rant whine 'splain espouse: Somber reading. Or: Why I hate the New Yorker.

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Somber reading. Or: Why I hate the New Yorker.

And now, for something completely different.

I hate the New Yorker because it's overly-referred to by utterly pretentious people ("Oh, did you read that article in the New Yorker...?"), plus it's horribly designed (which I acknowledge makes me a complete hypocrite because I'm such a design snob that I refuse to read a poorly designed magazine). Oh, and the cartoons suck. I know everyone thinks they're so brilliant. They're not. They suck.

I know the New Yorker also features some brilliantly good writing. It's just that I can't bear to look at the magazine long enough to read any of it. So when a colleague recommended this article on climate change on the New Yorker's website, I bookmarked it and decided to go read it later.

When I did, it was infuriatingly like reading an article on the web in 1997. Their website is as poorly designed as their periodical ("I say, let's cram 10,000 words of copy on a single page with not a single illustration or pullquote or anything to break up the monotonous sea of gray, and declare that it doesn't need to be designed well because it's such good journalism." -- See what I mean about pretentious?).

But I was glad I did anyway. But only because the article in question is good. A somber reminder that the world will not be saved by technological advances alone. But I did have to read it in three sittings. Too much text on one page.