3 ms·
The NYRB is that very boring family friend who has no idea how to talk to anyone who’s not a tenured professor and consequently spends most of his time in an ar
by cageface 2y ago
The NYRB is that very boring family friend who has no idea how to talk to anyone who’s not a tenured professor and consequently spends most of his time in an armchair.
We must be reading a different NYRB. The NYRB is one of the few remaining consistently thoughtful and interesting magazines. Nobody has better political coverage now and their book reviews transcend the issues the author of this article laments.
- shuckles 2y agoThe New York Times Book Review and New York Review of Books are different publications.
- cageface 2y agoYep I know. I've been a NYRB subscriber for literally decades. I never read the NYT review.
- zerocrates 2y agoThey are, but the comment you replied to is quoting a part of the article that's offhandedly criticizing the New York Review of Books.
- carabiner 2y agoThe article discusses both.
- Popeyes 2y agoJust like functions, naming your book review publication in New York is hard.
- mturmon 2y agoYeah, that was when I knew for sure that the author is trying to make a point and didn’t care about the facts. I’ve read NYRoB since the 1990s and you are right, they had and have a lot of really good writing and reviews. The thing OP unforgivably misses is that today’s NYRoB is not the same as a decade ago. The editors have changed and it’s noticeably less “clubby” (less, as they used to say, “New York Review of each other’s books”). Also, worryingly thinner? So the characterization in OP is out of date, to the extent that it ever had some truth. Also, what’s the fucking problem with writing at the level of sophistication of a tenured professor? * Also, someone has to toss this quote in somewhere: >> Thirty-six years earlier, disgust with the same ubiquitous, thin gruel [in NYTBR] had prompted Edmund Wilson to declare in the second issue of The New York Review of Books: “The disappearance of the Times Sunday book section at the time of the printers’ strike only made us realize it had never existed.” As quoted in: https://www.cjr.org/cover_story/goodbye_to_all_that_1.php https://www.cjr.org/cover_story/goodbye_to_all_that_1.php