How To Read The New Yorker In 13 Easy Steps

1. Flip to the Table of Contents.
2. Is there an Emily Nussbaum piece? Hooray! Read it immediately.
3. Now do the check for Anthony Lane’s byline. Good. Good.
4. Stop for a moment and congratulate yourself on having read two New Yorker articles already.
5. Check to see who wrote the “Shouts and Murmurs” piece for the week. Get distracted by wondering how Andy Borowitz’s entire career is possible. Permit your mind to jump to a parallel track and wonder why it is that American publishing persists in giving Joel Stein valuable real estate. Move back to thinking about the profusion of genuinely funny and insightful writers who are published in places that are not the New Yorker. Many of these writers are women and/or not white and/or not part of the New York City publishing scene. Surely that’s only coincidental. And surely, the finest minds in publishing are working on the happy problem of early 21st-century publishing, which is how to tap the abundance of incisive and funny writers who eschew gatekeeping publishing culture. Remember you were supposed to be checking for the byline on who wrote “Shouts and Murmurs.” Oh. Them. Skip it.
6. What are the features this week? You’re too emotionally fragile to handle Elizabeth Kolbert’s latest opus on how untouchable giants of unchecked capitalism are turning the Earth into a barren hellscape. Is there a story on the rivalry Olympic-level sailing you can read instead? You’re in the mood for two hundred and fifty words dedicated to a step-by-step description of tying a rolling hitch knot.
7. Get sucked into a story on street style. Realize, four paragraphs into the story, that you’ve got a mental checklist for every New Yorker story written: An atmospheric lede meant to convey a sense of place and time to the reader; a quote that’s designed to signal the values and ideas of the human subject in the article and provide a jumping off point to the next section, which is an historic overview of a whole industry and/or cultural movement; said historic overview of a whole industry and/or cultural movement; a vertiginous leap back to the present now that we’re all experts on the history of everything; a chronological progression of events meant to either underscore the story’s lead or show how misdirected the subject of the article is; the final paragraph, which is meant as a wry underscore to the last 5000 words.
8. Read two more articles and confirm the checklist structure.
9. Oh crap, you’ve accidentally landed on the first page of the fiction. Skip it, skip it, skip it —
10. Yep, there it is. The protagonist of the fiction story is a well-educated white man. And look! He’s mentioned his penis obliquely in the first page.
11. Flip the page before you get to the part in the story where the well-heeled white protagonist interacts with his black maid and spends the next 2000 words in a state of priapic agitation. No, don’t flip back to see if this week’s protagonist is all worked up over the smooth-skinned Filipino carpenter his wife hired. Those stories always end with someone listening to crickets as they smoke a cigarette alone in the darkness. The end of the cigarette will glow as an ironic counterpoint to the protagonist’s lack of emotional enlightenment.
12. We’re at the books section. Did Tad Friend write this week’s “Here’s a cultural analysis as seen through the lens of this book I’m reviewing” piece? He did! Spend a moment wondering how often Amanda Hesser rolls her eyes over the course of a weekend. Spend another moment wondering how unfeminist it is to ding a writer you like when they’re married to a writer or artist you don’t like. Resume reading Tad Friend as a way to cultivate a broader critical mind, muttering, “Well, he’s far less precious than Adam Gopnik and I did like Cheerful Money, so there’s that.”
13. Hey, you’ve made it through almost a whole New Yorker! Congratulations. While you’ve been walking through steps 1–12, three more issues have arrived. And one is the fiction issue.