I thought Meaney’s suggestions were smart, subtle and I’d be willing to read a few revised issues just to see how it felt …

I’m looking forward to taking some time to consider each of her suggestions, especially about the TOC and the use of red type. One nice thing about the online index of the Talk of the Town is that it has a bit more breathing space and a way to think about the pieces as separate entities, which obviously they are. What points did you think were the most valid? And do you agree that the magazine has lost touch with Irvin? I don’t know if that’s even possible.

I think the suggestions for the TOC were most exciting. That two column layout she suggests looks beautiful and I find the amount and kind of text used in the current TOC to be strangely empty of useful information. All I comprehend now is the writer’s name.

Actually, June 25 TOC has two sentences on Taguba. If that kind of thing appeared in the left column, that’d be dandy.

Less interested in color illustrations. What do cartoonists (the reference to hell seems to solicit them) think of that?

Goings On About Town - Current 4 column “This Week” is kind of illegible and, I agree with Meaney, so are the skinny reviews throughout the Goings On. I’m not so sure about her suggestions for correcting this kind of thing … but like I said, I’d love to see tentative changes on ‘spec, so to speak.

Re Rea Irvin - I felt it was uncanny how well the old RI cover I found for my post today worked with what I “felt” about the current design and the possibilities of it changing - I pretty much love TNY design, as I’ve said before. And I guess, then, I feel the look must still be very much in touch with Irvin. But “in touch” is a funny way to put it, as I think Meaney called the old masthead “hand drawn,” while the new one she considers crisp and a little mechanical.

With the older designs of the magazine more widely available to us now (with TCNY) maybe there is a bit more freedom to change. As all will not be lost.

Well, you did ask!! And what do YOU think?

I’m working on closing a coupla Print pieces (including one about ’20s type, as it happens!), but then I’ll dive in. But I will say that as we pore over the existing design, we should acknowledge that there’ve actually been several quite recent changes in the look of the mag, especially in GOAT (e.g. Critic’s Notebook, Pop Notes, On the Horizon). I’m a fan of all of those (the look and the utility), and they should be considered in the conversation.

Re GOAT, oh exactly!! The readability of Tables for Two, DVD Notes, Pop Notes, etc is particularly interesting as the layout of these (the little two columns) seems inspired by the historically popular, totally readable film capsules.

I 0ften love the content of the Critic’s Notebook, but that’s what I referred to as “skinny reviews” - I’m with Meaney on these, they are hard to read with so few words per line.

All this begs the question, what is the average age of TNY readers? And what is the average visual acuity?!

Check out the media kit sometime; it’s online here. Looks like median age is 48.65 (both sexes), with men 48.13 and women 49.27. So vision is an issue, although given the median household income ($138,300 for both), they can afford reading glasses.

This recalls a recent experience, actually: A friend’s parents were in town a few weeks ago and were looking for a play to go to. They went straight to GOAT to check out their choices, but wanted more information about the plays they were considering. Would it be wrong to have stars or highlights or something that singled out the GOATers’ top choices? Martin, has the magazine done this in the past? I don’t like the Onion movie reviews very much (though I do like the A.V. Club a whole lot), but I do appreciate the little distinctions that show what the critics recommend.

And that reminds me of the Stuart Dybek story this week, which is so damn good I think. I’m going to write about that, you can bet on it. ZP, do you agree?

I think I know them and they have misplaced their reading glasses!!

I actually read the fiction this issue, thanks to a prompt in a comment left on my “worth the time and effort” post. I’d like to delve further into the paradoxical world of faux reality effects (see comments there) but my brain is overheated at this moment. Maybe I’ll write about it later, or comment if/when you post.

Stars? Oh, I could go on about that too …

As I wade through the 1960s and 1970s, I’ll sometimes make a special point of looking at the GOATs carefully (mainly to see who was acting in what; I’m a theater nut). Certainly at no time since 1955 has TNY had any kind of stars. Consider coverage of theater and movies to run in parallel to the TOC; when the TOC was teeny and gave no info, the listings were pretty gnomic too. I suppose capsule movie reviews got longer a lot earlier than the rest of the GOAT got beefed up.

Actually, I think the GOAT is an ideal testing ground for innovation, because as far as I’m concerned, they could junk everything that’s there, replace it with a really sharp listings section that tried to be current and comprehensive in a completely different way, and I wouldn’t blink twice. I exaggerate to make the point. With TONY on the newsstand, TNY isn’t about to double the expense involved in presenting listings, so I guess that’s out. They could shake things up there — I sometimes get puzzled at why A is there but B is not.

Oddly, I’m not only on dialup but to save money the connection isn’t accepting images, so I can’t even evaluate Meaney properly.

I’ve said to Emily before that the TOTTs should be a little less whipped into a TOTT prefab than they now are. They’re all the same length, all have this specific beginning, middle, and end. If TOTT had more items that ran only a paragraph and more items that ran a full page, I’d be happier.

Which I guess dovetails to the point I wanted to make all along; form follows function, or in this case content. It’s useless to talk about what the covers or TOC should look like without addressing the things that will reside in the TOCs.

Oh. I also wanted to say, Meaney mentioned that the title on the cover used to be hand-drawn more often and that nowadays it’s a bit too standardized. I would recommend checking out the cover for the March 23, 1974 issue.

Hmmm. I thought Meaney’s article’s layout could stand a little help itself.

I know, it would be shockingly unorthodox to have stars (but not, as in the Dybek story, little dollar signs) in GOAT. After all, everything listed there, from Cat Power to the Pope’s play, is worth noting, in theory, right?

I feel particular affection for this part of the magazine, because it’s what I read first and most avidly as a child and teenager (yes, after the cartoons). It was my first exposure to critical writing (and probably got me stuck on the idea of living in New York years before I thought of moving here), and I loved watching the long reviews turn into capsules. Seeing that “PK” after a short review will always give me a thrill. Now that I’m a movie-crazed grownup, in fact, I regularly use GOAT as a guide to what I want to see most and least, and of course I can do that without kitschy little symbols. Stars, ratings, numbers, half-enchiladas: I usually disdain them. It’s so dispiriting to see a movie poster whose critics’ quotes are all along the lines of: “*****!!!! —Harry Hacksaw, Times-Picayune.”

So why would I suggest that New Yorker reviews, subtle, thoughtful and evenhanded as a rule (except when it comes to “Break me a fucking give,” from which I’m still recovering), be so crass and bottom-line-minded as to use any kind of scale for judging art, or, much more likely, a tasteful underline or wee butterfly for a Critic’s Choice? I guess I was given a new perspective by these out-of-towners, who were not dummies but had limited time and would rather trust TNY than take their chances: We’re in the city for a couple of nights; what would John Lahr say we shouldn’t miss? Maybe most New Yorker readers never have this problem, but the occasional visitor may be puzzled.

But these are not strong feelings. “This Week” and “On the Horizon” call out the best of the batch of upcoming NYC events, and those are unquestionably excellent additions and, as I mentioned, are easy and pleasant reading. So, maybe we should conclude, buy Time Out for the listings and use The New Yorker’s Goings On for a scan of the city scene, not a score but a riff, not an mandate but a mood. There’s a lot of sass and voice and intrigue and poetry in GOAT, if you read it carefully enough, and I recommend that you do.

I will say this: though it’ll be some time before I reach the median age, my eyesight has never been so hot, so the “Revivals, Classics, Etc.,” section, traditionally one of the most useful and exciting to me (living, as I do, in the past), does tend to strain the weak peepers, and if it were given a hair more breathing room, you would not hear me complain.

I think the invocation of Lahr brings out the reason why TNY can never play the role your friends’ parents wanted it to. In theater, the magazine reviews one or two things a week in the weeks that it chooses to review something. In movies, it has two critics, and there is no reliable way of guessing what movie will be the star of next week’s issue, or who the reviewer will be. The magazine looks at about ten pop CDs a year, maybe? There may be too much out there, given the way its back of the book works.

In other words, TNY critics only have the option of defining themselves in opposition to Harry Hacksaw; they can’t do both. That may be fine, but it does mean that certain options are closed off, and maybe being a robust city guide is one of them.

Thought: What percentage of its readership doesn’t live in the NYC area? I think the answer to that question would probably indicate why TNY hasn’t made the switch to a true city guide in the vein of TONY. Indeed, given the “national” or even “international” nature of its readership, the GOAT is really pretty comprehensive, considering.

Alrighty, I’m going to go post on stars.

Carolita makes a nice point. The Meaney thing strained the eyes, the imagination, and some perception specific to web media that I don’t know the name of.

I find it difficult to agree with these revisions — giving up “graphically unconscious” in favor of graphically self-conscious. (“You’ve got CYMK, why not use it?”— Really!)

One thing I’ve always liked about the New Yorker (and Harper’s, mostly), is an unwillingness to follow visual fads, even to the point of design conservatism. It certainly doesn’t suit the personality of the magazine to appear to care too much how it looks.

Anyway, even marketed as appeals to function, I still get mostly whiffs of “graphic designy” looking at these motions; the suggestion for the table of contents seems to be only to be of great use to archivists.

However, I do completely agree with Emily’s remarks about the Revivals & Classics section, which does not need to break the grid so much as change up the formatting, at the most use the existing columns as modules, whatever.

Rather than a full-scale Pentagram makeover, what would most benefit the magazine would probably be a tack-sharp inhouse design team who is respectful of the magazine’s tradition and understands its exterior personality. And there is some evidence of this in, as others have pointed out, the Critic’s Notebook, etc. (Though, seriously, drop that point size a couple and let the critics inhale all the way.) No knock to the current staff, though; but, now that you mention it, I am available for work.

I do wonder what accounts for things looking “graphic designy” though; it’s not really the same as “faddish” — it’s a closer analogue to what Frost called “poetical”.

Designical?

Thanks for weighing in, ZBS (ZBS and ZP are not the same commenter, by the way, in case you’re following along), and everyone! This is a conversation I’ve been wanting to have for a long time. Since we’re still closing, I’m adapting an email I just wrote to continue this thread:

The New Yorker can’t and probably shouldn’t have comprehensive listings, it’s true. TONY, in particular, is basically listings with text as supplement, not the other way around, and that’s as it should be. The trouble is that I trust nearly all the New Yorker critics more than most of the others, so I want to make sure I get to or at least note what they consider unmissable. But of course we just can read the reviews (especially the larger-text mentions and “Also Playing”) and glean the unmissability for ourselves, which is what I do.

You know what I really miss? When I moved to New York in 1989, you could buy an 8 1/2” x 14” sheet of double-sided paper that listed all the movies playing in every theater that week in the city. It was, I recall, 50 cents or a dollar, available at every newsstand kiosk. A simple, foldable sheet of paper with all the movies you needed, plus times and locations, right as you were on your way out for the night. Maybe I need to bring that back myself, because so far no electronic device has managed to match it. Moviefone, which I don’t love, and Fandango, whose voice-recognition system is absurd in noisy New York, are so inadequate to the needs of the city filmgoer; what I want is to know what’s playing soonest in a twenty-block radius of where I’m standing at the moment. Do I know the zip code of the Ziegfeld? No.

I’m really not for stars—what was I thinking even bringing them up?—but I do like a tiny bullet or something to indicate critics’ especial picks.

ZP, all of this is making me return to a very pertinent question you posed on your site not long ago. Can you guess which one?

Could it be … . “Why does The New Yorker review such bad movies?”

The set-up [to the pictured cartoon in which two people exit a theater whose marquee reads “Absolute Rubbish”] reads, “Well, you can’t say they didn’t warn us.” Gahan Wilson in the May 7 New Yorker. Pair with Anthony Lane’s Spider-Man review. Except, the way I see it, he’s the one exiting the theater, not me. Why does The New Yorker review such bad movies?

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, previous commenters have more or less covered the subjects I was going to comment on in re design changes to the New Yorker.

Still, FWIW:

Agreed as to the Table of Contents. It’s near-useless in its current form. With no line breaks and writers’ names offset as they are, one can do little more than glance down the list to see whether Gladwell (or whoever) chipped in an article this week. Meaney’s suggested revision looks good to me.

Agreed as to Meaney’s points about the inconsistent, unhelpful use of red text and Irvin font.

I don’t buy the argument that since the magazine is paying for that expensive four-color print process, so you should use it to the extent possible. Maybe it’s a hidebound take, but I like the black-and-white cartoons and TOTT caricatures just fine as they are, thank you. I would guess that many readers would agree.

Changing the magazine’s look from monochromatic to full-color would be a major design overhaul and should be driven by something other than the cost of the print run. For that matter, I would guess that Si Newhouse and family aren’t losing sleep over the current price of cyan ink.

In the age of Time Out NY and its online ilk, I’m somewhat mystified at the page space that the New Yorker continues to devote to Goings On About Town. It’s nearly impenetrable, and with so much of the readership not living in or near the city, it’s the book’s most easily skipped section. There’s only room for one page (no, make that two columns) of reader mail, when three or four pages would certainly be worth reading, but every week there’re 15 largely repetitive pages of agate-type arts listings? How about just running a few picks in each category telling visitors what they ought to check out (no stars required). Leave the comprehensive coverage for the feature articles.

Though it may not be polite to say it, Anthony Lane is at his best when he’s eviscerating something that deserves it (Revenge of the Sith, Da Vinci Code, Transformers). His tearing into lousy movies like red meat is an artistic expression more satisfying than the movies themselves. Sure, he can be eloquent (his long essay on the Lord of the Rings books was touching and fine), but he’s most effective as a classy, well-spoken hatchet man.

Emily, try using Google Text to find about-to-start movie showtimes at nearby movie theaters around Manhattan. Text the movie title and get instant results. Worked like a charm last time I was in NYC, though I ended up skipping Superbad in favor of writing what became my first Emdashes article.