I typically am overwhelmed by the bounty of absorbing articles in the New Yorker. I accept my fate. I can’t keep up.
So imagine my surprise when the NY Times recently has doubled… nay, trebled… my heavy burden of delicious reading. And to make it worse, the web presentation of their articles is simply flabbergasting.
So. This is the future. An inexhaustible burden of delicious journalism calculated to keep me from the light of day. And a new standard of online journalism to measure by.
I offer a selection of links of the recent amazing articles, and their delectable treatments.
Gary Shteyngart, an American writer born in Leningrad, USSR, spends a week at Four Seasons hotel in New York, eating fancy food and guzzling expensive wine, and watching Russian TV, trying to answer the question…
“What will happen to me — an Americanized Russian-speaking novelist who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a child — if I let myself float into the television-filtered head space of my former countrymen? Will I learn to love Putin as 85 percent of Russians profess to do? Will I dash to the Russian consulate on East 91st Street and ask for my citizenship back? Will I leave New York behind and move to Crimea, which, as of this year, Putin’s troops have reoccupied, claiming it has belonged to Russia practically since the days of the Old Testament? Or will I simply go insane?”
A far-too-intimate look at the young Alex Honnold, a ‘free climber’, without ropes, planning for a first-ever free-solo of El Capitan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/magazine/the-heart-stopping-climbs-of-alex-honnold.html
A writer who cheerfully admits that he never plans anything, that he loses stuff all the time, like his passport, and doesn’t bother to sort out his driver’s license before flying to Newfoundland for his NY Times writing assignment. This is a very different sort of travel writing through the eyes and mind of a very different kind of travel writer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/karl-ove-knausgaard-travels-through-america.html
A portrait of New York City through the eyes of all sorts of New Yorkers, who use the currency of memorable walks to tell their personal tales in a way that brings the sense of place of New York to life in its people’s footsteps and voices. This article is a particularly excellent example of how an intuitive and comfortable sequence of images and texts tells a story in a style perfect for the web reader.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/22/magazine/new-york-city-walks.html?smid=tw-nytmag
52 places, each illustrated with a large-format photograph or video, and with a few paragraphs to excite the imagination. And the 52 featured places are now followed by a new ‘Place of the Month’ selected from reader suggestions, to keep this journalistic travel destination alive. [This abandoned boat just happens to sit right next to the Dancing Coyote Cottages on Tomales Bay, in Inverness, California, where Pat and I frequently spend time in the spring savoring the delights of Point Reyes National Seashore and the beaches, hiking trails, and restaurants of Marin County.]