s a long and generally excellent piece by Hua Hsu on that on-going feast n’ farce o’ schadenfreude, the Harvard Asian-American discrimination lawsuit. But there are two sentences near the end of the article that boggle the mind severely, to wit: One of the most ephemeral qualities that admissions officers…
The New Yorker fucks up
Thomas Meany has an article on German wunderdude Peter Sloterdijk, who knocks out thousand-page treatises on anything from the nature of being to the nature of shit. “This profligacy makes Sloterdijk hard to pin down,” sighs Meany. Is Sloterdijk wasteful and extravagant or just prolific, Tom? I know that “prolificness” is not an exciting word…
The Atlantic, making the New Yorker look good, almost
The Atlantic magazine is in hot water for publishing “Sponsor Content” (aka “native advertising”) in the form of a fake article touting the “religion” of Scientology as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Perhaps even more embarrassing for the 150-year-old mag, the Scientology folks evidently conspired to fill the comments section with gee-whiz remarks along…
The New Yorker makes another unforced error! (probably)
A few weeks back I found a small but blatant error in the New Yorker, when author Daniel Mendelsohn managed to confuse “turbine” with “cylinder” when describing the engines of the ill-fated Titanic. In this week’s NY, Joan Acocella has a rather rambling article on dictionaries. In the midst of a discussion on slang, she…
Sign o’ the Times? New Yorker fact-checkers don’t know the difference between a turbine and a cylinder
The current issue of the New Yorker has an excellent story on the Titanic by Daniel Mendelsohn, but even though Dan has been fascinated by the Titanic from an early age, he comes a cropper while describing a famous scene from James Cameron’s inescapable film: The scene in which the liner puts out to sea,…
Emily Nussbaum, discovering the seamy side of torture
When Dexter, the tale of a sensitive serial killer, first premiered, five seasons ago, the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum counted herself a fan: Each week, Dexter, played with icy charisma by Michael C. Hall, stalked his victims. He strapped them to a table, sliced their cheeks to collect a drop of blood, then cut them up with a…
Over at the New Yorker, past is prologue
In its obituary for J. G. Ballard, the New Yorker uncorks the following line: “Ballard had already made a name for himself as a writer of science fiction that was short on technology—no robots, no spaceships—and so eerily prescient in its portrayal of global warming (floods, famines) that it can hardly be called fiction.” Yes,…
At Last! My take on that New Yorker cover
Well, it is the law, you know. I dodged them as long as I could, but when the Thought Police caught up with me and gave me the choice of sixty days in the hole or posting a comment, I buckled, so here it is: The New Yorker’s Obama cover was smart-alecky, pretentious, and condescending,…
Humor at the New Yorker. No, I’m NOT kidding!
In the past, it’s true, I have on occasion made fun of the New Yorker, driven beyond endurance by its obsessive orotundity, but this squib by David Owen is pretty funny.