Wednesday, December 14, 2005




Toys for (pretentious) grown-ups

80 years of intellectual journalism and befuddling punchlines - usually with talking dogs.












It's been a few years since I gave myself a significant Christmas present, mostly for lack of ideas not too significant (we'll wait until the XBox 360 is cheaper, and glitch-free). With the added incentive of a significant employee discount, this year was too easy.

I'm now the proud owner of The Complete New Yorker, 8 DVD-ROM's containing 4,109 issues of the magazine since its first issue on February 21, 1925. And it's not just the text, but every cover, illustration, ad, bizarre cartoon (bravo to McSweeney's for skewering them perfectly) - it's all here for my immersion.

Obviously the right audience will fawn over this exhaustive library. But how's the packaging, the interface? They've been working on this for a while, and it shows. Search options are all you could ask for: filter by author, "department," year or issue. When you find the article you're looking for within the search results, click it and viewer will prompt you to insert the correct disc. You can browse by cover - click a cover and you'll be presented with the table of contents. Find an article you like, click it and it'll take you to the story exactly as it appeared in print. From there you can zoom - just click the left-mouse button; you can click-drag in zoom mode to move around the page. In flip mode, a click of the right-mouse button will turn the page for you.

My first search, being the proud Tampan (yes, for you out-of-towners, that's what they call us) that I am, was for mentions of "Tampa." The oldest mention was from the Talk of the Town section of the November 25, 1944 issue (cover price, 15 cents). It gave a story of a Tampa woman whose husband was a lieutenant serving in Italy. She wrote her husband in worry that she would not be a priority to receive a telephone (one of a thousand details of wartime that boggle my mind); he then sent her a phone from Italy, which the Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company of Florida was happy to install. The writer (the section is credited to both Robert Hale and E.B. White - yes, that E.B. White) was worried about the precedent this chivalry was setting, a precedent that could prove to be "the greatest provocation to mass lawbreaking since Prohibition."

Pithy. But that may be what makes the The New Yorker so unique. Eighty years later, despite the astronomical changes in media and communication, the magazine has not changed much at all. It's still a magazine for reading, for readers. Bless them for sticking to it. Curse them for giving me another excuse not to leave the house.


Posted by Joel at 12/14/2005 10:35:00 PM