Roundup: New York Magazine Edition

I've been reading The New Yorker for ten years or so and still look forward to seeing David Sedaris, John Updike and Alec Wilkinson on the Contents page. Over the past few months, however, I've started reading New York Magazine, and it's quickly become my favorite weekly from the streets of New York.

NYMag's crisp, intelligent writing equals that of the elder New Yorker, but where The New Yorker is sometimes pretentious, NYMag is smart and snarky. With Ripkenesque consistency, the magazine kicks ass like Boba Fett, and almost every word is published online. For instance:

David Amsden profiles the lives and deaths of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake in Conspiracy of Two.

In any suicide narrative there comes the point where one searches for the early signs, for the missed warnings, for the moment when the rise ended and the fall began. And in the story of Duncan and Blake there is no more obvious place to begin this search than in Los Angeles, a city with a long history of thwarting idealists. If New York can be a hostile but ultimately rewarding environment for an artist, Los Angeles is often the opposite: easy and glittering until you begin to suspect that it is all maybe a cruel illusion. It was Nathanael West, himself a New Yorker who settled in Hollywood, who perhaps best understood the potentially grim effects this can have on the mind of an ambitious optimist. “Once there, they discover the sunshine isn’t enough,” he wrote in The Day of the Locust of those who seek a specific paradise in Los Angeles. “Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time … The boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment.”

As an aside, Theresa Duncan's blog, The Wit of the Staircase, is still online and worth a look.



John Heilemann writes about Barack Obama, who still hasn't replied to my challenge regarding same-sex marriage.

From the start of his bid, Obama has styled himself an agent of change, and all the available evidence suggests that voters still consider him the most credible aspirant to that role. The questions facing him have always been the same: Can he fashion a coherent vision of what the change he’s promising would look like? And can he convince voters that transformative capacity trumps experience? While it’s fair to say that Obama has failed to answer either in the affirmative, it’s also true that he’s barely begun to try—and that the opportunity to do so remains in front of him.

The magazine's Fall Preview discusses the Coen brothers, Phillip Roth, Coheed and Cambria, and so on...

Philip Roth is the Barry Bonds of the contemporary highbrow novel. In the mid-nineties, at an age when most of his peers were declining into flabby-sentenced parodies of themselves, Roth pumped himself up on the steroids of wild indecorous honesty (in Sabbath’s Theater, the protagonist imagines his mother’s ghost emerging from his lover’s vagina) and launched an already hall-of-fame-worthy career into the Hemingway-Faulkner stratosphere.

And that's the roundup.