The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
Well, I wasn't going to read Emily Nussbaum on Orange Is the New Black (July 7 & 14), but it was worth it for her quotation from the show:
"A lot of people are stupid and still live full, productive lives."
Jeff Wrangler:
I wasn't going to read Peter Schjeldahl on the Jeff Koons retrospective, but I'm just about out of anything in the magazine that interests me as I wait for the next issue. However, in the end I'm glad I read the piece for this wonderful pun:
"We might justly term the present Mammon-driven era in contemporary art the Koons Age."
;D
Actually, it's always kind of interesting to read that somebody from York, Pennsylvania, could become an internationally famous--some might say notorious--artist.
Jeff Wrangler:
Today I finished Rachel Aviv's July 21 article about the test cheating scandal in Atlanta, and I must say I'm not the least bit upset about it because it just seems to me that when you base everything in education on test scores, something like the Atlanta scandal is just waiting to happen. I actually feel sorry for the teachers caught up in it. But then, I think Aviv's article was written in a way to evoke sympathy for the teachers.
I've also gone on to start Louis Menand's article on "The Sex Amendment." I had a bit of a laugh. In his sermon yesterday, our rector made reference to the rather nasty and racist exchange between Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony back in 1869; now I think I know where he got it: from Menand's article. ;D
David Remnick was on the Today show this morning. He doesn't look anything like I imagined he would look. I figured he would wear eyeglasses.
Front-Ranger:
I'm reading Aviv's article too. It's really eye-opening. I must be naive...hard to believe those teachers and the principal engaged in such bald-faced cheating!
But meanwhile the new issue came and I devoured Elizabeth Kolbert's article on the Paleo fad: Stone Soup.
serious crayons:
Does everybody here know that the New Yorker on Monday removed the paywall on its archives for the next three months?
Of course, we subscribers can look through its archives anytime, but I almost never do that unless I'm really desperate to look up a story because I find their archive access very user unfriendly. This makes it easier. (Though I still hate having to read by pushing around an image of a magazine page rather than scrolling through a regular html-type page, and I hate not being able to print out longer pieces.)
Here are a couple of places with lists of suggestions of articles to read.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/07/22/new_yorker_online_free_for_three_months_what_should_you_read.html
http://longform.org/posts/our-25-favorite-unlocked-new-yorker-articles
I know many people are excited about big names (David Grann! Seymour Hersch! John McPhee! Janet Malcolm!) or big topics, but I myself plan to reread Larissa MacFarquhar's 2001 profile of movie producer Brian Grazer. For whatever reason, that article, which I read purely by chance in an idle moment -- it came out a month after 9/11, so it was hardly the most pressing subject at the time -- has stuck with me all these years. Whenever I see Grazer's name on a movie or TV show my interest is slightly piqued and I'm more likely to watch it. (Luckily, Grazer's projects are usually pretty good -- he produces Ron Howard's movies, among other things.) Now I'm going to go back and find out what made that profile so influential. (http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2001-10-15#folio=176, in case anyone else is interested.)
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