I have been a faithful reader of New Yorker for about 40 years, but I am wonder if it is time to let my subscription lapse. They are no longer content to have ideas big enough to justify waiting a week so they email readers every day. Here are some subject lines:
- Trump’s Sham Populism, Exposed (i.e., Donald Trump is a liar and we need to pay $100/year to understand that)
- Scott Pruitt Rejects Climate-Change Reality, an article on planetary physics by Amy Davidson, who has a bachelor’s degree in “Social Studies”
- Donald Trump’s Worst Deal (about a hotel in Azerbaijan that is no doubt core to the multi-billionaire’s empire; the only dollar figure mentioned is $2.8 million, less than the cost of a D-check (12-year) inspection on King Donald’s personal Boeing 757)
- Trump Learns That Health Care Is “Complicated” (i.e., Donald Trump is a moron)
- Can a Free Mind Survive in Trump’s White House?
- Holding Trump Accountable (for not being Hillary Clinton?)
- The Deep Denialism of Donald Trump (for not admitting that he is inferior to Hillary Clinton?)
- We Need the Truth About Trump and Russia (because the Red Scare of the 1950s wasn’t sufficient)
- Orwell’s “1984” and Trump’s America (Trump is “pure Big Brother”)
- “Neil Gorsuch Tried to Prove His Independence — During his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Gorsuch attempted to show that he is not a stooge of the Trump machine.” (A guy who gets a guaranteed hyper-technical job for life will be secretly controlled by the layperson who appointed him.)
Even if I could vote for President at some point prior to 2020 and even if I lived in a state in which my vote counted, why would any of this be interesting? The New Yorker used to publish material that people referenced 10 or 20 years later. Statistically Donald Trump will be dead and buried pretty soon. At that point who would care to read, recall, or reference any of the above?
The top story as I wrote this entry was “The G.O.P.’s Lousy Health-Care Bill,” pointing out that if it is no longer illegal to refrain from purchasing health insurance then a lot of young people will shut their checkbooks. The magazine’s bias is apparent in the subhead “Twenty-four million people stand to lose their insurance”. Clicking into the article reveals that what people are “losing” is being compelled to buy something that they don’t want, at least not at the quoted price. Isn’t almost everything regarding Obamacare and its repeal a dog-bites-man story (stop using tax dollars to give people free X and there will be fewer people with X; stop making it illegal to go without X and there will be fewer people with X)?
Presumably this strategy is working for New Yorker’s bottom line. I’m wondering if it is because of Facebook and the fact that the most-shared stories are the ones that generate outrage. So they print stuff that virtuous Trump-haters can feature to their Trump-hating friends and they can all be outraged together about how stupid, racist, and sexist their fellow citizens are. But isn’t this market niche already pretty well filled by traditional news sources such as the New York Times, the Guardian, or CNN? Is the market for Trump-hatred truly unlimited?
Other New Yorker readers here in Massachusetts, where at least Two Minutes of Trump Hatred are required every day, are pointing out the same thing: we don’t need the New Yorker to remind us that people who live in a city that got crazy fat off the status quo don’t like the candidate voted in by the non-coastal deplorables. There must be something else occurring or being created on Planet Earth that is worth writing about.
Related (some New Yorker stories that I remember liking, none having to do with the moral superiority of Democrats):
Two questions:
– Why pay $100 to their “customer loyalty program” when the annual subscription is listed at $60 on their Web site? I know, I’ve seen that too: please accept our exclusive discounted renewal price of $100 and save up to 99.99999999999% of the newsstand price.
– Why waste time on John Cassidy’s scribbles when, e.g., Atul Gawande writes for the same magazine? “And all the lousy little poets coming ’round tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson..”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_(Leonard_Cohen_album)
I was very close to making this decision immediately after the election. Alas, I’m hoping the publication gets back to doing what it does best—as I’m hoping we all do once the mania subsides (and I’m thinking it will simply have to).
Hi Philip,
What was your opinion of Tina Brown years (1992-98) at the New Yorker? Personally I hated them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Brown#The_New_Yorker
I posted 12 links to New Yorker articles on Twitter in 2016-7, presumably ones I thought were especially good. 10 out of 12 of those were before June 1. That statistically insignificant, totally biased sample does rather support your thesis.
By the way, 2 of the 12 articles were about Trump, they were hilarious.
LESSONS FROM PLAYING GOLF WITH TRUMP
January 14, 2017
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/lessons-from-playing-golf-with-trump
THE UNSOLVABLE MYSTERIES OF THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT
By Josephine Livingstone November 30, 2016
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-unsolvable-mysteries-of-the-voynich-manuscript
THE BIG UNEASY
MAY 30, 2016 ISSUE
What’s roiling the liberal-arts campus?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges
“WRITING IS AN ACT OF PRIDE”: A CONVERSATION WITH ELENA FERRANTE
By Nicola Lagioia May 19, 2016
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/writing-is-an-act-of-pride-a-conversation-with-elena-ferrante
March 30, 2016
The Strange Origins of TrueCrypt, ISIS’s Favored Encryption Tool
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-strange-origins-of-truecrypt-isiss-favored-encryption-tool
WHY ARE EDUCATORS LEARNING HOW TO INTERROGATE THEIR STUDENTS?
By Douglas Starr March 25, 2016
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-are-educators-learning-how-to-interrogate-their-students
A REPORTER AT LARGE MARCH 28, 2016 ISSUE
EXPORTING JIHAD
The Arab Spring has given Tunisians the freedom to act on their unhappiness.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/28/tunisia-and-the-fall-after-the-arab-spring
MARK SINGER ON THE PERILS OF PROFILING DONALD TRUMP
By The New Yorker March 11, 2016
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/video-mark-singer-on-the-perils-of-profiling-donald-trump
UNDER THE CRUSHING WEIGHT OF THE TUSCAN SUN
By Jason Wilson March 11, 2016
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/under-the-crushing-weight-of-the-tuscan-sun
KEEPING UP WITH THE COUNTRY’S YOUNGEST FEMALE MONSTER-TRUCK DRIVER
By Ian Frisch February 17, 2016
http://www.newyorker.com/news/sporting-scene/keeping-up-with-the-countrys-youngest-female-monster-truck-driver
February 11, 2016
Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/gravitational-waves-exist-heres-how-scientists-finally-found-them
JANUARY 11, 2016 ISSUE
THE WALL DANCER
Ashima Shiraishi’s route to the top.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/11/the-wall-dancer
To be fair, you were the one who gave them your email address.
As for those who want to hold Trump accountable, I always ask them how much time they spent holding Obama accountable.
I subscribe, but I get no emails. I do most of my perusal on my iPad, but AFAIK there is no digital-only option so most of the paper copies go straight to trash. I subscribe primarily for Anthony Lane’s film reviews and the cartoons — every six months or so one of the latter goes onto my refrigerator. Occasionally I read an article on some subject of interest, which for me excludes politics.
I don’t pay $100 — is that the current (pre-rounded) annual rate? Once or twice I’ve let my subscription lapse for a while to get better deals. This is one of my stinginess peccadillos.
I bagged my longtime subscription just after the election. I was tired of the great David Remnick telling me how stupid I was for even thinking about voting for he-who-shall-not-be-named. It was like an 8 yo screeching in my ear because we weren’t going to watch any more Sesame Street.
Now, I just read the non-fiction books mentioned here: Private Empire, Eccentric Orbits, etc, so thanks Phil.
One small quibble with EO, Bloom describes Adm Chuck Larson as a ‘Top Gun fighter pilot and submarine commander’. A three minute wikipedia search indicated he joined the sub community from aviation in 1963, but Top Gun (Fighter Weapons School) didn’t start until 1969. That kind of stuff annoys me. It’s already impressive to me that he was both a pilot and a sub commander. Why the need to embellish with falsehood?
Trump has driven many liberals over the edge. He is living rent free inside their heads. The Washington Post’s new slogan is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. “Trump is Hitler” was taken, I guess.
The New Yorker’s righteous Democratic party bias is not exactly recent history. And let’s face it, the Trumpenfuhrer is an easy target for lazy journalists because he says something inane most every day. But hey, if you want to read smug, well written articles on random subjects, rocks along the interstate, Chinese merchants selling lingerie in Egypt, snicker at the rubes in West Virginia or Michigan or Ohio, and while living in your split level in suburbia want to fantasize about living in NYC, enjoying the best the US has to offer for food, the arts and intellectual life — but not actually living there — what else are you going to read — the New York Post?
Was “Democracy Dies in Darkness” an invitation to burn newspapers, I wonder?
IMHO, the trend started over a decade ago, when the focus of broadsheet newspapers in the US shifted from informing the reader to entertaining and engaging them emotionally. Building a “community” and becoming its “thought leader” has become a priority; an old-style journalistic principle of strictly separating news from opinions has been thrown to the wind.
And the market cheered, um… kinda. The rejuvenated “serious” newspapers have become just like The Sun in Britain, only without tits in the centerfold; and I’d say tits is arguably the best way to build an active community.
No wonder that the media loves to hate Trump: that’s what their community demands. We have both liberal (majority) and conservative (minority) newspapers in this country, but we no longer have newspapers worth reading.
For similar concerns as yours, they lost me as a long time subscriber early this year. My only regret is not pulling the plug a couple of years ago.
Its true. The New Yorker goes too far into leftist garbage crap on a regular basis. Occasionally it publishes something worth reading, and still at a higher frequency then most magazines.
The Atlantic is still good tho, and is probably the only major news/commentary magazine I read on a regular basis.
They lost me when Hendrik Hertzberg started writing “Talk of the Town.”
“What was your opinion of Tina Brown years (1992-98) at the New Yorker? ”
I also hated the Tina Brown era and this was when I stopped reading “the New Yorker”.
Then things improved a good deal when David Remnick became editor in 1998, and in the 00s the magazine was good again. Then sometime around 2010 the quality started sliding and now the magazine is even worse than it was when Brown was editor.
This time around I don’t know what happened, and I’m curious what the story will turn out to be. Remnick is too young to be going senile, and the deterioration this time was gradual enough for it to be easy to miss the signs.
None of the print publications have weathered the rise of the internet now in terms of either business or quality.
My suspicion is that the response to the internet was to bring in a bunch of marketing consultants and then dumb down the publications, which, if there is a way for a periodical to survive the internet, is probably the exact opposite of what they should have been doing. A few became vanity publications/ mouthpieces for sugar daddies, which didn’t help the quality for the reader.
philg has been reading the New Yorker a lot longer than I did, so I can understand his reluctance to part company with it. I gave up on it after Obama’s election, but the last couple of years of the Bush administration weren’t much fun. I don’t know whether it is a change in the magazine, or a change in my outlook, but it seems like the balance between “informative” and “propaganda” has shifted too far for my taste.
Alas, I will miss Malcolm Gladwell, “North America’s greatest thinker” – h/t Phil. To think of all the valuable education I’ll miss out on. Oh well, I guess I can still view his Ted talks. Now, if they resort to having a titties-filled centerfold, I’m in! Remnick, Hertzberg, and ‘the Wise One’ are small prices to pay (for hopefully GIANT titty spreads).
Patrick: I didn’t hate the Tina Brown years. There was a little more topical/fluffy stuff, but not always political and not the same points made over and over again.
Others: It didn’t bother me that New Yorker took about 5 percent of the magazine to praise Obama and His works and/or damn the Republicans for obstructing the wonders that He might otherwise have been able to accomplish. I live in Massachusetts after all! But the last year or so they’ve spent so much ink condemning Trump and the Deplorables (a rock band?) that there is no reason to subscribe (since I can get that any time on Facebook/CNN/MSNBC/Nytimes/etc.).
@wally:
Was it Malcolm Gladwell who said I needed to dedicate at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to show my titties before I could get accepted to a major centerfold? As an older male I protest, and I hope you would too–if you ever saw them!
Why don’t you just drop it…see if you miss it…subscribe again if you do?
You constantly amaze me with your overthinking of unimportant, mundane matters.
I agree with you, Phil. I’ve been reading it since 1964, when I was a freshman at HLS. The magazine is obsessed with Trump and seems to have developed a patronizing contempt for the ability of its readers to think for themselves in political matters.