Jon Lee Anderson's articles are the New Yorker equivalent of cod liver oil. They're good for you, but I don't like them. They're too long and boring. 
Actually, I can think of a few
New Yorker writers I would say that about. But I'm sure that in some cases their articles are of intense interest -- to policy-makers, maybe, or think-tank fellows.
What I'm glad to see less of in the
New Yorker in recent years -- probably since the Tina Brown days, actually -- are those pages-on-pages-long articles that, oh, have some marginal interest, and would undoubtedly add to your knowledge of the world, but are excruciating to plow through and not really of major importance, either. For example, I recall getting about a third of the way through one about a grocery store. When I got to "On Tuesday, the dairy truck comes, and the cases of milk are loaded into the shipping dock ..." or something like that, I bailed.
I still see the occasional article that I would put into that category, but not so many as before.
Remember back to those pre-Tina days -- when there were no photos, no capsule descriptions of the stories in the tables of contents, no discussion of anything Hollywood outside of Pauline Kael's pieces, bylines in the form of 10-point italicized tag lines instead of bold lines at the tops of the articles?
I'm not one to dis Tina Brown. I think she improved on what was already a great magazine.
