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"Amazing read, much longer than I generally get hooked into." Please, please subscribe to the New Yorker in some fashion ... I personally subscribe to the kind

by rsync 10y ago

"Amazing read, much longer than I generally get hooked into." Please, please subscribe to the New Yorker in some fashion ... I personally subscribe to the kindle version which is a very useful and workable format. The New Yorker[1] regularly has very, very good long form articles that have deepened my understanding of what I consider to be very important issues. Off the top of my head, I can think of three such articles that stick out - their long treatment of the deepwater horizon accident and the chemical dispersants that were used in the cleanup, their decade-after-the-fact retrospective article on Gore vs. Bush, and a more recent article on the police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. [1] Also the London Review of Books which is excellent for long form current events articles. Also book reviews.

verelo 10y ago
I often find when I do get lost in an article, it's common to be something from the New Yorker. The articles are very well written and often explore the story in a way that is factual and creative that I really enjoy. Reading "Precedent and Prologue" (Gore V's bush supreme court article) I got so interested in the judicial activism concept and ended up lost on Wikipedia for a few hours bouncing around related articles. The exact same thing happened to me with this Mosul Dam article, when I saw myself reading about Gaddafi I realized I had gone so far down the rabbit hole that the topics I was now reading about were only vaguely related. All said and done, it's a good point i really should become a paid subscriber, thanks for suggesting it!
- nyolfen 10y ago
  it's gotten a lot of buzz lately, including on HN, but if you're interested in going down the gaddafi hole a bit further i'd recommend the recent adam curtis film, hypernormalisation. his films tend to be a bit like getting lost in a wikipedia hole in their own right, though.
  - emp_zealoth 10y ago
    Seconded Then watch Only The Dead (see the end of a war) by an australian bloke Good luck sleeping afterwards
    - mcphilip 10y ago
      No joke, just finished watching HyperNormalisation[1]. The most depressing part to me is that Adam Curtis isn't off on an easily dismissed tangent in this documentary, he's essentially cross cut the last 40 years into a 3 hour cliff notes guide to some of the darker corners of postmodern philosophy. Specifically, Baudrillard. His 2002 essay, The Violence of the Global[2] has some interesting food for thought: >We believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression. HyperNormalism is bleak and offers no solutions for course correcting international affairs, and there's the rub: universal solutions may not exist. For me, my mind's left reeling by the complexity of the times, leaving me at a loss for how to integrate information from sources like Baudrillard into my worldview guiding day-to-day behavior. My typical response is a hyperlocal focus on the people around me in meatspace and trying to at least get the basics right like the golden rule. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM [2]http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385 http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385
  - Angostura 10y ago
    You have to be a little careful though - https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg
    - omnimus 10y ago
      Adam Curtis does make some generalisations but i am not sure its possible without them. The world is so complex that anyone trying to understand the topic would have to go through same research Curtis had to. Its so hard to make point about global situation in 3 hours. It is a political commentary and sometimes its subjective but i think his work make lot of people think and investigate. That's whole lot better than something that tries to be objective no matter what - that always ends up saying practicaly nothing.
lobster_johnson 10y ago
The New York Review of Books is also wonderful. I prefer it to the LRB, though they share a bunch of contributors, and they're both great.
pasta 10y ago
Agreed. If you believe that you should not read main stream news (like I do) this is one of the sources to get 'good' news from.
- techsupporter 10y ago
  I don't mean to knock on The New Yorker or cast aspersions on your choices, but I have two rebuttals: First, longform articles such as this one usually come months or years after the fact and don't help with the primary mission of journalism, which is to keep you abreast of the goings on around you. (Of everything from "what your local government is doing and how that affects you" to "what the financial markets in another continent are up to and how that affects you.") This is my opinion, but I think that the pejorative "mainstream media" is often used as a substitute for "media that doesn't write a story how I want it written." Second, The New Yorker is owned by Advance Publications, which is about as "mainstream" of media as you're going to find. One of their larger publishing subsidiaries is Conde Nast, which publishes The New Yorker alongside Architectural Digest, Vogue, Golf World, GQ, and several other publications. You may also know them as the publisher of ArsTechnica. They also own more than 40 newspapers. Just my two cents, for what that's worth these days.
  - grzm 10y ago
    longform articles such as this one usually come months or years after the fact and don't help with the primary mission of journalism, which is to keep you abreast of the goings on around you I think there are many facets to the mission of journalism. In-depth and investigative journalism are very important as well as being kept up-to-date on what's happening in the day-to-day. In some cases I prefer these more in-depth pieces as they have some perspective on how the events they're describing are affected by historical context and how they are affecting what's going on in current events. Consider the Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate coverage or the Boston Globe's coverage of the child sex abuse by Catholic priests in Boston. Different events and issues can be served by different forms. For a piece like this, I have a hard time imagining it being served better as a short piece of a couple column inches in a paper or a 90 second segment on the evening news. Not all events need coverage like this, of course, but it doesn't make the long-form pieces any less an important and vital aspect of journalism.

by rsync 10y ago

verelo 10y ago

I often find when I do get lost in an article, it's common to be something from the New Yorker. The articles are very well written and often explore the story in a way that is factual and creative that I really enjoy. Reading "Precedent and Prologue" (Gore V's bush supreme court article) I got so interested in the judicial activism concept and ended up lost on Wikipedia for a few hours bouncing around related articles. The exact same thing happened to me with this Mosul Dam article, when I saw myself reading about Gaddafi I realized I had gone so far down the rabbit hole that the topics I was now reading about were only vaguely related. All said and done, it's a good point i really should become a paid subscriber, thanks for suggesting it!

nyolfen 10y ago
it's gotten a lot of buzz lately, including on HN, but if you're interested in going down the gaddafi hole a bit further i'd recommend the recent adam curtis film, hypernormalisation. his films tend to be a bit like getting lost in a wikipedia hole in their own right, though.
- emp_zealoth 10y ago
  Seconded Then watch Only The Dead (see the end of a war) by an australian bloke Good luck sleeping afterwards
  - mcphilip 10y ago
    No joke, just finished watching HyperNormalisation[1]. The most depressing part to me is that Adam Curtis isn't off on an easily dismissed tangent in this documentary, he's essentially cross cut the last 40 years into a 3 hour cliff notes guide to some of the darker corners of postmodern philosophy. Specifically, Baudrillard. His 2002 essay, The Violence of the Global[2] has some interesting food for thought: >We believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression. HyperNormalism is bleak and offers no solutions for course correcting international affairs, and there's the rub: universal solutions may not exist. For me, my mind's left reeling by the complexity of the times, leaving me at a loss for how to integrate information from sources like Baudrillard into my worldview guiding day-to-day behavior. My typical response is a hyperlocal focus on the people around me in meatspace and trying to at least get the basics right like the golden rule. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM [2]http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385 http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385
- Angostura 10y ago
  You have to be a little careful though - https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg
  - omnimus 10y ago
    Adam Curtis does make some generalisations but i am not sure its possible without them. The world is so complex that anyone trying to understand the topic would have to go through same research Curtis had to. Its so hard to make point about global situation in 3 hours. It is a political commentary and sometimes its subjective but i think his work make lot of people think and investigate. That's whole lot better than something that tries to be objective no matter what - that always ends up saying practicaly nothing.

lobster_johnson 10y ago

The New York Review of Books is also wonderful. I prefer it to the LRB, though they share a bunch of contributors, and they're both great.

pasta 10y ago

Agreed. If you believe that you should not read main stream news (like I do) this is one of the sources to get 'good' news from.

techsupporter 10y ago
I don't mean to knock on The New Yorker or cast aspersions on your choices, but I have two rebuttals: First, longform articles such as this one usually come months or years after the fact and don't help with the primary mission of journalism, which is to keep you abreast of the goings on around you. (Of everything from "what your local government is doing and how that affects you" to "what the financial markets in another continent are up to and how that affects you.") This is my opinion, but I think that the pejorative "mainstream media" is often used as a substitute for "media that doesn't write a story how I want it written." Second, The New Yorker is owned by Advance Publications, which is about as "mainstream" of media as you're going to find. One of their larger publishing subsidiaries is Conde Nast, which publishes The New Yorker alongside Architectural Digest, Vogue, Golf World, GQ, and several other publications. You may also know them as the publisher of ArsTechnica. They also own more than 40 newspapers. Just my two cents, for what that's worth these days.
- grzm 10y ago
  longform articles such as this one usually come months or years after the fact and don't help with the primary mission of journalism, which is to keep you abreast of the goings on around you I think there are many facets to the mission of journalism. In-depth and investigative journalism are very important as well as being kept up-to-date on what's happening in the day-to-day. In some cases I prefer these more in-depth pieces as they have some perspective on how the events they're describing are affected by historical context and how they are affecting what's going on in current events. Consider the Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate coverage or the Boston Globe's coverage of the child sex abuse by Catholic priests in Boston. Different events and issues can be served by different forms. For a piece like this, I have a hard time imagining it being served better as a short piece of a couple column inches in a paper or a 90 second segment on the evening news. Not all events need coverage like this, of course, but it doesn't make the long-form pieces any less an important and vital aspect of journalism.