Tag Archives: new york magazine

I Love New York (Magazine)

Aside from my pre-teen obsession with reading Seventeen, Teen Vogue, and the other fashion magazines geared towards educating young girls on makeup tips and “What kind of a kisser are you?” I have not been much of a magazine person.

The cost of $4-$5 for a magazine that is 90% ads has been a reason. The obsession with buying things and attempting to look like models another. Magazines, in general, never did much for my self-esteem. So I dropped them entirely sometime in high school.

There are many types of magazines, you may say, geared towards people with a plethora of interests. True. I found fault with all of them.

I found Harper’s and The New Yorker to be boring. All fashion magazines were out (the price tags on the merchandise inside are always way over my limits, in addition to the aforementioned reasons), I liked a rag called AdBusters for a while in college, but it was costly and the articles never really grabbed my interest for long.

I was always looking for that perfect magazine. The shiny, creative layouts matched with interesting essays and a dash of girly stuff. Interestingly enough, Good Housekeeping was the only one that came close. (What can I say, I’m an old lady stuck in a 24-year-old’s body).

But now, during my obsessive researching of New York City, I’ve come across New York Magazine, a magazine I have never picked up before as I have never lived in New York and figured it was something out my interest zone.

I haven’t actually read the magazine. I’ve read the website, which is amazing, especially for me at this time of my life. They have a really useful neighborhood guide for people trying to figure out the best place to move, with news and feature stories, fashion stuff, restaurant and bar reviews, a book section with interviews and reviews (They have a great review list of spring fiction books worth getting), funny blogs, the list goes on. NY Mag is awesome.

If I weren’t moving out my apartment in four weeks and unsure what my next semi-permanent address will be, I would subscribe to the actual glossy.

Betraying Salinger by Roger Lathbury

I am one of the few who never really cared for J. D. Salinger’s work. To be fair, I’ve only ever read The Catcher in the Rye, which I thought was overrated and annoying. Just my opinion, I know many disagree with it. Some books just don’t speak to some people.

I happened upon a feature story called Betraying Salinger on the New York Magazine website about a small publisher’s failed attempt at publishing Salinger’s last publicly released piece of writing. Even though I don’t care much about Salinger, I found the feature very well written and interesting.

It tells about Salinger’s strange rules about the release of his piece, Hapworth 16, 1924, and his unique personality and how the publisher messed up the book deal.  Anyone who likes (and doesn’t like) Salinger’s work would find this piece interesting.

Another fun thing found was a list of author’s bashing authors, like this one about Salinger:

J.D.Salinger, according to Mary McCarthy (1962):

I don’t like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn’t a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don’t like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it’s so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can’t stand it.

                                      -The 50 Best Author vs. Author Put Downs of All Time