Credit: Daniel Clowes
clowes.jpeg

I’m normally a fan of the regular old New Yorker, but this issue—the June 4 & 11 one—seems like it was created specifically for me. (Thanks, New Yorker editors! It’s about goddamn time!) “The Science Fiction Issue” contains work from Sam Lipsyte, Anthony Burgess, Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, Junot Díaz, Ray Bradbury—

(deep breath)

—Ursula K. Le Guin, China Miéville, Margaret Atwood, and William Gibson. And then Anthony Lane talks about Moonrise Kingdom! And there’s a piece by Emily Nussbaum about Doctor Who and Community! AND THEN Daniel Clowes did the cover!

RIDICULOUS. Consider yourselves alerted, lit nerds and sci-fi nerds and Community nerds and Wes Anderson nerds and most other species of nerd. The issue’s already available online for subscribers, and it’s on the Kindle, too; for some ill-conceived reason, your grandparents will have to wait until the end of the week to pick up a hard copy. Which I will probably do as well, both to say “hey” to your grandmother and also to have a copy to keep and hold and fawn over forever.

With honor and distinction, Erik Henriksen served as the executive editor of the Portland Mercury from 2004 to 2020. He can now be found at henriksenactual.com.

6 replies on “Nerd Alert: This Week’s <i>New Yorker</i>”

  1. A good friend of mine has given me a subscription to the New Yorker for my birthday for the last two or three years and although I never get through reading them all and constantly have a backlog, it’s a pretty great gift. I may have to actually read this issue in a timely manner, though.

  2. I have something like 75 back issues of the New Yorker saved on my Kindle. I get to a few pieces each week, then archive each issue with the plan to go back to it at some point. Realistically, this will never, ever happen.

    My aunt is the only person I know who manages to keep up with the New Yorker, and she only reads it every other year: For a year she’ll read nothing but the New Yorker, cover to cover, every week; then she’ll take the next year off from the magazine and read novels instead. Which is one way to keep up, I guess, but I don’t think I could do without novels for a whole year.

  3. Don’t people interested in those authors, and Wes Anderson films, and Community cut a pretty huge swath of readers at large? I’m wondering what it really means to apply one word (“nerd”) to all this.

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