Free New Yorker Articles!

[floridaorange]

The New Yorker is offering free unlimited access to all its stories from 2007 for the next three months. The link below is an annotated list of some of the best ones. I've read two so far, they are really great.

Enjoy!

New Yorker online free for three months. What should you read?


Here are some examples:

POLITICS AND WORLD AFFAIRS
“Hellhole,” March 30, 2009. Atul Gawande provides a groundbreaking examination into whether solitary confinement in the United States constitutes torture.

“Eight Days,” Sept. 21, 2009. This exhaustively reported story by James B. Stewart recounts the closed-door dealings that went down after Lehman Brothers imploded.

“The Empty Chamber,” Aug. 9, 2010. George Packer offers a sobering take on the staggering dysfunction and obstructionist theatrics that prevent progress in the United States Senate.

“Getting Bin Laden,” Aug. 8, 2011. This moment-by-moment account of the mission to get Osama Bin Laden, written by Nicholas Schmidle, is every bit as thrilling asZero Dark Thirty, and much more rigorously fact-checked.

“Netherland,” Dec. 10, 2012. Rachel Aviv delivers a powerful, shocking, and brilliant story on LGBTQ homeless youth.

“Taken,” Aug. 12, 2013. Sarah Stillman’s reporting illuminates an appalling, pervasive practice that you won’t believe actually exists.

PROFILES
“Master of Play,” Dec. 20, 2010. In this surprisingly rich profile of Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Super Mario Brothers and grandhomme of Nintendo, Nick Paumgarten explores what we seek out when we play.

“The Apostate,” Feb. 14, 2011. Lawrence Wright’s heavily vetted and fact-checked reporting on the Church of Scientology, which later evolved into the book Going Clear, offers a rare look into the notoriously secretive organization.

“How To Be Good,” Sept. 5, 2011. Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit addresses deep questions of morality, happiness, and suffering.

“Dr. Don,” Sept. 26, 2011. Peter Hessler’s profile of a small-town druggist in Colorado is a story of place as well as simple humanity.

“You Belong With Me,” Oct. 10, 2011. In Lizzie Widdicombe’s profile of Taylor Swift, the songstress comes off as a genius purveyor of teen-angst in tune form and an earnestly sensitive and precocious star.*

“The Yankee Commandante,” May 28, 2012. David Grann profiles William Morgan, an American who fled to Cuba and fought alongside Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the Revolution, only to be executed by firing squad under Castro’s orders.

CRIME
“Trial By Fire,” Sept. 7, 2009. David Grann’s gripping story demonstrated that by executing Cameron Todd Willingham for the murder of his family, the state of Texas may very well have killed an innocent man.

“The Pink Panthers,” April 12, 2010. David Samuels’ account of a band of brazen jewel thieves from the Balkans reads like a sophisticated detective novel.

“Iphegenia in Forest Hills,” May 3, 2010. Janet Malcolm turns a murder trial in Queens into a study of crime, the legal system, journalistic ethics, and insular immigrant communities. Like several pieces on this list, the story was later expanded into a book.

“The Throwaways,” Sept. 3, 2012. Sarah Stillman provides a crucial exposé about the use of young offenders as confidential informants.

“A Loaded Gun,” Feb. 11, 2013. In this thorough and troubling crime story, Patrick Radden Keefe examines the life of Amy Bishop, who killed six of her colleagues in a mass shooting, and 25 years ago, may have killed her brother, too.

SCIENCE
“Swingers,” July 30, 2007. This widely celebrated story by Ian Parker complicated the popular notion of the bonobo, a type of chimpanzee that had been hailed for its supposedly peaceful, sex-loving disposition.

“The Itch,” June 30, 2008. Atul Gawande probes the fascinating medical mystery of a woman whose puzzling itch caused her to scratch all the way through to her brain. Warning: might make you itchy.

“The Sixth Extinction?,” May 25, 2009. Elizabeth Kolbert’s consideration of the history of mass extinctions led to a book of the same name, published this year.

“God Knows Where I Am,” May 30, 2011. Rachel Aviv’s look at mental health patients who reject their psychiatric diagnoses is smart and heartbreaking in equal measures.

PERSONAL ESSAYS
“The Running Novelist,” June 9, 2008. Translated from Japanese, this essay by Haruki Murakami chronicles the parallels between a career as a novelist and a passion for running.

“Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” Nov. 18, 2013. Ariel Levy’s candid personal account of her brief but life-altering experience with motherhood is devastating.

“The Unmothered,” May 9, 2014. Ruth Margalit tenderly captures her experience of grief after losing her mother to cancer, detailing the unexpected ways in which it unfolded.

ARTS AND CRITICISM
“Noble Savages,” Feb. 27, 2012. One Slate staffer recalled reading James Wood's review of Edward St. Aubyn and “just thinking that it is impossible to write any better than that.”

“Danse Macabre,” March 18, 2013. David Remnick exposes the Bolshoi, once the jewel of Russian culture and favorite for political patronage from the Kremlin, as an organization struggling to retain its relevance, artistry, and prestige in modern times.*

“Home Fires,” April 7, 2014. George Packer takes on the literature of war, the memoirs of veterans, and the power of the storytelling.

FICTION
“Them Old Cowboy Songs,” May 5, 2008. This melancholy story about a young couple on a homestead won a National Magazine Award and appeared in Annie Proulx’s collection Fine Just the Way It Is.

“Midnight in Dostoevsky,” Nov. 30, 2009. This short story by Don DeLillo centers on a pair of college students taking a logic class together and wondering about a stranger they see around town.

HUMOR
“Guy Walks Into a Bar,” by Simon Rich, Nov. 18, 2013. This Shouts & Murmurs piece this is the best 12-inch pianist joke of all time.

Correction, July 22, 2014: This post originally misspelled Lizzie Widdicombe’s last name and David Remnick’s first name.

[floridaorange]

Re: Free New Yorker Articles!

from the article on "Scientology."

I asked Haggis why he had aligned himself with a religion that so many have disparaged. “I identify with the underdog,” he said. “I have a perverse pride in being a member of a group that people shun.” For Haggis, who likes to see himself as a man of the people, his affiliation with Scientology felt like a way of standing with the marginalized and the oppressed.

hmm,

Some aspects of Scientology baffled him. He hadn’t been able to get through “Dianetics”: “I read about thirty pages. I thought it was impenetrable.” But much of the coursework gave him a feeling of accomplishment. He was soon commuting from London, Ontario, to Toronto to take more advanced courses, and, in 1976, he travelled to Los Angeles for the first time. He checked in at the old Chateau Élysée, on Franklin Avenue. Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn had once stayed there, but when Haggis arrived it was a run-down church retreat called the Manor Hotel. (It has since been spectacularly renovated and turned into the flagship Celebrity Centre.) “I had a little apartment with a kitchen I could write in,” he recalls. “There was a feeling of camaraderie that was something I’d never experienced—all these atheists looking for something to believe in, and all these loners looking for a club to join.”

[KiwiTollway]

Re: Free New Yorker Articles!

^ that's interesting. At least he identified his deepest motive for aligning with a belief system.

I almost read that article, but chose two others, which I enjoyed reading --their stories will stay with me for a while (i.e., memorable). Oh, I tried to read one other, but gave it up midway thru. Going to try "Master of Play" next.

thanks!

[floridaorange]

Re: Free New Yorker Articles!

which ones have you read?

[KiwiTollway]

Re: Free New Yorker Articles!

"Midnight In Dostoevsky:"

“If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,” he said, “the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.”

We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real.
“In our privatest mind,” he said, “there is only chaos and blur. We invented logic to beat back our creatural selves. We assert or deny. We follow ‘M’ with ‘N.’ ”

Our privatest mind, we thought. Did he really say that?
“The only laws that matter are laws of thought."


"God Knows Where I Am"

"Thanksgiving In Mongolia"

"How To Be Good"...........

"Parfit developed a new aesthetic obsession: photography. He drifted into it—a rich uncle gave him an expensive camera—but later it occurred to him that his interest in committing to paper images of things he had seen might stem from his inability to hold those images in his mind. He also believed that most of the world looked better in reproduction than it did in life.

I may be somewhat unusual in the fact that I never get tired or sated with what I love most, so that I don’t need or want variety.

He disliked overhead lights, in which category he included the midday sun, but he loved the horizontal rays at the two ends of the day. He waited for hours, reading a book, for the right sort of light and the right sort of weather.
:
:

Although she [Theo] lived far away, she kept in touch with her parents and siblings and cousins. She tried to see her brother when he came to the East Coast, as he frequently did, to teach, but usually he didn’t call. He didn’t do this to avoid her—it simply didn’t occur to him, because he was thinking about philosophy. She knew this, and tried not to feel hurt. When they did see each other, he was very friendly.
:

As the years went by, Theo came to accept that although her brother loved her, it was simply not important to him to spend time with his family. He was extremely softhearted, and she knew that in a crisis he would always help her, but deepening ties to his past through continuity, valuing blood as a source of kinship—these were just not part of who he was. Years later, Parfit wrote to her in a letter that they had reacted to their unhappy family in opposite ways. They were like the Rhine and the Danube: they begin very close, but then they diverge—one flows to the Atlantic, the other to the Black Sea."