The New Yorker Opened Their Archive — Here's Where To Start
In case you haven't heard, America's favorite magazine to carry in public has pulled a Willy Wonka and opened up part of its robust archive to the general public. Now you can finally join the ranks of your friends whose grandparents gave them the complete New Yorker on CD-ROM and see what all the fuss is about. But where to begin?
To help make sense of the overwhelming collection, the Digg editorial team has put together a selection of personal favorites. Of course we highly suggest reading as much of the New Yorker archive as possible, but if you're strapped for time and/or looking for some place to start, you can't go wrong with these:
Regrets Only by Louis Menand
Part intellectual history, part biography, Louis Menand's article about Lionel Trilling gave me my first real introduction to one of our most significant (and arguably last) public intellectuals. It's a piece about what happens when leading a life of the mind makes you famous. — Anna Dubenko
A Pickpocket's Tale by Adam Green
"Fuck. You." That was illusionist Penn Jillette's reaction to a trick pulled off by one of the best pickpockets in the world and the opening anecdote in Adam Green's fascinating piece on Apollo Robbins' ability to manipulate our fragile spheres of attention. — Ross Neumann
The Apostate by Lawrence Wright
A friend of mine from high school left before the start of our senior year to join Scientology's Sea Org, which Lawrence Wright describes as "the church's equivalent of a religious order," so his piece systematically documenting the crimes and abuses committed by the church's leadership has stuck with me for a long time. In this piece, Wright tells the tale of acclaimed director and screenwriter Paul Haggis, who resigned from the church in 2008 after uncovering troubling incidences and policies which Haggis characterizes as "serious, indefensible human and civil-rights violations." — Josh Petri
Life At The Top by Adam Higginbotham
Adam Higginbotham's look into New York City's most complex window-washing rig pulls you in with whimsy, carefully walks you through a history of the trade, and leaves you with a true appreciation of window cleaners. It's a great example of what reporting a story into the ground can produce. — Steve Rousseau
Being A Times Square Elmo by Jonathan Blitzer
The best kind of article is one that tells you about something you didn't know you were interested in. The Times Square "characters" put way more money and effort into their costumes than you'd think. — Veronica de Souza
An S.O.S. In A Saks Bag by Emily Greenhouse
What struck me most was the incongruous nature of the whole situation. A man fearing for his life takes a risk to deliver a secret note, while still taking the time to calmly and politely sign off with "Thanks and sorry to bother you." The piece exposed the complex fortitude of human will, while shining a light on foreign labor issues. — Joe Tonelli
The Chameleon by David Grann
Clear your schedule. Cancel that vacation. Quit your job. You now have all of David Grann's New Yorker writings at your fingertips and you'll want no distractions. Start with this truly bizarre tale of a French serial impostor who has fooled the world into believing he is a normal teenage boy by taking on the identities of the missing or dead, including the long-lost son of a Texan family whom he lived with for five (five!) months. Like most of Grann's stories, it's stranger — and better — than fiction. — David Weiner