In the New Yorker...

[southendmd]

Talk about disorienting!
Many European countries use some variation of the AZERTY keyboard (also QWERTZ).  This is the French one:



I borrowed a friend's laptop once and was hopelessly confounded.  

[Jeff Wrangler]

Not only do I pay my bills on the internet, but I have them automatically withdrawn from my account. I keep a fairly close eye on things as they go along, but if I don't set it on automatic I forget to pay them on time.

And that, I say, is a good argument for continuing to receive hard-copy bills in the mail, and for writing checks to pay them. 

[Jeff Wrangler]

Everyone should read Jane Mayer's "Trump's Money Man" in the March 27 issue.

Because it's good to know your enemies. ...

[Front-Ranger]

I am getting a huge kick out of the previously unpublished F. Scott Fitzgerald story in the March 20 issue.

Back on March 28, Jeff posted this and I read the story "The I.O.U." after just returning from Pint's Pub in downtown Denver, where my Sherlock Holmes society met to discuss "The Naval Treaty". Surprise! There are several parallels: a nephew of an illustrious uncle clashes with him, has brain fever for ten months, has a spunky fiancee, and there is a disaster regarding a publication. Coincidence, or archetype?

[Jeff Wrangler]

"Brain fever." How Victorian is that? 

[Jeff Wrangler]

I think Mayer's article about Robert Mercer successfully demonstrates that the Republic is really in danger from the super wealthy.

"Until Election Day 2016, Mercer and Hanley--two of the richest men in America--paid Caddell to keep collecting polling data that enabled them to exploit the public resentment of elites such as themselves."

That's positively evil.

[serious crayons]

And that, I say, is a good argument for continuing to receive hard-copy bills in the mail, and for writing checks to pay them. 

Yes, if you're the kind of person who mails off a check immediately upon receiving the bill. As you might suspect, I am not. So the automatic withdrawal option works fine for me.

[serious crayons]

So this weekend I weeded through my stacks of old New Yorkers. There were issues dating back to April 2016! And even then it was hard to part with some of them!

They aren't all duty articles, either. I even spotted a David Sedaris piece I don't recall reading, though I usually read his the minute they arrive.

If a magazine contains only one or two articles I want to read, I rip them out, staple them and make a pile that I can gradually work my way through. I stash them in places where I might need emergency reading material. I still never even get through that stack, but at least it's shorter than the whole magazines.

However, some of them have three or four articles that still seem worth reading, so then I do keep the whole magazine!

Sometimes I wish the New Yorker were a monthly. Because this isn't even the internet's fault entirely -- I used to always fall behind in my New Yorkers in the early 1990s. But back then I also read Harper's and probably digested the paper a little more thoroughly.

The one good thing that's come out of the presidential election is that I feel I can freely toss any political reporting published prior to November 8.


 

[Jeff Wrangler]

On Jeopardy! this evening: E.B. White said that The New Yorker used commas with the precision of knives in a circus act. 

[Front-Ranger]

I enjoyed the article about Prince Charles in the latest issue. Some eye-opening revelations there.