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February082007

Grafs: What's The New Yorker's Munch-munch Ratio?

Filed under: Headline Shooter   Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

An experiment in which, instead of writing unfairly hasty sentences when pressed for time, I offer you a fizzy thimbleful of each noteworthy article.
A rough gauge of sophistication as it’s constructed through language, then, can be found in the number of references to Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, painter of The Scream (or other people named Munch), and instances of the word munch, one of the most ungainly, inelegant words in the English language.... When I examined previous New Yorker articles to delve deeper into its Munch-munch ratio (which is 2 since 2000), I found that, in fact, every instance of munch was a quotation of some sort. New Yorker writers had, in fact, a Munch-munch ratio that was undefined. Until Nov. 13.
—Graham Meyer, "Spectral Intrusions," The Other Tiger
The result is the meta-erroneous belief that The New Yorker has a policy against printing corrections at all—a belief that has made it all the way to the Columbia journalism department. “As I understand it, for many, many years they didn’t even run letters to the editor,” [Nicholas] Lemann said. “It’s fairly recent—I can’t remember when they started—that they run letters. They still, since 1925, have not run corrections.”... In fact, although the weekly “Mail” section is a relatively new addition, the magazine has printed letters since at least 1936. —Leon Neyfakh, "Off the Record," New York Observer
It looks like George Packer may finally get the war he's been asking for. In his 2003 New Yorker essay "War After the War," which was the basis for the book The Assassin's Gate and which is one of the single finest pieces of journalism I've ever read, Packer made the case that Iraq would be won or lost not in battlefield victories or large-scale campaigns but in tiny human interactions, ground-level points of contact between Iraqis and Americans. His intimate, scene-based reporting became an example of the thing he was advocating, the attentiveness to nuance and context that the military couldn't get right.
—Gabe Roth, "Right Approach, Wrong Time?," Roth Brothers
In his interview with Robert Hass to an overflowing crowd at International House, the Columbian artist Fernando Botero mentioned that when reading Seymour Hersh’s article in The New Yorker about American soldiers using torture in the same prison at Abu Ghraib where Saddam Hussein used similar violent tactics, he was deeply shocked.... This, he had not expected of the North Americans. Compelled to respond to this outrage with pencil and brush, he spent the next 14 months creating over a hundred drawings and paintings, based on the photographs which had been published showing the humiliation, abuse, depravity and torture.
—Peter Selz, "The Power of Botero’s Abu Ghraib Images," The Berkeley Daily Planet (includes one of Botero's arresting drawings)
Balliett’s page-long, semicolon-laden paragraphs—like Stephen Dixon’s, but more voluptuous—felt like mere transcriptions until, with a decisive snap or a concise, precise image, he would bring us back to the point. Often, it just happened that the point would be a different one—more surprising, less common-sensical, less easily summarized—than the one we thought was being made.
—"Whitney Balliett, 1926-2007," Quiet Bubble (Another Balliett reflection is here; thanks to Scott McLemee for the tip!)
2 comments

Comments

That's funny, I remember being conscious that the New Yorker did not print letters to the editor to the extent that when I was in college, this would have been maybe 1990, I wrote some kind of a parody New Yorker letters section and submitted it to Spy magazine. To my shock, I got a call from them saying they were running it -- but they never did. I don't have a copy; I wonder if it's in Graydon Carter's storage unit or something. Of course I probably "learned" this fact about the New Yorker from Spy to begin with...

JTFebruary 08, 2007

That's a fantastic story. If you still have your Mac SE FDHD (mine was nicknamed "Saftetyhead" by my friend Casey, for obvious reasons), boot it on up and get me that floppy!
 
As I predicted they might, the consistently riveting Regret the Error (which is devoted to tracking and critiquing media corrections—now that's the kind of niche blog I'll read) has a comment on the Observer story, with an analysis, a look into New Yorker correction history, and a conclusion: "Readers need to be given an easy way to spot corrections."

EmdashesFebruary 08, 2007

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