I might be shooting myself in the foot by posting this, but the table of contents for the newest issue of the New Yorker is usually available on Sunday on newyorker.com, the day before the issue hits the newsstands and arrives in subscriber mailboxes. All you need to do is hack the URL of the TOC from the previous Monday. Here's the URL for the April 23 TOC:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2007/04/23/toc_20070416
"2007/04/23" is the date of the issue and "toc_20070416" refers to the date of the posting. This then is the URL for the April 30 issue:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2007/04/30/toc_20070423
At right is the cover for tomorrow's issue, which includes Adam Gopnik's piece on the Virginia Tech shooting, a new piece by Atul Gawande, and Anthony Lane's review of Hot Fuzz. Monday's New Yorker on Sunday is usually only available to the select few of the Manhattan media elite who are sped their new issues hot off the presses. Now everyone can have a similar experience on the web.
Enjoy.
The New Yorker redesign just went live. Not sure if I like it yet, but I don't not like it. Some quick notes after 15 minutes of kicking the tires, starting with the ugly and proceeding from there:
- Only some of the old article URLs seem to work, which majorly sucks. This one from 2002 doesn't work and neither does this one from late 2005. This David Sedaris piece from 9/2006 does. kottke.org has links to the New Yorker going back to mid-2001...I'd be more than happy to supply them so some proper rewrite rules can be constructed. I'd say that more than 70% of the 200+ links from kottke.org to the New Yorker site are dead...to say nothing of all the links in Google, Yahoo, and 5 million other blogs. Not good.
- The full text of at least one article (Stacy Schiff's article on Wikipedia) has been pulled from the site and has been replaced by an abstract of the article and the following notice:
The New Yorker's archives are not yet fully available online. The full text of all articles published before May, 2006, can be found in "The Complete New Yorker," which is available for purchase on DVD and hard drive.
Not sure if this is the only case or if the all longer articles from before a certain date have been pulled offline. This also is not good.
- They still default to splitting up their article into multiple pages, but luckily you can hack the URL by appending "?currentPage=all" to get the whole article on one page, like so. Would be nice if that functionality was exposed.
- The first thing I looked for was the table of contents for the most recent issue because that's, by far, the page I most use on the site (it's the defacto "what's new" page). Took me about a minute to find the link...it's hidden in small text on the right-hand side of the site.
- There are several RSS options, but there's no RSS autodiscovery going on. That's an easy fix. The main feed validates but with a few warnings. The bigger problem is that the feed only shows the last 10 items, which isn't even enough to cover an entire new issue's worth of stories and online-only extras.
- A New Yorker timeline. Is this new?
- Listing of blogs by New Yorker contributors, including Gladwell, SFJ, and Alex Ross.
- Some odd spacing issues and other tiny bugs here and there. The default font size and line spacing make the articles a little hard to read...just a bit more line spacing would be great. And maybe default to the medium size font instead of the small. A little rough around the edges is all.
- The front page doesn't validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. But the errors are pretty minor...<br> instead of <br />, not using the proper entity for the ampersand, uppercase anchor tags and the like.
- All articles include the stardard suite of article tools: change the font size, print, email to a friend, and links to Digg, del.icio.us, & Reddit. Each article is also accompanied by a list of keywords which function more or less like tags.
- Overall, the look of the site is nice and clean with ample white space where you need it. The site seems well thought out, all in all. A definite improvement over the old site.
Thanks to Neil for the heads up on the new site.
You're disappointed with me. You don't even know it, but you are. I can feel it, your disappointment, coming at me from the edges of the Internet. Or perhaps it's just all those mashed potatoes I had for dinner last night. There's a simile for all you writers out there: "his disappointment affected me like indigestion brought on by too many mashed potatoes for dinner last night." That's golden.
Which is to say, I've stopped reading magazines, effectively ending my project to read 52 different periodicals over the course of this year. The project ended a couple of months ago actually, but my guilt was such that I only just accepted it. Deep down, I always knew I wouldn't make it. The decision of which magazine to read, the procuring of said material, budgeting the time to read, keeping track of what I'd read so far...it was all too much work, more like a second job than a fun way to spend my time.
David is doing much better with his resolution to read 52 books in 52 weeks; 24 down, 28 to go. I am ashamed.
On my way to lunch the other day, I noticed a new exhibit at the Annex of the NY Transit Museum in Grand Central: New York: The Ride, Subway Cartoon and Cover Art from The New Yorker. That's two of my favorite NY things together, so I swung by for a look today. It's a tiny exhibit and takes only 5-10 minutes of your time, but if you're in the vicinity, it's worth the effort. Here's my favorite piece, Hell: The Fifth Avenue Entrance by Mick Stevens:
Here's the description of the exhibit:
Throughout the years, cartoons and cover art from The New Yorker have brilliantly captured this city, its hopes and aspirations, its people and their foibles, and their daily routines. Subway humor has been a staple of The New Yorker since the magazine's 1925 inaugural issue.
While offering an entertaining survey of subway satire from the 1920s to the present, the exhibition also explores changing perceptions of the subway over the course of nine decades. Original artwork, reproductions of The New Yorker covers and cartoons, and original magazines, whose subject matter is the subway system and the people who ride it, are on view.
The exhibit continues through July 18.
Women's Wear Daily is reporting on a proposed magazine by O'Reilly called Make (links mine):
Even O'Reilly, the favorite book publisher of geeks everywhere, is thinking of jumping into the DIY pool. It's exploring the idea of a publication called Make that would be the anti-Cargo -- the latter tells its readers which DVD player to buy, while the proposed one would tell its own how to rip that DVD player open and hack it. As uncommercial as it sounds, the project has attracted help from some big names in tech publishing circles: former Industry Standard chief executive officer John Battelle and former Boing Boing editor Mark Frauenfelder.
Sounds like ReadyMade for the hacker set. If they get the first issue out by the end of the year, I can add it to my reading list.
I know you're all on the edge of your chairs waiting for word about my 52 magazines in 52 weeks effort, and I shall not disappoint you on this fine, sunny day in NYC. So far, I have read copies of Wired, Print (2 issues), Prospect (a UK monthly), nest, Vogue (blech), and Juxtapoz (tied with Vogue for least appealing magazine so far). And I've just started Herbivore, a magazine of vegetarian culture. I suspect that reading it will make me think of SF, but not in the most pleasant way.
Starting the first week in January, I'm going to read a different magazine every week for the entire year (while reserving the right to quit after a couple of months if I feel like it). A variety of reasons for this, but mostly because 1) I'm hoping magazines will be a welcome change from books and weblogs, 2) I want to explore some new subjects/viewpoints, and 3) why the hell not? I may or may not write about the magazines I read on kottke.org, but I'd guess you'll probably be hearing something about them at some point. (Lucky you!)
So, any recommendations on what I should read? I'm going to be reading issues of many popular magazines (Newsweek, National Geographic, Wired, The Economist, Harper's, GQ, Rolling Stone, etc.), but what I'm really interested in is quality niche magazines containing good writing about a particular subject. Anything I should stay away from? Oh, and I know Manhattan is littered with magazine shops, but if you know of any particularly good ones, that would be helpful info to have.
