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I went into the New Yorker offices at the One World Trade Center for the first time to work on an assignment, and man—what a beautiful place. It was so futuristic and well lit. I’ve been reading the magazine for a while, and seeing the different departments working on it in the flesh was an eye-opening experience. While I was going on a tour, I saw Richard Brody, the film critic, at his laptop writing, with a hot coffee by his side. He was stroking his long grey beard, seemingly in the zone. I thought… “Wow, these people are actually real and not just those iconic cartoon profile pictures.” Great place to work.
Nov 15, 2022
Related Recs
I really like reading the New Yorker and have done so for about a decade. I no longer live in New York but I still read the Tables For Two section excitedly first thing every week and try to get through the majority of the articles. However, there are sooooo many more in the backlogs and the iPhone app is actually quite optimized with previous published pieces so I like to sift through the internet to see what people recommend from the past, and also use their Sunday Archive emails to delve into old writings. It's cool to see people like J.D. Salinger or Truman Capote writing articles for them back in the day. One I recently loved was the original publishing of the Brokeback Mountain short story in the fiction section. As a Wyoming native I found the descriptions of the landscape and energy to be so richly written.
Sep 24, 2024
📰
When I was a kid I was obsessed with making funny captions for the images on the back of The New Yorker. There was a competition where you would send in your funny caption and there was a chance it would appear in the next issue. I never won.
My love for this magazine was reignited recently when I read an excellent profile piece on Fiona Apple. It was published just prior to the release of Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020) and written by one of my favorite TV critics, Emily Nussbaum. Piece can be found in the attached link.
More recently I've been going through the lists what the magazine considers the best media of the year. Movies, books, records, most of them are good. It's great to get out of an internet bubble where all people do is listen to shit posted on /mu/, and bolded on rym; to listen the experts as it were.
Dec 15, 2023
🗞
I love to see which top-voted entries didn’t get picked. I like to be nosy - I always want to know what’s going on behind the editorial curtain.
Feb 6, 2024
Top Recs from @marcus-maddox
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Night Walk is one of my favorite photography books of the last decade. It’s an incredible document of the tumultuous Lower East Side in the 1980’s. Described as a “narrative of lost youth,” it incapsulates a raw energy in a specific moment in time. Rarely do I see still images so expressive, so intentionally chaotic but with an artistic authority. This book is a force, and it doesn’t have a lot of text which I love. Just purely moving imagery. The photos of the art scene resonate with me. It’s a reworking of the original book, Invisible City, which came out in 1988.
Nov 15, 2022
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This is a book of interviews with 12 pioneering artists who create photo books. It’s a long discussion about two of my deepest passions: photography and bookmaking. I found it because of the curator David Campany, and it is a must have for those who take their photography seriously. The most visceral interview is with the photographer Larry Clark, who talks about getting sued by the grandparents of a baby he photographed, leaving out pictures of sawed off shot guns, and his commitment to never making his friends look bad. There’s a lot of passages about book design, a range of photography styles, and the meaning of success. This book is a gold mine of insight, and I carry it with me like a bible.
Nov 15, 2022
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I’m a nerd when it comes to image composition, and James Cowman has a relatively obscure YouTube channel dedicated solely to the art of composition. His videos are amazing and some of them literally have less than 500 views. There’s some good writing on photography out there, but almost no good resources specifically about composition. I rarely get helpful information, with examples, that go beyond the rule of thirds. This guy is breaking that mold… by explaining the harmonic armature. I love James’ passionately critical attitude towards the medium. He might get some flack for it, according to the contact page on his website, but I love his work. His video about Henri Cartier-Bresson is so honest and insightful.
Nov 15, 2022