The Content

The first thing you notice about the new New Yorker archive collection, with every issue of the magazine up to February, 2005 on eight DVDs, is that the physical package was designed by an idiot, or a sadist.

It’s a folder, nine inches wide by twelve inches high; the DVDs are in a further fold-out section on the right, and a rather nice book on thick paper with ‘highlights’ from the magazine over the years is glued into the folder on the left.

If you think about that for a moment, you will understand why I say the designer was an idiot; if you try to read the book without having the whole assembly laid flat on a table, you have to deal with the DVD section— which is twelve inches by twenty-seven inches when unfolded, which it will quickly be if you’re not careful — flapping about. In short, it’s impossible to read the book without a table, or a third hand.

If the DVDs had been put on the left, though, and the book on the right, the open cover of the book could have been grasped along with the DVD section by the left hand, while the rest of the book could have been grasped with the right hand, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has ever read, say, a magazine.

This is a small thing, but as the utility of the whole product could have been improved immeasurably at absolutely no cost, it’s nevertheless an annoying thing

The second thing you notice about The Complete New Yorker is that in the accompanying book of highlights from the magazine (cf. above), of the book’s one hundred and twenty-two pages, six are devoted to articles about the war in Iraq, and three to the whole of World War II.

Or maybe four, if you count a Janet Flanner profile of Hitler in 1936.

The Hitler article is interesting in that it’s far less condemnatory of the Führer and of the Third Reich than the magazine is now of George Bush.

Sixty-five years after printing a profile of Hitler that presented him as an unapproachable but possibly interesting character — much of the first installment is dedicated to exploring Hitler’s relationships with women — the same magazine printed this, from Susan Sontag, about 9/11:

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.

I am not interested in arguing courage or “civilization” with Susan Sontag. I do not lament what I see as her myopia. I lament, rather, that the New Yorker has lost some of its detached nature, and that it is far worse for it.

The New Yorker still has it in its character, largely, to stand aloof from society when talking about truck pulls, or ballet, or music; but for politics, or anything touching on politics (which is a quite broad category these days), the magazine has become more or less useless.

I think the decline came along with the addition of writers’ names to Talk of the Town pieces. If you are not familiar with the New Yorker: the first actual content in the magazine, behind about forty or fifty pages of ads and Manhattan movie, theatre, music, and art-gallery listings, is The Talk of the Town. It tends to run about five pages, and to consist of several short and entirely unrelated articles, averaging about a thousand words each. Nearly anything can appear in The Talk of the Town, but there’s generally at least one thing (what do you call these, anyway) in there about whatever the news of the week is.

In the mid 1990s, the New Yorker eased in the practice of identifying contributors to The Talk of the Town. First, it began appending a short note to the end of the whole section, listing the contributors’ names:

Then, about a year later, it expanded the note to include information on who had written what:

And, eventually, they wound up with each separate piece running over the name of the writer:

The result seems to be that the political pieces have got more strident and annoying. When you print signed articles, you’re representing them as the work of ‘professional’ writers who are themselves responsible for what they say. Not only does the publisher have a greater duty to stand behind unsigned articles, but there’s less temptation for the writer to do anything but make his case well (and, in the case of the New Yorker, wittily). It’s impossible to definitively connect cause and effect here — there have been far bigger changes at the New Yorker, and in the world, in the last fifteen or twenty years than the changes in author attribution — but having the whole run of the magazine easily accessible makes it easy to verify that the old New Yorker and the modern New Yorker are very different beasts.

What annoys me about the modern New Yorker is not its politics, but rather the way in which it expresses its politics. The New Yorker, to the extent that it had a political position at all, has always been a left-wing publication, but it was first and foremost an aloof and profoundly bourgeois publication. Now, though, it’s primarily a publication with a cause, and you cannot, by definition both be aloof and have a cause at the same time. This diminishes the New Yorker in my eyes, and makes it suspect. A publication with a cause has reason to screw with the facts.

Maybe after 2008 they’ll be able to wipe the saliva from their chins and return to something like normal. Even if Bush is followed by another Republican president, the mainstream left just might come to the conclusion that the constant complaining and hyperbole is just as effective for them as it was for the GOP when Clinton was in the White House (i.e. not effective at all), and try some reason instead. At the moment, there’s not much they can do: when you’ve spent five years comparing someone to Hitler, there’s really no rhetorical way out. You have to ride that argument until external events allow you to get off.

The Technology

The Complete New Yorker comes to you on eight DVDs, packaged in the aforementioned terrible folder/book thing. The marked price is $100, so the fact that the DVDs are housed in a scratchy cardboard sleeve is a bit galling.

Overall, the technology of the collection isn’t bad: by which I mean that it’s at least usable. In the late 1990s, National Geographic put out a 31-CD set with their entire 110-year archive on it. The thing was an unbelievable dog. The scans were of such low resolution that you could barely, by squinting mightily, manage to read the text; printouts were totally illegible, and you could not copy and paste from within their proprietary interface.

I was worried about some of the same issues coming up with The Complete New Yorker. Just about all of them are there, but improvements in computer technology mean that these things are just annoyances, rather than crippling deficiencies.

The indexes for authors, articles, etc. are stored (in the Macintosh version, at least) in a SQLite database which is easily read by any SQLite client or library.

The magazines themselves are stored as .djvu files of around 10 MB each, but they are not, in the state in which they’re provided on the discs, accessible by normal DvVu clients. I haven’t poked around enough yet to figure out what they’ve done to the files (ROT13 anybody?), but it shouldn’t take too long to make them readable.

And this is a good thing, because the supplied application is pretty bad. Oh, it could be worse, a lot worse.

The single most annoying thing about the application is that the window has two sizes: covering your entire screen, or minimized. If you’ve got a screen that’s larger than is needed to display the pages, The New Yorker helpfully takes over the remaining real estate in order to display pleasing gray borders. On my PowerBook, this means that when viewing a full spread, about 20% of the screen is simply wasted.

Far worse than that, though, is the search window.

The search window is not customizable, not resizable, not able to be modified in any way. The ‘Article Abstract’ pane is always 756 pixels wide and 88 pixels high, no matter how long the abstract is. There is always room for fourteen search results, no less and no more. There are always over 140,000 pixels dedicated to the ‘Sources’ list, whether the user wants to use that list or not.

If you want to narrow your search down to a few specific years, departments, or authors, and then dedicate more screen space to the search results themselves, you are out of luck.

Oh, and it’s slow, too, at least on my (admittedly aging) computer.

Under Windows, the hideous and useless ‘Safedisc’ system is used in an attempt to ‘secure’ the discs against copying.