Because The New Yorker is a pretentious rag filled with pseudo-erudite 5,000-word ramblings on The Hills, I will compose my review of the magazine in crude bullet points:GOOD
- Good writers
- Sometimes good stories
- Sometimes good poems
- Sometimes moderately amusing cartoons
NOT GOOD - Overblown high-brow reviews of fucking everything, from Forgetting Sarah Marshall to local bars that everyone local already knows about, but will now be filled with ever and ever more yupsters from Manhattan.
- Self-congratulatory advertising for lifestyle items that no one cares about
- Snore-inducing "ethnic" pieces, usually involving a writer who, if not non-white, has lived abroad, and is talking about something involving cooking. These "cooking" pieces are often written by women. We women sure do like us some cookin'!
- Weak-ass, unfunny weekly caption contest
- The same content every single week wrapped in a different cover (sometimes, if you're really lucky, three covers at once!). I really cannot tell one issue apart from the one before or after it.
- Total lack of interest in "debut" authors and poets in favor of crusty old "established," or in some cases dead, writers.
Yeah, I subscribe to keep myself "apprised" of current writing, but the staff of this magazine needs to quit fooling itself that it's discovering or uncovering anything that hasn't been covered to death elsewhere. I don't ever actually end up reading any of the issues. They collect on my floor, in dusty stacks, which is pretty much where they belong.
RATING: 27%
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6 comments:
In the third paragraph of your NOT GOOD section, you've spelled induce with an s. In the fifth, there's a typo that turns or into "of."
I'm not trying to be a pedant, but if this were my post I'd want someone to tell me. By all means, delete the shit out of this comment once you've read it.
I've never read an issue of the New Yorker, although I saw one of those Mad magazine back cover fold-ins that showed their monocled mascot being robbed at gunpoint. I was only, like, 9 or something, so at the time I didn't really get it.
I promised you crude! "Crude" does not include spell-check. Also, that man with the monocle is the only kind of person who should be reading The New Yorker.
I don't really know who the target audience of MAD Magazine is supposed to be. On one hand, you have movie parodies like Fart Trek, but on the other hand you take digs at the New Yorker.
Also, I do want to point out that although I too hate the New Yorker, I also would love to be published there immediately please.
Send them any one of your poems, any one, even one about knock-knock jokes, and preface it as "a foreign-born Arab's response to 9/11." It will be published immediately.
This is such a great post. The New Yorker really is awful. Almost as bad as the NY Times has become.
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