Colin Brace
On 2/21/06, joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> Yes, I do and I read that article. The New Yorker is not what it used
> to be, but once in a while, there is still some great stuff in it.
Just curious: what was it when it was what it used to be, and when was that? ;)
I've been reading the magazine since my early teens (early 1970s), admittedly with breaks of a decade or two here and there, and I can't honestly say whether it is dramatically different now then then. Perhaps it was more literary then, less au courant -- but also more stodgy. Now it slightly hipper, more attention to current affairs, investigative reporting by the likes of Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer's pieces on torture and rendition, Alma Guillermoprieto's dispatches from Latin America...
However, I can easily imagine how you might be bored by the center-leftism of its editorial voice.
For my part, I am not sure I could ever be entirely objective about how the magazine used to be, since my memories of reading it in my youth are inexplicably intertwined with a certain nostalgia for the context; holiday visits to ancient relatives who had a stack of the last six month's issues in their parlours, and the luxury of being able to pass hours flipping through in their pages, reading things like a long, long piece on the Grand Ole Opry by a then-unknown Garrison Keillor. The magazine then seemed to be something for either the young or the old; middle-aged people were too busy getting on with their lives.
I remember once talking about the New Yorker to a friend from Berkeley -- this was easily a decade ago; must have already been after the arrival of Tina Brown -- and he sighed that New Yorker just wasn't what it used to be; somehow it had gotten more superficial. Yes, they still published long articles, but they articles they used to published used to be REALLY long. It wasn't just the length though but... what?
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam
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As a Christmas gift, I received the complete New Yorker on 8 CDs. It has a fairly good search engine, so one can look for particular articles, stories, writers, etc.; or one can just browse page by page, issue by issue, through 80 years. I, too, had a memory of the New Yorker from the '70s as being considerably different from the present - less commercial, more genteel. Wrong. The magazine seems to have been essentially the same throughout its history.