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GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES
Welcome to The New Goon, D&D’s new essay, journal, and magazine discussion superstation.



This thread is designed to house conversation regarding longer essays and in-depth articles as well as for gossip and assessment regarding periodicals. Big editorial shakeup? Discuss here. New issue of a quarterly? Give us the highlights and a general assessment. Perhaps you are considering subscribing to a journal, but aren’t sure which one. Ask here with some of your interests and we can point you in the right direction.

Below I’ve put together summaries and highlights from some periodicals. Inevitably, it reflects my own interests and prejudices, so I am happy to amend this post with contributions from others.

The New Yorker

Site

Summary: If you know one literary journal, it is probably this one. Monthly publication with exacting standards, notorious cover images, and unmatched cultural influence.

Highlights:

Out of Bethlehem: The life and politics of Joan Didion.

Hiroshima: Survivors of the bomb.

Kill Company: On an Iraq War massacre.

The New York Review of Books

Site

Summary: To quote Esquire, “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.” It’s a fortnightly covering an astonishingly broad swathe of intellectual pursuits. It comes as a broadsheet with very few pictures, pages dense with text, built around book reviews but featuring long, demanding essays on a variety of issues as well. It’s been around since 1963.

“The opening editorial” posted:

The hope of the editors is to suggest, however imperfectly, some of the qualities which a responsible literary journal should have and to discover whether there is, in America, not only the need for such a review but the demand for one.

Highlights:

Reflections on Violence: Hannah Arendt's legendary essay on the instruments and aims of violence.

A Practical Vision of a More Equal Society: Thomas Picketty reviews Anthony B. Atkinson’s Inequality: What Can be Done?

On “Crash”: Zadie Smith reviews “Crash."

The Robots are Winning! : Daniel Mendolsohn’s masterful review of "Her" and "Ex Machina."

Shakespeare in Tehran: Stephen Greenblatt on attending an academic conference on Shakespeare in the Islamic Republic. You should read it in its entirety.

“Greenblatt” posted:

The original audience must have been as shocked by this interference as the torturer Cornwall. Though the servant is killed by a sword thrust from behind, it is not before he has fatally wounded his master. And what is most shocking is that the audience is clearly meant to sympathize with the attempt by a nobody to stop the highest authority in the land from doing what everyone knew the state did to traitors. Here there is no cover of presumed madness, and though the setting is still ancient Britain, the circumstances must have seemed unnervingly close to contemporary practice.

How could Shakespeare get away with it? The answer must in part be that Elizabethan and Jacobean society, though oppressive, was not as monolithic in its surveillance or as efficient in its punitive responses as the surviving evidence sometimes makes us think. Shakespeare’s world probably had more diversity of views, more room to breathe, than the official documents imply.

The Mysterious World of the Deaf: Gavin Francis reviews I Can Hear you Whisper by Lydia Denworth.

Israel: The Alternative: Tony Judt’s infamous call for a binational, secular, one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict – in effect, a surrender of the state’s Jewish identity. The essay got him removed from the masthead of The New Republic.

What’s the Matter with Economics? Alan S. Blinder critiques Jeff Madrick’s “Seven Bad Ideas.”

New York: Conspicuous Construction:Architecture critic Martin Filler.

“Filler” posted:

Today’s race to erect ever-higher, ever-more-luxurious Manhattan condominiums recalls the early-twentieth-century competition to win New York City bragging rights for the world’s tallest building, as one record-breaking tower after another rose in dizzying succession. Yet not one of New York’s postmillennial claimants to that lineage possesses an iota of the aesthetic élan that distinguished those early skyscrapers, internationally renowned as America’s signal contribution to modern architectural form. Here one can point, for example, to the Woolworth, Chrysler, and Empire State buildings.

In contrast, the smokestack-like protuberances that now disrupt the skyline of midtown Manhattan signify the steadily widening worldwide gap between the unimaginably rich and the unconscionably poor. Those of us who believe that architecture invariably (and often unintentionally) embodies the values of the society that creates it will look upon these etiolated oddities less with wonder over their cunning mechanics than with revulsion over the larger, darker machinations they more accurately represent.

In the Syria We Don’t Know: Fascinating Charles Glass essay on the embattled Alawites written from the confines of a pro-Assad stronghold.

The Liberal Zionists: Jonathan Freedland reviews a slew of books about liberalism in Israel.

The London Review of Books

Site

Summary: The more radical British cousin of the New York Review of Books. Its cultural and literary critiques are very similar to the New York Review, while its politics hew to a more socialist line.

Highlights:

Rule-breaking - Jan Werner Muller on the struggles of the Eurozone.

Text-Inspectors: Andrew O’Hagan review Glenn Greenwald.

Barbarism with a Human Face: Zizek discusses Lenin and Stalin’s legacies in Kiev during the uprising.

Why Not Kill Them All? Keith Gessen reports from Donetsk.

Almost Lovable: Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews Owen Hatherley’s Landscapes of Communism with a focus on Stalin-era architecture.

n+1

Site

Summary: N+1 was founded in 2004, opening with an essay blasting Dave Eggers and the institutions (McSweeny’s,The Believer) associated with him. It is characterized by a Frankfurt School approach to cultural criticism and has powered the careers of a clique of like-minded critics and authors, including Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Masha Gessen, Carla Blumencranz, Nell Zink, Benjamin Kunkel, Frank Guan, and Sheila Heti.

From the inaurugal issue:

quote:

Early issues included a “child” and “philosopher” as core features. The Believer would learn a truth from one of each. The magazine seemed unconscious of the weakness of believing so hard in children and old men: either those who hadn’t started lives of adult thought, or those who were just about done. We respect the philosophers they profiled, but the motif confused philosophers with white-haired dispensers of truth. That is not a thinker: that’s Santa Claus. It led on one occasion to the tragic spectacle of Richard Rorty answering the Believer’s query, “Do you see yourself, in the coming years, continuing to respond to these charges of relativism, etc.?”: “I think that what I write from now on will be pretty much rehashes of what I’ve already written. I don’t have any new ideas.” The profiles of children have had better luck celebrating kids’ innocence and purity. The Believer profiles “tools.” It lists writers that you simply must read. It believes in others, instead of itself.
Ultimately, the Believer is a book review. It has attracted writers we admire. It does differ in at least one particular from, say, the New York Review of Books, in that its overt criterion for inclusion is not expertise, but enthusiasm.

Highlights:

Mavericks: Alice Gregory on Surfing.

Elephant States Geographer Jacob Shell on human-elephant relations in Burma.

Style at the Scale of the Sentence: Franco Moretti’s Stanford Literary Lab does performs distant reading analysis of Middlemarch and other Victorian novels.

Slave Capitalism Gabriel Winant reviews Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams.

The White Review

Site

Summary: Not very well-known in the United States, but this British journal is similar to n+1 in its scope, breadth, and cultural cache. If they continue to pay the bills, I anticipate it becoming a must-read even in the US.

Highlights:

Greece and the Poetics of Crisis

The American Prospect

Site

Summary: A sober liberal quarterly with a New Deal-style pro-labor ideology. Typical issues feature extensive policy prescriptions and political strategies for effecting progressive change. Mostly run by the troika of Robert Kuttner, Paul Starr, and Harold Meyerson.

Highlights:

40 Year Slump: The State of Work in the Age of Anxiety: “That year, for the first time since the end of World War II, Americans’ wages declined. Since 1947, Americans at all points on the economic spectrum had become a little better off with each passing year.” Harold Meyerson examines the political economy of Americans’ shrinking wages since 1974.

Immigration and America’s Urban Revival: Extensive data on the interplay of immigration and crime rates informs this Robert J. Sampson essay.

The Political Roots of Widening Inequality Robert Reich explains how states construct regulatory regimes and markets for the benefit of the wealthy, and prescribes measures for the advancement of a more egalitarian economy.

The High Road Wins: Excellent Ann Markusen article comparing the economic performance of Minnesota under Democratic Governor Mark Dayton and Wisconsin under conservative idol Scott Walker.

When Liberals Were Organized Princeton professor Julian Zelizer recounts the history of the Democratic Study Group, an organization within Congress that prioritized liberal initiatives and strategized how to bring them to fruition.

Is There Hope for Survivors of the Drug War? http://prospect.org/article/there-hope-survivors-drug-wars Monica Potts on how drug convictions effect individuals and society.

The New Republic

Site

Summary: A century old liberal bi-monthly formerly known for its violent commitment to Israel and American interventionism, but has undergone a radical transformation culminating in an instigated mass-departure from the editorial team in December.

Andrew Sullivan edited in the 1990s. It’s hard to be charitable toward his tenure beyond his influential argument for gay marriage http://www.newrepublic.com/article/79054/here-comes-the-groom. He presided during the notorious Stephen Glass bullshit and elected to publish Charles F. Murray’s racist “Bell Curve” argument. The excellent Franklin Foer edited from 2006 to 2010, and again from 2012 to 2015.

The front of the journal generally focuses on politics, and the “back-of-the-book” reviews books and culture. Leon Wieseltier edited the back-of-the-book for decades but resigned upon Franklin Foer’s departure.

Highlights from the Foer era:

Amazon Must be Stopped: Drawing on liberal legal tradition rooted in the early twentieth century advocacy and jurisprudence of Louis Brandeis, Franklin Foer makes the case for antitrust action against Amazon.

Superpowers Don’t Get To Retire: Neoconservative Robert Kagan defends “liberal interventionism” in the wake of American disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Scott Walker’s Toxic Racial Politics: Alec MacGillis analyzes the racist underpinnings of Scott Walker’s fiscal policies and political appeals.

The Loneliness of Vladimir Putin: Julia Ioffe on Putin’s anti-dissent measures and waning mass appeal

Gabriele D’Annuzio: Hilarious essay on a proto-fascist aviator in Italy.

In December, owner Chris Hughes ousted Foer (technically he resigned) and ushered in a new regime under editor-in-chief Gabriel Snyder, a Gawker alum, with a mandate to correct for the magazine’s racist reputation, build a stable of writers more reflective of the modern liberal coalition (read: less white men), and shift the publication’s focus toward an online-first mentality.
Highlights under Synder’s reign:

Fear of a Radical Pope: Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig describes the fissures in the Roman Catholic Church as conservative American bishops panic at the arrival of the Cool New Pope.

God and Profits: Another essay from Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig on the strange merger of capitalism and Christianity in the American cultural landscape.

The Ghost of Cornel West: Michael Eric Dyson’s brutal hit piece on the recent output of Dr. Cornel West.

The New Republic’s Legacy on Race: Jeet Heer examines The New Republic’s historical coverage of racial issues.

The Case for Paid Leave: Bevy of analyses and arguments on paid parental leave, which has become the magazine’s signature domestic issue under Synder’s editorship.

Pacific Standard

Site

Summary: Santa Barbara-based bimonthly formerly known as Miller-McCune, still affiliated with the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media, and Public Policy. It emphasizes behavioral research and social science stories when possible, and has adopted the tagline “The Science of Society.”

Highlights:

Death at the Summit: Fantastic Graeme Wood essay on InTrade, the research it enabled, and its sordid collapse poetically typified by John Delaney’s death on Everest.

The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century Charles Homans recounts whaling under the Soviet Union.

Disenfranchised: Why Are Americans Still Buying into the Franchise Dream? : Timothy Noah on the economics and psychology of franchising.

Jacobin

Site

Summary: Socialist quarterly known for eye-catching design, themed issues (“Technology,” “The City,” “Reconstruction”) and hardcore leftism. The publisher and editor-in-chief is a young guy named Bhaskar Sunkara.

Highlights:

In The Name of Love : Essay on the “Do What You Love” philosophy and its deleterious integration into the modern workplace.

Fanfare without the Fans: Why modern sports stadiums suck.


There are, of course, tons and tons more journals and magazines. The Paris Review is probably the premier outlet for short fiction. Nautilus Magazine is doing interesting work. IEEE Spectrum has some excellent articles. Dissent, The New Left Review, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Caravan, Tablet, Vanity Fair, New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, GQ, Lapham’s Quarterly…the list goes on and on. And now we have a thread to discuss them.


GalacticAcid fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Aug 31, 2015

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GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES
Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and frequent New York Review of Books contributor, has died at 82.

Find his essay archive here.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


this is a Good Thread

Mr. Wiggles
Dec 1, 2003

We are all drinking from the highball glass of ideology.
I used to read the New Yorker and the Review all the time but I just don't have the minutes these days. I still get a a paper copy of The Atlantic delivered to my house, though, which I always make time for.

GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES

Mr. Wiggles posted:

I used to read the New Yorker and the Review all the time but I just don't have the minutes these days. I still get a a paper copy of The Atlantic delivered to my house, though, which I always make time for.

Living in Queens, the Review makes sense for me. I need something to read on the train to and from Manhattan every morning. Without that built-in reading time, I'm not sure I could handle it.

I'm curious why you selected The Atlantic above all the others. If I had to choose just one monthly, it would probably be Harper's. Not a criticism! Just curiosity.

Even though, I thought the Harper's hit piece on Hillary Clinton via Doug Henwood was terrible (and I usually like Henwood). For a legitimate in-depth critique of Hillary, I thought the Jackson Lears's essay in the LRB was much more thought-provoking.

But while we are on the topic of The Atlantic, I should probably link to two of the most widely discussed articles of the past year:

James Fallows on "The Tragedy of the American Military" and Ta-Nehisi Coates on "The Case for Reparations".

Bastard Tetris
Apr 27, 2005

L-Shaped


Nap Ghost
Anyone here read Monocle? I've enjoyed a few of their articles but the overall content with lines like "Work spaces in Paris and sexy dog food." give me pretty extreme douche-chills.

Junior G-man
Sep 15, 2004

Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma


This is A Good Thread and a Great OP.

Assepoester
Jul 18, 2004
Probation
Can't post for 11 years!
Melman v2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TT81o4hL4c

So what do you think this hypothetical TIME ADVANCED is more closely patterned after... Harpers, The Atlantic, or The New Republic?

GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES

Cardboard Box A posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TT81o4hL4c

So what do you think this hypothetical TIME ADVANCED is more closely patterned after... Harpers, The Atlantic, or The New Republic?

Aesthetically it's a dead-ringer for Harper's, but "Getting Things Done Through Partisan Politics: Why Anti-Washington Sentiment May Be Misguided" is newrepublic.txt.

TheImmigrant
Jan 18, 2011

Mr. Wiggles posted:

I used to read the New Yorker and the Review all the time but I just don't have the minutes these days. I still get a a paper copy of The Atlantic delivered to my house, though, which I always make time for.

I still get all of these in print, along with Harper's and Le Nouvel Observateur. I don't have the time to read them all any more, but I'd feel too guilty to let subscriptions lapse.

Defenestration
Aug 10, 2006

"It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"


Grimey Drawer
Great thread idea, looking forward to it. I have so many opinions.

N+1 published the essay MFA vs NYC which is huge if you follow writing circles. I can't find it out from a paywall though
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-10/the-intellectual-situation/mfa-vs-nyc/

The New Yorker is known for publishing whatever neurotic NYC white male lit darling #1 shits out that week, which leads us to things like this hot garbage by Jonathan Franzen about how he is super sad after his successful book tour and misses his BEST FRIEND DFW
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/18/farther-away-jonathan-franzen

The Atlantic alternates between super amazing and astoundingly tone deaf. The amazing stuff is for example Ta Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations"

Vox doesn't really count here but I'd like to say that it can suck a dick.

daft
Oct 16, 2012
I don't know if it qualifies but the few articles I have read on The Baffler have been pretty good. Thanks for the post OP.

Mr. Wiggles
Dec 1, 2003

We are all drinking from the highball glass of ideology.

GalacticAcid posted:

Living in Queens, the Review makes sense for me. I need something to read on the train to and from Manhattan every morning. Without that built-in reading time, I'm not sure I could handle it.

I'm curious why you selected The Atlantic above all the others. If I had to choose just one monthly, it would probably be Harper's. Not a criticism! Just curiosity.

Even though, I thought the Harper's hit piece on Hillary Clinton via Doug Henwood was terrible (and I usually like Henwood). For a legitimate in-depth critique of Hillary, I thought the Jackson Lears's essay in the LRB was much more thought-provoking.

But while we are on the topic of The Atlantic, I should probably link to two of the most widely discussed articles of the past year:

James Fallows on "The Tragedy of the American Military" and Ta-Nehisi Coates on "The Case for Reparations".

Those guys are a couple of the major reasons. The dispatch section is still good, and I like the poetry. Generally the magazine is a bit too limousine liberal for my taste politically, but as was mentioned, the occasional super fantastic article makes up for that.

GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES
Just getting around to the current issue of The New Republic.

"Corn Wars," on the geopolitics of corn and agricultural intellectual property, might be the best thing they have published since the shakeup in December. It has all the hallmarks of a great magazine article - slightly offbeat topic, cloak-and-dagger narrative woven through a robust historical-political analysis.

Mr. Wiggles posted:

Those guys are a couple of the major reasons. The dispatch section is still good, and I like the poetry. Generally the magazine is a bit too limousine liberal for my taste politically, but as was mentioned, the occasional super fantastic article makes up for that.

That's the sense I get from it, I feel like I always find out about their slam dunk articles either way though so I don't bother subscribing.


Defenestration posted:


N+1 published the essay MFA vs NYC which is huge if you follow writing circles. I can't find it out from a paywall though
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-10/the-intellectual-situation/mfa-vs-nyc/


MFA vs. NYC isn't online, but their "Symposium on Labor and Magazines" from the Winter 2015 issue is. Had I realized that I would have put it in the OP. It's a really great look at what goes into producing political and literary journals - I especially recommend Maxine Phillips writing about Dissent, and the discord between advocating forcefully for labor rights within the publication, while the publication itself relies on pretty exploitative working conditions.

daft posted:

I don't know if it qualifies but the few articles I have read on The Baffler have been pretty good. Thanks for the post OP.

The Baffler owns, I almost subscribed after this.

GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES

Defenestration posted:


N+1 published the essay MFA vs NYC which is huge if you follow writing circles. I can't find it out from a paywall though
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-10/the-intellectual-situation/mfa-vs-nyc/


N+1 is currently running a subscription promotion that includes a free copy of both MFA vs. NYC and their collection of writing on American cities, City by City.

Gunshow Poophole
Sep 14, 2008

OMBUDSMAN
POSTERS LOCAL 42069




Clapping Larry
bookmarking the poo poo out of this thread, great idea OP!

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012

GalacticAcid posted:

The Baffler owns, I almost subscribed after this.

quote:

As an anthropologist and anarchist

lol

It actually surprised me to read this article because I had previously associated worries about technological stagnation with the far right. Still, just because anarchists and neoreactionaries worry about it doesn't mean it isn't a real problem. Does anyone know of some good discussions of technological stagnation (It is real? If so, what causes it?) by people with some scientific credentials?

TheOtherContraGuy
Jul 4, 2007

brave skeleton sacrifice

Silver2195 posted:

lol

It actually surprised me to read this article because I had previously associated worries about technological stagnation with the far right. Still, just because anarchists and neoreactionaries worry about it doesn't mean it isn't a real problem. Does anyone know of some good discussions of technological stagnation (It is real? If so, what causes it?) by people with some scientific credentials?

I have to admit, as a leftie who likes Graeber, I think he's really off base with this one. The issue is not too few publications, but too many.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-output-doubles-every-nine-years.html

The biological sciences are going through a new golden age and the fact that he dismisses the importance of the Human Genome Project with a single sentence shows a profound ignorance of the field.

Sharkie
Feb 4, 2013

by Fluffdaddy

TheOtherContraGuy posted:

I have to admit, as a leftie who likes Graeber, I think he's really off base with this one. The issue is not too few publications, but too many.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-output-doubles-every-nine-years.html

The biological sciences are going through a new golden age and the fact that he dismisses the importance of the Human Genome Project with a single sentence shows a profound ignorance of the field.

There's also this statement:

quote:

Even more, the hype and political investment surrounding such projects demonstrate the degree to which even basic research now seems to be driven by political, administrative, and marketing imperatives that make it unlikely anything revolutionary will happen.

which describes how science has been done for the past few centuries as if it's a dire new development.

exmarx
Feb 18, 2012


The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.
I liked this baffler piece: Not the People’s Uber

BlueBlazer
Apr 1, 2010
This thread is awesome.

Read stuff be educated, oh goons.

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

GalacticAcid posted:

The Baffler owns, I almost subscribed after this.

This man seems to believe that if you can imagine a thing and throw enough dollars at it it'll surely come true within a decade, regardless of whether the problem's easy or even possible to solve. We don't have death rays and teleporters not because people have failed to dream, but because a laser's a hilariously inefficient way to kill a man and teleporters are unscientific gibberish. Strong AI and nuclear fusion haven't materialised not because of stultifying bureaucracy, but because these problems are really, really loving hard, and no one making predictions in the 60s had the faintest idea how hard. And I have no idea how he can talk about drones and then in the next breath claim that weapons technology hasn't advanced. We have flying death robots, is that not good enough?

About the only accurate observation in there is the fact that factory automation has been delayed by producers running to cheap overseas labour, but that's about as novel an insight as noting that water has a tendency to flow downhill. And he doesn't even make it to step two: eventually, capital is going to run out of cheap labour pools to run to. The supply is not infinite.

And jetpacks were a stupid idea anyway. :colbert:

GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES
Cheap labor pools will exist indefinitely without strong labor organizing, which is far from a given.

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

Fair enough, though I think I may have worded that poorly. What the capitalist wants isn't so much cheap labour as cheaper labour. The business needs to grow, which means profits have to rise. Cutting labour costs is a easy way to accomplish that, and they'll pursue that (and other methods) in preference to automating and innovating (hard) as long as they can, but eventually you're going to hit a point where you just can't push labour costs down any more. Either because there's nowhere cheaper to offshore to or because (thanks to poor or non-existent labour organisation) you've managed to push your workers so far that if you go any farther they'll starve to death. Point being: globalisation and liberalisation can give capitalists an out in the short term, but it's not a solution to the fundamental problem in the long term.

...though obviously I'd prefer a solution that doesn't require mass poverty and starvation wages before they start automating. Sorry, I realised this was starting to look like a argument for either unfettered free-market capitalism or accelerationism halfway through, and that was not at all what I was going for.

GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES
Jacobin did some nice work on this subject in their technology issue.

Here is Peter Frase's editorial. The print edition has some attractive graphs charting the positive relationship of labor strength (low unemployment, rising wages) with productivity gains based on BLS data. I loaned my copy to a friend of mine, I'll take pictures and upload them when I get it back.

GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES
Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) and Alissa Quart (Monetized) are running an organization called the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, partnering with publications including Pacific Standard and online outlets like Vice and Fusion to report on economic struggle.

Quart reported on the "Rise of Extreme Daycare" last November, on the development of 24 hour daycare facilities that cater to working class parents whose retail jobs require constant availability and algorithmically-assigned hours, often leading to punishing graveyard shifts. There is fantastic photography here too from Alice Proujansky, and it really is great reporting.

Another notable essay from the project: Donnell Alexander on motel living. This was co-published with Fusion. Alexander's best-known work is probably "Are Black People Cooler than White People?" from 1997, in what I believe was the final issue of Might magazine (the publication chronicled in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius). Alexander also recently wrote "Are Black People (Still) Cooler Than White People?: A Revisionist History" for the kind of bonkers online publication Ratter - also worth a read.

Mister Mind
Mar 20, 2009

I'm not a real doctor,
But I am a real worm;
I am an actual worm
The entire run of Spy Magazine is available online at Google Books. You should really avoid anything after 1992, but in its prime it was the great deflater of pomposity and hypocrisy, and gave us the epithet "short-fingered vulgarian" for Donald Trump. I've been reading some of my old paper issues, and in retrospect they're a lot less clever than they think they are, and oddly moralistic, but they're a wonderful window into the oft-forgotten GHW Bush years in America.

GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES
For those of you based in New York City, n+1's Issue 23 launch party will be held Friday, September 25th at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Free entry for subscribers, $10 for plebes.

I went to the Issue 18 (Winter 2014) launch party, it was a ton of fun.

Which reminds me, I plan to do an :effort: post at some point highlighting publications based outside the NYC - DC - London bubble. Kicking that off:

Sampsonia Way promotes writers in exile and advocates for free speech worldwide.

Creative Nonfiction publishes, strangely, nonfiction that is creative.

Both are based in Pittsburgh, PA.

From our friends in the South, Oxford, Mississippi's Oxford American publishes fiction, essays, and criticism (a good piece on a fertilizer plant explosion in West Texas)and Texas Monthly has an unusual knack for brisk narratives on seedy topics, especially crime cases.

Antwan3K
Mar 8, 2013
Does Le Monde Diplomatique go here? It's a monthly and one of the best news periodicals in the world. Their English edition is http://mondediplo.com/ (that I'm kind of pissed I can't access entirely as a subscriber to the french one)

Wraith of J.O.I.
Jan 25, 2012


I was just thinking of how I need to describe to a periodical now that I have an income sufficient to afford it. What would people here suggest between the New Yorker and the NY Review of Books? I've read a lot of the New Yorker over the years, and much less of NYRB, but am very open to it, and have liked what I've read.

Bro Dad
Mar 26, 2010


Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

I was just thinking of how I need to describe to a periodical now that I have an income sufficient to afford it. What would people here suggest between the New Yorker and the NY Review of Books? I've read a lot of the New Yorker over the years, and much less of NYRB, but am very open to it, and have liked what I've read.

I recommend Lapham's Quarterly. Every issue is based on a broad theme (the current issue is Philanthropy for example), with half historical and half contemporary longform articles.

Also its worth it in my opinion just for the beautiful artwork and layout design, making it a great coffee table book.

TheOtherContraGuy
Jul 4, 2007

brave skeleton sacrifice

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

I was just thinking of how I need to describe to a periodical now that I have an income sufficient to afford it. What would people here suggest between the New Yorker and the NY Review of Books? I've read a lot of the New Yorker over the years, and much less of NYRB, but am very open to it, and have liked what I've read.

I've had a subscription to the NYRB for a couple months now and consider it possibly one of the best purchases of my life. Even when I disagree with a reviewer's point of view I find their arguments compelling.

GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES
I haven't had much free time this week so I've been MIA, I do plan to reply to some of the preceding posts soon. In the meantime, notable that National Geographic is abandoning non-profit status, a major departure after 127 years.

GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES
Coates will be on the Brian Lehrer show momentarily to discuss the Moynihan Report.

Edited to Add: Here is his cover story for the October issue of The Atlantic: The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration, occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the Moynihan report. Some context, it's become pretty popular in lefty circles to bash Moynihan for "victim-blaming," so Coates's relatively positive (albeit still critical, especially of Moynihan's failure to adapt to possibilities of communal organizing beyond the explicitly patriarchal
"traditional" family) assessment is an interesting development.

quote:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan knew better. His 1965 report on “The Negro Family” was explosive for what it claimed about black mothers and black fathers—but if it had contained all of Moynihan’s thinking on the subject, including his policy recommendations, it likely would have been politically nuclear. “Now comes the proposition that the Negro is entitled to damages as to unequal favored treatment—in order to compensate for past unequal treatment of an opposite kind,” Moynihan wrote in 1964. His point was simple if impolitic: Blacks were suffering from the effects of centuries of ill treatment at the hands of white society. Ending that ill treatment would not be enough; the country would have to make amends for it. “It may be that without unequal treatment in the immediate future there is no way for [African Americans] to achieve anything like equal status in the long run,” Moynihan wrote.

GalacticAcid fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Sep 18, 2015

GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES

Antwan3K posted:

Does Le Monde Diplomatique go here? It's a monthly and one of the best news periodicals in the world. Their English edition is http://mondediplo.com/ (that I'm kind of pissed I can't access entirely as a subscriber to the french one)

It does belong, and thanks. My knowledge of journals outside the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK, is woeful so any information from abroad is welcome. I used to leaf through Cahiers du Cinema in undergrad when I was working on my French and loved that.

TheOtherContraGuy posted:

I've had a subscription to the NYRB for a couple months now and consider it possibly one of the best purchases of my life. Even when I disagree with a reviewer's point of view I find their arguments compelling.

Highly agree. The September 24th issue I thought was astoundingly good, although I think Timothy Snyder is full of poo poo. Jessica Matthews on American foreign policy, James Surowiecki on Stiglitz, RJW Evans on the building of state terror apparatuses between the French Revolution and 1848, and what I have to assume was Oliver Sacks's last essay were all excellent.

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

I was just thinking of how I need to describe to a periodical now that I have an income sufficient to afford it. What would people here suggest between the New Yorker and the NY Review of Books? I've read a lot of the New Yorker over the years, and much less of NYRB, but am very open to it, and have liked what I've read.

The NY Review of Books doesn't publish fiction, unlike The New Yorker. It comes fortnightly, whereas The New Yorker comes monthlyweekly (thanks Weembles for the correction below). Personally, I think the quality standard is more exacting in the NY Review - The New Yorker is a little more hit-or-miss in my opinion. The NY Review also doesn't really do humor of any kind. It does publish excellent poetry, probably my favorite regular selection since Henri Cole left The New Republic.

Bro Dad mentioned Lapham's - it is a great, great quarterly, but quarterlies serve as a slightly different function in my view. They are great to read at home, and to display on coffee tables and bookshelves, but The New Yorker and the NY Review are both easy to carry around and read at lunch or breakfast by yourself, waiting for the dentist, etc. Plus I like the sheer eclecticism of the editorial range in both of them, though I do see the appeal of themed issues a la Lapham's. So, depends on what you're looking for! I advise heading to the local library and checking out some recent issues of anything you're considering shelling out for.

:siren: Deal Updates:siren:

Foreign Affairs emailed me with a pretty sweet offer, $19.95 for a year's sub. Not sure how long that will last.

Jacobin is doing $30 off international subscriptions this week (lol, discount code: CORBYN) in celebration of their five year anniversary.

:siren: N+1 Issue 23:siren:

They only release three a year so every issue is a big deal. I really, really enjoyed this one in its entirety, and especially advise reading "Yarmouk Miniatures," about the role of theater under the Assad regime, the broader theatricality of life under dictatorship, and the condition of intellectual and life in a state of civil war. I think this will go down as one of the era's best pieces, frankly. It also quotes Stephen Greenblatt, whose essay on Shakespeare in Tehran I linked to in the OP.

GalacticAcid fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Sep 23, 2015

TheOtherContraGuy
Jul 4, 2007

brave skeleton sacrifice

GalacticAcid posted:

Highly agree. The September 24th issue I thought was astoundingly good, although I think Timothy Snyder is full of poo poo. Jessica Matthews on American foreign policy, James Surowiecki on Stiglitz, RJW Evans on the building of state terror apparatuses between the French Revolution and 1848, and what I have to assume was Oliver Sacks's last essay were all excellent.


The NY Review of Books doesn't publish fiction, unlike The New Yorker. It comes fortnightly, whereas The New Yorker comes monthly. Personally, I think the quality standard is more exacting in the NY Review - The New Yorker is a little more hit-or-miss in my opinion. The NY Review also doesn't really do humor of any kind. It does publish excellent poetry, probably my favorite regular selection since Henri Cole left The New Republic.

I haven't read the whole issue yet, but the article on Mandate-era Jewish extremism was extremely interesting.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/sep/24/jewish-terrorists/

Solkanar512
Dec 28, 2006

by the sex ghost
I know the OP mentioned IEEE, but are there any others out there covering science/technology/mathematics/engineering?

And here's one from left field - Archeology. There are some decent articles in Smithsonian and National Geographic, but it's fascinating to see this thread and find out about the really good stuff, you know?

Jacobin
Feb 1, 2013

by exmarx

daft posted:

I don't know if it qualifies but the few articles I have read on The Baffler have been pretty good. Thanks for the post OP.

I was going to say the Baffler definitely deserve some treatment, and my coincidental-namesake Jacobin magazine did an article on the Baffler: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/12/modify-your-dissent/

GalacticAcid
Apr 8, 2013

NEW YORK VALUES

Solkanar512 posted:


And here's one from left field - Archeology.

I realize that I'm clobbering a dead horse here but you will enjoy this Ingrid Rowland review of "The Priest, the Prince, and the Pasha" about the discovery and display of some seminal Egyptian artifacts, notably the "Boston Green Head." This essay is also from the September 24th issue of the NY Review.



The head in question.

Anyway a friend of mine in the field recommends the American Journal of Archaeology or the more specific Journal of Roman Archaeology - note that I can't personally vouch for either.

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Weembles
Apr 19, 2004

GalacticAcid posted:

The NY Review of Books doesn't publish fiction, unlike The New Yorker. It comes fortnightly, whereas The New Yorker comes monthly.

The New Yorker is't a monthly, it's a weekly.

They occaisonally publish double issues which cover two weeks, though.

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