reading the new yorker

favorite passages from each edition.

[readingthenewyorker]

As for Lester Bangs, the rock journalist in “Almost Famous” (2000), nothing in Hoffman’s résumé was more wrenching than the careful, low-toned advice that Bangs dispensed over the phone, one evening, to a rookie in the same profession, steering him away from bright lights, and from the lure of loveliness. “Good-looking people, they got no spine; their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we’re smarter,” he said, adding, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”

How could that not speak to a million moviegoers? If they embraced Hoffman with ardor, it was in part because he looked so uncool, and so unbeautiful, and because he so obviously hailed from the same tribe as they did, and because there was a kind of beauty, after all, in the flame of feeling that got stoked inside that sweaty heft and pallor. The ordinary body housed a furnace.

[readingthenewyorker]

Hating some crazy old loudmouth who is a vindictive bully and lives in a castle is far less of a strain than thinking about the vulgarity and the prejudices of his audience.

Jill Lepore: The Reputation of Roger Ailes : The New Yorker

[readingthenewyorker]

You could set “The Great Beauty” in America, but only if Harper Lee had spent her evenings at Studio 54.

Anthony Lane: “The Great Beauty” and “Philomena” Reviews : The New Yorker

[readingthenewyorker]

Armed with a jar of peanut butter and gallons of milk (casein, a protein in dairy products, can alleviate the effects of capsaicin), he regularly sets himself such stunts as eating twenty-one of the world’s hottest peppers: seven bhut jolokia, five Trinidad Scorpion Butch Ts, four Douglah 7-Pots, three Trinidad Moruga Scorpions, two Jonah 7-Pots. (He made it through eleven of them.) Last June, he and a friend decided to try the Carolina Reaper.

— "Lauren Collins: Fire-Eaters : The New Yorker

HP22B CAROLINA REAPER ( OFFICIAL FBI REVIEW FROM HELL ) GUINNESS WORLDS HOTTEST PEPPER (by tedbarrus)

[readingthenewyorker]

(via Les Chiffoniers Metallic Stripe Pants | SHOPBOP) I was curious about what the future of pants looked like, so I looked it up and they are on the sale rack at Shopbop for $172.50. I believe these are the pants discussed here:

...Thanks to an introduction by Rosen, the factory [InStyle USA] has been working with an Italian company called Framis, which manufactures specialized machines that use heat to bond fabrics, allowing designers to create garments that incorporate multiple textures seamlessly. The machines cost twenty thousand dollars. At the moment, there are none in New York's garment district. Rosen's scheme would cover half the cost should a local company make a successful application for a grant. "It creates a whole different, modern technique to how clothing is done," he said of the machine. "It is going to be important in the future."

At InStyle, Rosen showed me a pair of pants that were being made using this bonding method, designed by a company called Les Chiffoniers. The pants were white twill, with a metallic rubberized stripe seamlessly attached, contributing nothing in bulk but plenty in style, if you go for white-and-silver pants.

[readingthenewyorker]

Looking at our minds with our minds is like writing a book about hallucinations while on LSD: you can’t tell the perceptual evidence from your own inner state.

Adam Gopnik: The New Neuro-Skeptics : The New Yorker

[readingthenewyorker]

But starting on Monday, New Yorker fans are going to notice some small but subtle design changes across its pages, which were led by its creative director, Wyatt Mitchell. The magazine is updating its table of contents, contributors page, “Goings On About Town,” Briefly Noted and Fiction sections. These changes include changing the number of columns, redrawing the Irvin typeface and introducing Neutraface as a secondary one.

C'mon, I obviously need to know more about the redrawing of Irvin.

[readingthenewyorker]

Tian Tian and Mei Xiang are simply “reproductively incompetent.” A key difficulty is that Mei Xiang places herself in what he called “pancake position”—flat on her stomach, legs outstretched—and Tian Tian isn’t assertive enough to lift her off the ground. Rather than mounting from behind or pulling her toward his lap, he steps onto her back and stands there like a man who has just opened a large box from Ikea and has no idea what to do next.

David Owen: Why Do Pandas Have Such Difficulty Breeding in Zoos? : The New Yorker

[readingthenewyorker]

The penis of an unneutered cat has barbs all over it, like the treads you drive over when you return a rental car.

Ariel Levy: Cat Breeders and the Allure of the Undomesticated Cat : The New Yorker

[readingthenewyorker]

It’s a self-eating watermelon of despair.

Burkhard Bilger: A New Era in Mars Exploration : The New Yorker

[readingthenewyorker]

The protagonist, Robert, is a young man, an odd-looking, rigid colossus who harbors a “vast abundance of love.” He is violently separated from his parents—his father catches his mother with her lover, brutally kills them both, and then slips away in a car—and in their absence he concludes that “nothing matters.” He has an ecstatic encounter with an ancient Greek vase.

My favorite part of this completely disturbing and fascinating article. This article also taught me the word "mishegoss".