The New Yorker

[Sneakeater]

Mitchell is right on this precise point, though: as a classical music fan, I find its use in classical venues to be an outrage.

[Sneakeater]

Ian Frazier aces the Ellin Mackay piece.

 

I laughed. I cried.

[bloviatrix]

Ian Frazier aces the Ellin Mackay piece.

 

I laughed. I cried.

That was a good piece, but I really enjoyed the Mary Norris one. It reminded me of my father who, like The New Yorker, practiced the "close" style of punctuation and drilled it into me when I was young.

[Sneakeater]

Yeah I loved that piece. It's great she finally got a byline.

[Wilfrid]

If the New Yorker was as closely edited as its reputation suggests, it would never print a phrase like "the philosopher Otto Weininger." One has to assume that the editors who reviewed that copy didn't really know anything about Weininger. If you do, it reads about as plausibly as "the philosopher L. Ron Hubbard."

[Sneakeater]

Yeah I loved that piece. It's great she finally got a byline.

 

Oh, now she has a book.

[Wilfrid]

A biography of Joe Mitchell at last.

 

It confirms, of course, how much of his reporting was, er, non-factual (and how little that mattered). But it's hard to tell from Janet Malcolm's review whether it's at all enlightening about his many years of utter inactivity at the New Yorker. Possibly not at all.

[Suzanne F]

I am of two minds about Mary Norris and her book. I think, you should know, that I believe, The New Yorker overuses commas, to the point of making it impossible for me to read.

 

Wilf: perhaps they now rely on the belief that writers know their subject better than anyone else can. Always dangerous.

[Wilfrid]

Commas, commas. Last copy desk I worked with insisted on the "Oxford" comma, and now I can't stop dropping them everywhere.

[Suzanne F]

No: there's the Oxford comma, and then there's overuse of the comma.

[Wilfrid]

Ah, then, I think I must, in a sense, know, vaguely, what you mean.

[Sneakeater]

Commas, commas. Last copy desk I worked with insisted on the "Oxford" comma, and now I can't stop dropping them everywhere.

 

The Oxford comma is RIGHT.

[Wilfrid]

That's not saving the dairy/deli distinction.

[Sneakeater]

There is actually an article about Philippe Bertineau in the current New Yorker.

 

Philippe Bertineau.

 

This is so great.

[Sneakeater]

(It's by Bill Buford. But that isn't the point.)