Lena Dunham wrote a personal essay called "A Box of Puppies" that appears in The New Yorker this week. It's worth the read if you like Lena Dunham's writing and/or puppies.
The New Yorker just launched its iPhone app today, a slick little number that allows you to read David Grann's reportage on the subway without New York Post readers giving you the stinkeye. In order to educate readers and potential subscribers on the ins and outs of the app, the magazine hired Lena Dunham to make a little instructional video for them. It's a strange one, made to look like some sort of public access talkshow from the 80s or 90s in an alternate universe in which everyone knew what iPhones and iPads were and Jon Hamm was on public access. It's like if Tim and Eric got [...]
This week's New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs is a very funny piece by SNL's Simon Rich about how Genesis might've gone if God was dating someone. Women be stoppin' omniscient entities from creatin' majestic universes, and all that.
New SNL writer and New Yorker cartoonist Zach Kanin drew up some pretty exciting predictions for 2012. (You know, in his spare time. I hear they keep a really lax schedule over at SNL.) According to Kanin, we can expect big surprises from Newt Gingrich and a sizable increase in young-adult novels written by rabbis. Perhaps the biggest news here, though, is that the season of Looking Back On 2011 has officially arrived, and before Halloween no less. Let the reflective blog posts and magazine top-ten lists commence!
If you're wondering if seeing a therapist will help your bizarre comedian tendencies, well, help is such subjective word. This week's The New Yorker profiles Adam McKay's therapist Barry Michels, who's unorthodox methods are designed help creative people figure out how to move past being neurotic bundle of nerves and actually write that script. According the article, McKay started visiting Michels four years ago, after his fear of speaking to the press would have him visibly shaking on the red carpet. “People are, like, ‘Oh, my God, are you all right? Do you have Parkinson’s?’ You think no one will notice and then you read the comments online, [...]
Former SNL writer Simon Rich's new novella Sell Out is being serialized this week in The New Yorker. You can check out Part 1 of 4 now. The next three parts will be released tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday. It follows a fictionalized version of Simon Rich meeting his immigrant great-great-grandfather who was preserved in brine for 100 years after a factory accident, only to find himself baffled by his descendant Simon's carefree lifestyle as a screenwriter. Rich's collection of short stories The Last Girlfriend on Earth just came out last week, so between that and this novella, 2013 has already been a incredibly productive year for him as an [...]
Humorist Andy Borowitz has long been a contributor to the New Yorker, well it seems the magazine no longer wants to just borrow(itz) him (sorry), as they've purchased his news satire site The Borowtiz Report. For those unfamiliar, it's kind of like The Onion but written by Andy Borowtiz. Today's post featured the headline "Romney Campaign Releases First Picture of V.P. Pick" and was followed by a picture of Rich Uncle Pennybags from the popular board game Monopoly. Do you get it? It is satire. He will be part of The New Yorker's new humor page on their website, which will feature the magazine's Shouts & Murmurs essays and [...]
Emily Nussbaum's New Yorker review of Whitney and 2 Broke Girls is pretty spot-on. She goes beyond the usual Sarah Silverman-Chelsea Handler comparisons and notes that the Whitney of Whitney has a lot in common with Lucille Ball:
Cummings has none of Ball’s shining charisma or her buzz of anarchy. Yet she does share Lucy’s rictus grin, her toddler-like foot-stamping tantrums, and especially her Hobbesian view of heterosexual relationships as a combat zone of pranks, bets, and manipulation from below. “This is war,” Whitney announces, before declaring yet another crazy scheme to undercut her boyfriend, and it might as well be the series’ catchphrase.
The article also considers [...]
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? This news implies some sort of supernatural intervention to me, by a force that surrounds us and penetrates us and binds the galaxy together but most importantly penetrates us. While on the show's panel at The New Yorker Festival this weekend with the cast, show creator Mitch Hurtwitz apparently revealed plans to give Arrested Development a new 9 or 10 episode run before going forward with the upcoming Arrested Development movie. 20th Century Fox is allegedly in talks with both Netflix and Showtime to potentially air the limited series, which will "have each installment focus on a different member of the Bluth clan."
[...]In this week's New Yorker, Woody Allen dives deep into a game of recession-racked Monopoly: "Litvinov, for his part, held two gray properties, Vermont and Connecticut, but his ex-wife Jessica owned Oriental, and he knew she would never trade it to him. He’d offered his house in the Hamptons, more generous visitation hours with the children, and Water Works, but she was adamant. Litvinov had always had problems with women. His inability to throw doubles with the dice had led to a terrible fight with his current fiancée, Bea. He was sure she was having an affair with Paul Kindler, who’d somehow gotten Citigroup to finance a hotel for [...]
"So many times I’d write a sketch set at, say, a marriage counselor’s office and I was so naïve and unsophisticated working in television that I would literally have the opening line of dialogue be, 'Well, here we are at the marriage counseling center.' When you’re coming from the world of print, it’s not obvious that the characters can just walk by a sign that says 'marriage counseling center.'” – The thoroughly impressive Simon Rich talking to Co.Create about how he is able to write for so many different mediums and how, when he first started at SNL, he was at one point fallible.
(To the tune of the theme from Shaft:) Who's the comedian Louis C.K. and Janeane Garofalo thought would be famous in Boston in the 80s? (Graham!) Yes, Matt Graham. Who is the man that's been paying his rent with Scrabble winnings? (Graham!) Who's the cat that played NCAA ball when he was 40 years old? (Graham!) He's a complicated man, but no one understands him but Marc Maron. (Matt Graham!) Okay, enough theme song. If you've never heard of Matt Graham, here's a fascinating short profile on the comedian, who Colin Quinn describes as being "like a high school Indiana point guard that drives you nuts, because [...]
Three months before he died of pancreatic cancer, Bill Hicks wrote this letter to The New Yorker's John Lahr to thank him for an article he'd written on Hicks. (The article is a pretty fantastic read as well. I'm definitely gonna start calling the television "Lucifer’s Dream Box.") In his letter, he talks about how following the article, creative possibilities feel "limitless" and says that "the offers finally match my long-held and deeply cherished creative aspirations." Fair warning, you'll probably get a tightening feeling behind your nose while reading this, and then a sour feeling in your jaw, and an itchy feeling in your eyes, and then [...]
The New Yorker Arrested Development reunion panel is coming up October 2, the magazine announced today, and will feature a "Bluth Family reunion panel" with all of the major players. I guess the question is, how many Arrested Development reunions will it take to emotionally satisfy us the way a movie would? And as a follow-up question, why don't laptops come equipped with an infinity symbol key?
