You're (not) a native New Yorker

A few days ago I did a post about the short stories of Ernest Hemmingway, mentioning his six word short story (later I found in Wikipedia that this style of writing was called nano-fiction). Imagine my surprise when yesterday I received a copy of the New Yorker that had a article about this story and style of writing. Synchronicity or what? OK. The NY article was dated late Feb – but I hadn’t seen it and had written my blog sometime before that date (and just not posted it).

So why, you may well ask, is a Brit living in the Netherlands a (regular) reader of the New Yorker? It’s kind of complicated. I have an ex-pat American friend here who has a subscription to keep in touch with his culture – and I get his hand-me-downs. He is no more a New Yorker than I am. He hails from Minneapolis – which is as far from New York as Naples is from Amsterdam. (Minneapolis’s most famous cultural exports are Prince and the Home Range Prairie Companion). But he values the magazine as a way to stay in touch with liberal-left zeitgeist in the USA and as a source of film reviews. (Both of us here suffer enormously from our lack of access to foreign language movies. Dutch movie distributors don’t consider it worthwhile to sub title films into Dutch and English - so our opportunities to go and see innovative Romanian movies are limited. And ticket sales at our local art house movie are probably down by 50% because of this stupid- and it should be said quite rare- illustration of Dutch xenophobia. I at least suffer a little less than W. as I can get by with French language movies – but I would like to see the Spanish, Chinese etc ones too).

I digress. If you ignore the “what’s on in New York” this week section – which can give you a feeling of missing out something- the New Yorker is great magazine. It blends current affairs, politics and the arts in a very unusual and balanced fashion. Sometimes the issues and individuals are not easily recognisable to a European and sometimes, because of this, they are of limited interest. But they provide a combination of solid, critical journalism with literary and artistic commentary.

The copy that W lent me this week has (aside from the short on Hemmingway): an eight page short story / extract from Salman Rushdie, an three page review of the film making career of the Cohn brothers, a ten page article about ecological footprints and carbon trading, a piece about the use of water torture by USA troops in the Philippines in the early 1900s (does that ring a contemporary bell?), and a piece about the newly emerging discipline of behavioural economics (which addresses some of the issues discussed in my last post).

In short it is a great magazine. I wish there were a European equivalent. Robert Maxwell – for all his faults- had the courage to try one in the late 1980s. I was an avid reader. It was ahead of its time and slowly went downhill. Twenty years later is there a business opportunity for any publishing house to produce a pan-European cultural and political magazine / broadsheet?