In the New Yorker...

[Jeff Wrangler]

My neighbors and i forget words and names often. I said I?d heard that if you can think of it within 15 minutes you?re OK. So when we do it ? which is frequently ? someone will pretend to look at their watch, set a timer, etc. We almost always think of it in less than 5. It?s weird that when one person forgets a word, often others do, too.

One time one of us texted the name to the others a couple of hours later. We were trying to think of the presidential candidate who fooled around and for some reason challenged the press to try to find evidence. They immediately uncovered a photo of him on a boat called Monkey Business. Knowing all that does his name come immediately to you?

Sure--Gary Hart. Now, the trick would be to remember the name of the woman he got caught with. I would have to look that up.

How about the name of the woman who shredded documents for Oliver North? 

When I?m sitting alone at a computer I cheat and google.

Me, too.

IPA stands for India Pale Ale, a popular, hoppy beer. Well known among beer drinkers and carried by many or maybe most breweries. Still, I agree he should have spelled it out in first reference. Obviously TNY doesn?t follow AP style, but does it follow another style or just have its own?

Thanks. I suspected IPA was something beer drinkers would know.

I don't know about the style guide, but I can't imagine they don't have their own in-house guide.

Word-finding difficulty comes with age, if not from something worse. 

[Front-Ranger]

...One time one of us texted the name to the others a couple of hours later. We were trying to think of the presidential candidate who fooled around and for some reason challenged the press to try to find evidence. They immediately uncovered a photo of him on a boat called Monkey Business. Knowing all that does his name come immediately to you?

Yes, that would be Gary Hart the Colorado senator. He used to live a mountain pass over from me, in a place called Troublesome Gulch. His poor wife was named the same as me.

... Obviously TNY doesn?t follow AP style, but does it follow another style or just have its own?

I'm sure they have their own style guide. Most publications do. I don't think TNY has dropped the Oxford comma as AP style recommends.

[Front-Ranger]

Sure--Gary Hart. Now, the trick would be to remember the name of the woman he got caught with. I would have to look that up.

Wasn't  her   name Heather something?

[Jeff Wrangler]

Wasn't  her   name Heather something?

Her name was Donna Rice--and I want to know how she met Don Henley.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Rice_Hughes

[Jeff Wrangler]

How about the name of the woman who shredded documents for Oliver North? 

That was Fawn Hall. I had to look her up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawn_Hall

[serious crayons]

I don't know about the style guide, but I can't imagine they don't have their own in-house guide.

I'm sure they have their own style guide. Most publications do. I don't think TNY has dropped the Oxford comma as AP style recommends.

Well, that's true. My own employer has an in-house style guide. Most entries are about local things; they rarely try to reinvent the wheel of AP style. They *might* differ on Indian/Native/indigenous terms, I suppose. We used to say Indians at least on first reference, and it's possible we've loosened up on that. But that's the only thing I can think of offhand.

When I worked for St. Jude Medical they had style preferences on a lot of medical/scientific things as well as advertising norms, etc. I was on a three-person team of wordies having fun rewriting the guide when all of a sudden SJM was bought by Abbott and our stylebook was mostly obsolete. But AP was the underlying default.

I think similarly most publications mostly adhere to an established style -- maybe most typically AP or Chicago Manual or MLA. But The New Yorker's in-house style guide seems needlessly quirky and generally not in a good way. The diaeresis aren't (wait, is that plural?) exactly needed but not really a problem. And I can't imagine TNY going for really recent AP additions like using % or allowing "their" for a generic individual, like "If a doctor tells you to exercise, you should obey them."

But spelling out big numbers makes reading harder for no good end.

And other things we've talked about are just weirdly annoying. "So and so, ... blah blah blah blah blrah, ... said.". The use of "got" in past tense where most people would say "gotten."

And I don't know if this is an official style matter or just David Remnick's way, but starting almost every story with a who what where when lede -- including, when possible, an exact date -- is weird, unnecessary and in many stories might be less appealing than various alternatives.

And they'd probably point to their venerable traditions. But they obviously aren't ironclad. I'm sure Mr. Shaw is already spinning in his grade over the allowance of swear words.
 

 

[Front-Ranger]

A compendium of reviews of recent issues. In the August 30 issue, I liked Gawande's "The Costa Rica Model" about public health care in that country, and George Saunders' fiction "The Mom of Bold Action". A review of "The Inseparables", a novel by Simone de Beauvoir that was unpublished until last year, was also good.

September 6 was the food & drink archival issue which was a bit of a disappointment because I still remember reading most of those articles the first time around. But the M.F.K. Fisher one about cravings was good. For some odd reason I was turned off to most of the articles in the September 13th issue except for a review by Ruth Franklin of Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World. It was pretty amazing.

I didn't expect the September 27th fashion issue to interest me but it did. "Desire", the fiction piece by Esther Freud made me wonder if she is a relation of the psychotherapist. Yup, she's his granddaughter and the daughter of the painter Lucien Freud. I enjoyed the writing of Rebecca Mead and the photos of the designer Harris Reid in "Height of Glamour". It was jarring to see Murakami's collection of T-shirts that followed. John Seabrook's piece on non-alcoholic drinks was fairly interesting. In the October 4th issue, Jill Lepore's piece on African American burial grounds was just too long. I also wish she would break up her paragraphs a bit and have more variety in her sentences or would she be considered a sell-out in doing that? Vladimir Sorokin's "Red Pyramid" was pretty good for dystopian fiction, of which we have so much of right now. I didn't finish Patricia Highsmith's diaries because I felt voyeuristic. Good review of the new novel by Jonathan Franzen. The Shouts & Murmurs piece was an amusing allegory on the pandemic.

More half-baked dystopian fiction was in the October 11 issue. Gary Shteyngart's piece on his botched adult circumcision was painful to read, but with all these men in my life (3 grandsons so far) I felt I had to. You would think everything that can be has been written about Oscar Wilde, but there's a new book reviewed in this issue that takes a different approach. There's a very insightful passage about  "The Picture of Dorian Gray" calling out the imagery and colors that Wilde evoked. It finishes up discussing "The Importance of Being Ernest" and duplicate lives/reality. Very thought-provoking.

[Front-Ranger]

....

And other things we've talked about are just weirdly annoying. "So and so, ... blah blah blah blah blah, ... said.". The use of "got" in past tense where most people would say "gotten."

Reading how "Eleanor Rigby" came about by Paul McCartney, I noticed the use of the word "got". It seems to lend a populist air to the narrative. Strange.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Reading how "Eleanor Rigby" came about by Paul McCartney, I noticed the use of the word "got". It seems to lend a populist air to the narrative. Strange.

Webster's shows both got and gotten.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/get

[Front-Ranger]

A must-see for TNY fans: The French Dispatch, quirky new movie by Wes Anderson.