I’ve long thought about trying to map of how the locations of music and maybe theater events listed in the magazine have changed over time.
There are performances of some kind in pretty much every corner of NYC but it’s interesting to see which neighborhoods have had events deemed relevant to The New Yorker readership in different eras.
Slightly different question, but does anyone have any info about Google’s digitisation of Mainichi Shimbun’s pre-war articles? The work was announced 3 years ago, but it’s been radio silence since: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20221110/p2a/00m/0bu/00...
I hope this gets incorporated into the existing website. I'm not an active subscriber but I used to be and I always thought there was a very fertile "other articles you might like" grounf that the New Yorker never took advantage of, given it's reputation and legacy.
Honestly this got me to subscribe. The back catalog is pretty stellar with pretty much every major writer of the twentieth century making a contribution. Zooming in on PDFs just wasn't how you wanted to read them.
I think that a better link (even though it lacks the context) is this new archive (which is mostly good as it lets you quickly see all cover pages) - https://www.newyorker.com/archive
But yeah, without a subscription, this still mostly just leads to walled off pages.
Accessing the actual archived version of every issue at https://archives.newyorker.com/ is truly wonderful as they are fully digitized back to back.
About 10 years ago, when I was at The New Yorker, I worked on launching the redesign, paywall, and the move to WordPress. We actually had most of the archive technically ready to go. The data wasn’t the hard part.
The real blocker was permissions and rights. Contracts going back a century obviously never contemplated digital publication, domains, or the internet at all. Untangling who owned what, and securing the right to republish everything online, was a massive legal and logistical undertaking.
That’s what held us back then, not so much the technology. Really glad to see that chapter finally closed.
With every passing year the New Yorker stands out even more. High quality long-form journalism and short fiction with minimal advertising (in the print issue it’s just a few at the front and one at the back) is very hard to find. I love getting my issue in the mail every week and I’ve never once thought that reading it was a waste of my time.
I’d highly encourage anyone who loves great writing to subscribe.
I see why people like it, but personally, I find their brand of longer form journalism extremely tiresome. Most often I read articles because I want to know the facts, and not just for the pleasure of reading for its own sake. Ponderous and meandering details of how the journalist interviewed so-and-so at such and such location and what the journalist thought about the food and the ambience and all of that just makes me furiously angry at what a waste of time it feels like. I just want to know the facts. I feel like AI is a godsend for impatient people like me who just want instant information And I have no interest in what a cool experience the journalist had or particular details of how they got paid or who they borrowed money from while they were writing.
I could never get into the New Yorker. It has always felt to me like every piece is deliberately drawn out. They take you to the precipice of something interesting only to pull back into an origin story, over and over again. I think it's the opposite of good writing: bloated, conceited, style over substance. It's not even meandering, it's just teasing. I'm sure it earned its place at the table long ago but the only part of it I can enjoy are the cartoons.
My biggest reading pleasure used to be the LRB but it was infected with the politics virus years ago. It used to be a place to learn minutiae through wonderful language and now it feels mostly like virtue signalling. I don't know where the best writing is these days but it sure as shit doesn't feel like it's in major print.
I wish we have more archive digitized before they disappear. Anandtech promised articles would be up now it is gone. CGsocity, 20 years of accumulated knowledge completely gone. I am sure there are plenty of others.
I am now wonder if these Archive can be sold as Data for Machine learning.
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There are performances of some kind in pretty much every corner of NYC but it’s interesting to see which neighborhoods have had events deemed relevant to The New Yorker readership in different eras.
But yeah, without a subscription, this still mostly just leads to walled off pages.
Accessing the actual archived version of every issue at https://archives.newyorker.com/ is truly wonderful as they are fully digitized back to back.
The real blocker was permissions and rights. Contracts going back a century obviously never contemplated digital publication, domains, or the internet at all. Untangling who owned what, and securing the right to republish everything online, was a massive legal and logistical undertaking.
That’s what held us back then, not so much the technology. Really glad to see that chapter finally closed.
I’d highly encourage anyone who loves great writing to subscribe.
https://apple.news/I8nGwNFiZSGKO9nZxZQ8jMQ
My biggest reading pleasure used to be the LRB but it was infected with the politics virus years ago. It used to be a place to learn minutiae through wonderful language and now it feels mostly like virtue signalling. I don't know where the best writing is these days but it sure as shit doesn't feel like it's in major print.
I am now wonder if these Archive can be sold as Data for Machine learning.