the new yorker
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Mary Todd Lincoln: The Controversial First Lady
Mary Todd Lincoln was no Jackie Kennedy. Although Mary Lincoln is often portrayed as being consumed by aristocratic airs, she hardly fit in with the upper-class. She spent hefty sums of money on custom tailored dresses to “look the part;”…
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“Who the hell is interested, anyway?”
In 1957, Truman Capote had done it again. Written for The New Yorker, “The Duke in His Domain” dissolved the absolute mystery surrounding Marlon Brando. And of course, it was Capote, and The New Yorker, so the writing was rich as chocolate…
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Improve your prose with Math
Alright fiction writers, put down your pens for a moment and let’s talk math. If you recoil when hearing the “M-word” or brace your index fingers into a cross at the sight of algebra or calculus books—you’re not alone. But…
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Simple Madness or Something Else?
Today is the day for ghost stories. At The New Yorker, Brad Leithauser analyzes Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” focusing on the distinction still being puzzled out by readers and scholars alike: were the ghosts real, or was…
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Getting the Story Straight
Ever wonder how the New Yorker gets their facts right? Here’s a hint: it’s not the editor. In an excerpt from The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry, chapter five, “Fact-Checking at…
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A Responsibility to the Classics
We’ve all got those books we’ve been meaning to read. Whether we heard about them yesterday, or saw them in a bookstore window a couple of months ago, or we can’t quite remember when but someone told us about something…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Dorothea Lasky v. Elizabeth Bishop
All of a sudden my inbox is filling up with links from friends to two essays related to poetry that have almost everything and nothing in common at once, and whose implications say a lot about how the art of…
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When We Allow the Imagination to Roam Free
At The New Yorker, Saturday Rumpus editor Michelle Dean explores what Mitt Romney might learn from Wallace Stevens. “This embedded idea, that there was something liberating in the elimination of risk, led Stevens to write approvingly in that company journal…
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Trouble In Nipple Paradise
The New Yorker recently posted a cartoon which features a naked, and post-coital, Adam and Eve to their Facebook page. What resulted was a kerfuffle between the magazine and social media site over their nudity regulation policies. Specifically, Facebook took issue…
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How Critics Affect Artists
An artist’s work can take years to complete, while a critic’s take on said art can be formulated in a matter of hours. This distinction is pointed out early on in Richard Brody’s discussion of criticism at The New Yorker. …
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The Rumpus Interview with Hart Seely
Tom Barbash talks with author and reporter Hart Seely about winning ballgames from your couch, Donald Rumsfeld, faking sanity, and the fate of quality journalism in the online era of click chasing.
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The Lehrer Affair
If Jonah Lehrer ever writes a book about irrationality, it would be hard to imagine a better case study than his own. Like the best of his stories, it’s surprising, instructive, and deeply ironic.