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Magazines : The New Yorker (1-year)In association with Amazon.comRating:  - Awesome writingI really enjoy this magazine. I read it for a while online and I decided to try a subscription for one year. In a couple of months I became addicted to it. I added one more year to my subscription when I got a good deal. It is amazing how some very common things are described in such beautiful words. This is an art. Rating:  - Cancel Your Subscription?**I've taken a drubbing over this review, but I won't delete it yet. My friend Jeffrey tells me the NY cover was intended in exactly the same spirit as my adoption of Hussein as a middle name. As anyone can see, I've been slammed by friends and strangers in the comments below. My wife wants her next week's New Yorker on schedule or my neck id in the noose. Fine. Probably I overreacted. This upcoming election is critical, and judging by the last, it won't be clean, forthright, honorable. Remember the SwiftBoaters? Here's what I wrote originally: I've just done so. The July 21, '08 cover shows Barack Obama and his wife dressed as Islamic terrorists, with an American flag burning in the fireplace. It's tasteless and dishonest, and either ill-timed or politically motivated by neo-conservatism. The editors' excuse, that the cartoon was intended to satirize the talk-radio smear campaign against Obama, doesn't convince me at all. The New Yorker has never shown much respect for the working folk of America, or anything but smug condescension toward rural and small-city people. Its market is obviously the intellectual upper 10%, plus those whose incomes allow them to suppose they belong in that category. Its editors make a point of being too near-sighted to acknowledge the Upper Midwest or the Pacific Coast. The advertisements tell who subscribes: Westin Resorts, Mercedes, Vanguard Financial, CitiBank, Dow Chemical. Its poems are quite often banal. Its famous cartoons are frequently funny, but more frequently smug and pretentious. Over the years, it has printed some immortal stories by Alice Munro, but it also prints crumpled scraps from the wastebasket of Joyce Carol Oates. Besides, I hate its three-column format, which slows my reading speed down by at least 25%. Nevertheless I've subscribed for decades, though I often don't even open an issue until a friend alerts me to an interesting article. After all, where's the competition? The Atlantic has gone reactionary. Harper's is plodding. The political and economic journals serve a different function. Our "free market" publishing system has resulted in comglomeration and decimation, both in magazines and books. Looks like this round goes to the internet. Rating:  - The New Yorker -- Now With "Satirical" Lynching PhotosWith the New Yorker's newest "satirical" cover, I suspect that a certain magazine editor might just have satirized himself out of a job. And as to "satire", isn't that what American Southerners used to call those postcards with lynching photos they sold down there? Rating:  - New Yorker ReviewGood magazine for contemporary articles. The poetry is pretty bad. The comics are very funny. Rating: - over 60 years of the new yorkerI have been subscribing to the New Yorker for more than 60 years. Why stop now? It is excellent. |
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