God bless the New Yorker for their ability to intellectualize anything. This week, they take on Lauren Conrad and Teh Hillz The Hills and end up confused about the hows and whys of the show's appeal: "Lauren looks like Marcia Brady, and the three others have dead eyes, although at least Whitney, alone of the girls, appears to understand what having a career means."
In 1999, BusinessWeek production manager Nicholas White went outside to smoke a cigarette and, upon returning, got stuck in an elevator. For 41 hours. The story of his ordeal is woven through Nick Paumgarten's new New Yorker feature about elevators, and is, predictably, the most interesting part. It's amazing how much 41 hours in a small metal box altered White's life forever, for the worse. And—oh yes—there is (sped-up) security camera footage of him the entire time. It's mesmerizing, because you can imagine him slowly going insane, which is exactly what's happening. Below, the video, and the article's summary of White's life since he was rescued. Let this be a cautionary tale to all of you who may find yourself similarly ensared in this most primal of New York office drone nightmares!
By now you've heard that The New Yorker devoted 10 pages of its current issue to a profile on George Clooney. And that the piece includes an anecdote about an anonymous man leaving a message on Clooney's voicemail demanding that he break up with his 29-year-old girlfriend. (Well, someone had to say it.) It's an enjoyable read, if only for the revelation that Clooney dresses his salad "with something sprayable called Balsamic Breeze."
"There was an article in the Times about homeless people taking the bus to Atlantic City, and I was totally inspired," Rebecca Aronauer said from her Brooklyn apartment the other day. The inspiration was for Inconvenience Day, Aronauer's bi-annual birthday celebration, and the idea was to take a bus from Chinatown in Manhattan to Atlantic City in New Jersey. For everyone she knew, the trip would be a huge inconvenience. "I have friends from Jersey, and even they say Atlantic City is a pain to get to."
Super-famous New Yorker writer and liar Malcolm Gladwell isn't the only reporter who tried to sneak funny bits of prose into his articles for a respected newspaper. (Except didn't he not do that? I'm confused.) Anyhoo, it's a fun old game to play, and we used to play it Page Six. My fellow former Sixer Chris Wilson and I used to daydream about getting the term "Bukkake Bandit" onto the page, which, in 2003/2004, was no easy trick. In fact, it never even got past Richard Johnson. Another crusade was to get the Google definition of Senator Rick Santorum's name into the Post back when that was still new and fun.
Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman should learn rule number 63 or web publishing: by deleting a blog post, one only draws greater attention to it. On Friday, the Conde Nast magazine's media industry terrier, Jeff Bercovici, wrote a typically niggling piece for Portfolio's website about best-selling fabulist, Malcolm Gladwell (displayed after the jump). According to Bercovici, the Tipping Point author is the bane of the fact-checking department at his day job, as a writer for the New Yorker, another title owned by Conde Nast boss Si Newhouse. There was nothing that controversial about Bercovici's item: Gladwell has himself drawn attention to his mockery of orthodox journalistic practice. But the post disappeared from Bercovici's Portfolio blog over the weekend.
The New Yorker just published a ridiculous, hand-wavy essay questioning the importance of factual truth in history and providing some sliver of refuge to fake memoirists like Margaret Seltzer even as it badmouths them. The essay is littered with questions, and they all have the sort of "everything is relative, man" ring you'd expect from discussions in an undergraduate philosophy class. "What makes a book a history?" "Is historical truth truer than fictional truth?" "If a history book can be read as if it were a novel and if a reader can find the same truth in a history book and a novel... what's the difference between them?" "Is history at risk?" There are a total of 16 question marks in the piece beginning to end, but they all drive transparently at the same answer, delivered toward the close of the essay in this summary of the historic meditations of English writer William Godwin: "The novelist is the better historian-and especially better than the empirical historian-because he admits that he is partial, prejudiced, and ignorant, and because he has not forsaken passion." The piece concludes by exploring, in a crescendo of absurdity, the idea that history — real, true, actual history as the term is understood today — should perhaps embrace a "license to invent" to draw in women readers, since women read novels and avoid contemporary history:
Look who just donated $100 million to the New York Public Library: Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of private equity giant the Blackstone Group. That would be the same Stephen Schwarzman made to look cheap in the Feb. 11 New Yorker, where someone on the library board said of him, "He has given, but not remotely what he could." The magazine questioned the value of Schwarzman's donations to Yale and the Kennedy Center, as well. Worth an estimated $8 billion, Schwarzman has a bit of an image problem after a Wall Street Journal profile revealed that, when at home, he often eats $3,000 in food over the course of a weekend and complains about things like a servant's squeaky shoes. He also took flack for a $3 million birthday party featuring comedian Martin Short and singers Rod Stewart and Patti LaBelle. Schwarzman said he's now donating the $100 million not to fix his nouveau riche image but because "the library helps... immigrants get their shot at the American dream," but really it sounds like the library people stopped waiting for the billionaire to take their hints and just cut a deal with the plutocrat:
Primary season is so hot right now. Did you see that Will.i.am video? Celebrities are getting into politics, which means we should too! This year, Us Weekly editor Janice Min started covering politicians more or less like she covers celebrities, because that is now the lens through which America interprets everything. (So-called serious political reporting—it's just like Us!) Is it such a stretch? As she tells the New Yorker, "When I was in junior high, I was the annoying kid in the class who always had the answer to whatever current-events quiz was going on. It's definitely a side of me." Min is such a lucky duck to have a job that lets so many sides of her personality come out. [New Yorker]
Michelle Obama has been upgraded from "regal" to "cool" in the New Yorker's profile of the next First Lady. She says "freaky." She says "Oh shit" about Obama Girl. Basically she's normal, which isn't news except no one else seems willing to come out and say it. In fact screw "which president would you rather get a drink with." I'd rather get a drink with Michelle Obama, and maybe laugh at the slick-hair stripey-shirt guys next to us, and then get in a fight with them in which she'd have to do all the fighting, and then go to another bar to make fun of more people. That's really what it comes down to: Michelle Obama makes fun of people. And that is cool.
The New York Times writer who blew up "rockism" from an industry term to a mainstream idea has left the paper. According to Radar, Kelefa Sanneh has already gotten a job at the New Yorker, home of the best living music journalist Sasha Frere-Jones. I can only hope Sanneh gets to write a too-witty-for-the-New-Yorker blog like Frere-Jones's. [Photo from Zoilus]
Slate does the regular round-up of must-read articles from magazines such as Newsweek and the Weekly Standard. Must skip: Adam Gopnik's essay on the French president's romance. "Cultural elitism," says Slate. (Um, isn't that the New Yorker's whole proposition to those that pretend to read the magazine?)
The New Yorker's lengthy, depressing story on the MySpace prank that became a tragic suicide is up. If you're looking for a bright spot to a story of adults driving a depressed 13-year-old girl to suicide, it might be author Lauren Collins' description of how that whole MySpace thing works: "MySpace has a pliant grammar, and its users manipulate lowercase and capital letters for visual effect. 'Z's trump 's's, so that 'Miss Honey Love' becomes 'Mz.Hon3y Luv.' A boy named Shane writes his name '$h@NE,' in the pasteup style of a ransom note." Little old ladies from Dubuque are presumably thankful for the brief. (MySpace would like you to know that they're holding a press conference at 11 today about "security" with "Hemanshu Nigam, Chief Security Officer, MySpace and Fox Interactive Media and others.") [New Yorker]
Judging from those little black-and-white ads that line the outer edges of the pages of the New Yorker the ideal reader is a gentleman nearing the end of his life who is comfortable both wearing a Greek fisherman's hat ($28) and a European beret ($12) with wide feet (EEE-EEEEEE). He is reasonably affluent but only recently and therefore must buy (from the pages of the New Yorker natch) a ring emblazoned with his family crest (research included. from $790) to pass on to his children (no doubt estranged) before he's shunted into an old folks home in the country (The Watermark, Unretirement Living.) [L Magazine]
The former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker (let's not mention the now-silent Talk) is to receive a lifetime achievement award from her magazine industry peers. Intelligencer's harsh conclusion: that the 54-year-old magazine legend is "at that point in her career when the final retrospective is in order".
Three guesses as to the identity of the anonymous S.N.L. staffer describing himself this week in the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" as being "physically incapable of growing a strike beard, or any beard." You really only need one guess—ours is that it's 22-year-old boy wonder Simon Rich, son of Times heavyset heavyweight Frank Rich. Isn't he just positively adorable? Ordering a drink must be a complete nightmare for him. You have to admire the New Yorker for its diligent commitment to pursuing a diverse range of sources. It would be so simple to take the easy way out and gather quotes from friends and colleagues. Like, say, for instance, contributors to the magazine's "Shouts & Murmurs" column!
The best nugget from Norman Mailer's personal correspondence: Tina Brown, the English editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, asked him to provide a reference for her green card bid. (It couldn't have hurt to have an endorsement from America's best writer, or someone who considered himself that.) For someone with such a reputation for pugilism, Mailer's letters are masterpieces of flattery. The writer, who died last year, produced the requisitely over-the-top letter to include in Tina Brown's immigration application, and appended an even more cloying cover note: "Don't believe a word of this. You are too attractive ever to let your head swell."
Can a piece of writing bring down a Presidential campaign? Well, probably not, in these times. But if it could, Elizabeth Kolbert's profile of Rudy Giuliani in today's New Yorker would. Basically she calls him a murderer, for just one thing. It's BRUTAL. And hey, it's New Year's Eve—you can spare 25 minutes to read it.
On this week's "Gossip Girl," the world's richest poor kid Dan Humphrey totally got a story published in the New Yorker! Whatever, we bet it was the Fiction issue, they'll let ANYONE in there! Later Serena gave him a nice present (a watch, so he'll be punctual meeting editors!) but he's such a fuckwad with class hang-ups that he can't accept it. But now we've "obtained" an excerpt of "his story" and we understand all.
