In Praise of the New Yorker Website

Up near the top of my list of journals and magazines you’ll find The New Yorker. The articles and fiction are first rate, the cartoons without peer, and the overall wash of general and current knowledge truly valuable in my effort to stay au fait — at least at what I think of as the “well-informed lawyer” level (I could never hope to achieve the general knowledge of a librarian!). It’s always been a print thing for me: I would only go to their website to grab a URL for an article I’d read in the mag so I could pass it on to Slawyers. But something made me have a look again lately, and I found a real treasure house.

First, most if not all of the articles from the print version are also available free on the website. Then there’s the really interesting bonus afforded by The New Yorker Conference material (“2012: stories from the near future“). Forty or so interesting people gathered last month to talk about things that we now imagine will be important in five years; seven of these talks are available in video, though I expect others to be added in time:

• Genius: 2012, Malcolm Gladwell
• Intellectual Property: 2012, Jeffrey Toobin talking with Tim Wu
• The City: 2012, David Remnick talking with Cory A. Booker
• Morality: 2012, Henry Finder talking with Jonathon Haidt
• Gaming: 2012, John Seabrook talking with Will Wright
• The Web: 2012, Ken Auletta talking with Barry Diller, Arianna Huffington, and Craig Newmark
• Solutions: 2012, Larissa McFarquar talking with Dan Barber, Marianne Cusato, and Adam Lowry

Even better, you can subscribe to these vidcasts in iTunes, for convenient offline listening. And speaking of podcasts, there’s a monthly fiction podcast on the New Yorker site as well. Too, a number of articles are supplemented with slideshows, to add a visual element where that makes sense. Finally, the pièce de résistance for me is the slideshow of cartoons from the current issue. There’s more — RSS feeds, animations of cartoons, links to contributors’ blogs… Go and see for yourself; it’s worth the effort.