The New Yorker | The New Yorker
May.01.2009
WASHINGTON — Congress announced plans today to review the use of performance-enhancing drugs among American authors, with star-studded hearings scheduled next month and legislation to limit access to steroids. Two House panels are planning mid-January hearings featuring former President Bill...
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Apr.05.2009
Along with other Guiding Light fans, I've been working my way through the five stages of grief. I actually got a head start. While I held out a tiny glimmer of hope for GL's future after I read through last December's reports from Peapack, in my heart of hearts I knew it just wasn't going to happen...
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Mar.30.2009
Really, you do. In a 1972 New Yorker piece titled, "Afternoon Television: Unhappiness Enough and Time," Renata Adler noted that Guiding Light had been "one of the most watched programs in daytime television. No more. The Doctors was just a better-written, better-acted epic of despair...
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Mar.09.2009
Two quotes: "Fiction is about what it is to be a fucking human being" and good writing should help readers "become less alone inside."
I saw both of these quotes by David Foster Wallace in the March 9 edition of The New Yorker in a story by D.T. Max. They struck me for a number...
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Feb.12.2009
In her New Yorker article (Feb. 9, '09), Another Country, James Baldwin’s Flight from America, Claudia Roth Pierpont describes Baldwin’s 1961 arrival at a party in Istanbul.
“Baldwin’s arrival at his Turkish friend’s door, in the midst of a party, was, as the friend recalled, a great surprise: two...
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Nov.17.2008
I noticed recently some rather curious comma choices in the New Yorker. Specifically, its editors seem to prefer to set off with commas prepositional phrases of "in" + a year. They don't do it all the time, but they seem to do it a lot lately. Some examples:
When he died, in 1984, he was...
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Sep.12.2008
I'm fascinated with sentences. I'm also fascinated with the New Yorker. The latter not necessarily in a good way. And that's all the context I can offer to explain why today I'm asking you to compare some opening sentences from the Atlantic magazine to some from the New Yorker.
Here are the first...
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Aug.07.2008
Medical Clinic
Procedure is for "US BREAST UNILAT... lump or mass in breast. Clinical data:lump at 9 o'clock about 8 mm-1 cm size, cystic..."
"...at 9 o'clock"? Can't help thinking of World War II movies, gunnery specialists, air force pilots and sailors locating the enemy's...
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Jul.28.2008
Writer’s block.
It sounds pathetic in this day and age. In a world where every Tom, Dick and Sally is frantically typing his or her every waking thought, the quaint notion of writer’s block in a social media environment seems like a poor excuse of sorts.
We are in the midst of one of the most...
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May.31.2008
I just read a great essay in this week's New Yorker. The title is "Awake" by Jenny Allen. It's about sleeplessness, how Buddha, who was the "awakened one," must have learned all about it from middle-aged women. Allen's essay inspired the following:
I am a middle-aged woman,...
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