The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on February 02, 2021, 03:06:57 pm ---You have more patience than I did. What did you find sad about it? The fact that she wrote about people who were down and out and/or had addictions and/or other problems?
--- End quote ---
Yes.
It was interesting, but I found it sad. All those sad people.
Jeff Wrangler:
If you skipped Elizabeth Kolbert's "Life Hacks" (Jan. 18), I recommend going back and reading it. I'm finding a lot more fun than the title and subtitle suggest. She got to bioengineer a strain of E. coli in her kitchen! ("The E. coli went into the fridge, next to the butter.") (I question the advisability of bioengineering a new strain of E. coli, but it's kind of fun to think you could do it in your kitchen.)
Front-Ranger:
Last night I read the weekly Jill LePore article in TNY's latest issue. It was all about cyberhacking, and it was terrifying!
Jeff Wrangler:
I'm reading Luke Mogelson's article now.
serious crayons:
I read Nathan Heller's Shouts & Murmurs last night. At first it was LOL-level hilarious. Which was interesting because I think of Nathan Heller as a light-toned but fairly serious writer (even now I'm still slogging my way through his Joan Didion piece). It was original and really funny.
But then about midway through it devolved, like most S&Ms, into such over-the-top absurdity it wasn't funny anymore. Maybe he felt he had to go that way because it's a sensitive topic (based on the politician who made headlines for praising Hitler in a speech) to show it was really, really not meant to be taken seriously. But a) I think anyone who reads the New Yorker would get it and b) that pattern, kind of subtly funny at first but steadily ratcheting up until it's ridiculous and less funny, is so typical of S&Ms.
I've never understood why a humor column in the New Yorker, which you'd think could access the funniest writers in the business, is so often less funny than your standard SNL sketch.
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