The New Yorker Story

This paragraph from Jonathan Franzen on the birth of the New Yorker story is spot on.

It was also in the fifties that “the New Yorker story” emerged, quite suddenly, as a distinct literary genus. What made a story New Yorker was its carefully wrought, many-comma’d prose; its long passages of physical description, the precision and the sobriety of which created a kind of negative emotional space, a suggestion of feeling without the naming of it; its well-educated white characters, who could be found experiencing the melancholies of affluence, the doldrums of suburban marriage, or the thrill or the desolation of adultery; and, above all, its signature style of ending, which was either elegantly oblique or frustratingly coy, depending on your taste. Outside the offices of The New Yorker, its fiction editors were rumored to routinely delete the final paragraph of any story accepted for publication.

An engineering theory of the Volkswagen scandal

Paul Kedrosky in The New Yorker:

In a powerful book about the disintegration, immediately after launch, of the Challenger space shuttle, which killed seven astronauts in January of 1986, the sociologist Diane Vaughan described a phenomenon inside engineering organizations that she called the “normalization of deviance.” In such cultures, she argued, there can be a tendency to slowly and progressively create rationales that justify ever-riskier behaviors. Starting in 1983, the Challenger shuttle had been through nine successful launches, in progressively lower ambient temperatures, across the years. Each time the launch team got away with a lower-temperature launch, Vaughan argued, engineers noted the deviance, then decided it wasn’t sufficiently different from what they had done before to constitute a problem. They effectively declared the mildly abnormal normal, making deviant behavior acceptable, right up until the moment when, after the shuttle launched on a particularly cold Florida morning in 1986, its O-rings failed catastrophically and the ship broke apart.
 

If the same pattern proves to have played out at Volkswagen, then the scandal may well have begun with a few lines of engine-tuning software. Perhaps it started with tweaks that optimized some aspect of diesel performance and then evolved over time: detect this, change that, optimize something else. At every step, the software changes might have seemed to be a slight “improvement” on what came before, but at no one step would it necessarily have felt like a vast, emissions-fixing conspiracy by Volkswagen engineers, or been identified by Volkswagen executives. Instead, it would have slowly and insidiously led to the development of the defeat device and its inclusion in cars that were sold to consumers.
 

If this was, in fact, the case, then Horn was basically right that engineers were responsible. The scandal wouldn’t have been caused by a few rogue engineers, though, so much as by the nature of engineering organizations themselves. Faced with an expensively engineered diesel engine that couldn’t meet strict emissions standards, Volkswagen engineers “tuned” their engine software. And they kept on tuning it, normalizing deviance along the way, until they were far from where they started, to the point of gaming the emissions tests by detecting test conditions and re-calibrating the engine accordingly on the fly.
 

My uncle who works in aerospace/aeronautics has long told me that most of the public has no idea how far the Space Shuttle program were pushing the boundaries of what was possible.

Encouraging to see Kedrosky get a byline in The New Yorker. Om Malik has a piece in The New Yorker on Jack Dorsey's return to Twitter. I love The New Yorker, but their coverage of the tech industry has occasionally struck me as a bit biased (part of the larger East Coast/West Coast culture war, with Silicon Valley in the role of the nouveau riche). I'm encouraged to see their stable of tech voices broadening.

Why?

MY NEPHEW: Why?
 

ME: Because you’re my sister’s son. And I care about her.

MY NEPHEW: Why?

ME: Because I just do.

MY NEPHEW: Why?

ME: Because, I guess, when I was born, she was three years old and, like any younger sibling, I put her on a pedestal.

MY NEPHEW: Why?

ME: I probably idealized her, which is strange considering that your mom was not very nice to me.

MY NEPHEW: Why?

ME: She probably felt a mix of confusing emotions.

MY NEPHEW: Why?

ME: She was an only child, and when I came along she was forced to share everything.

MY NEPHEW: Why?

ME: We each had needs, and I think it was difficult for our parents to satisfy us both.

MY NEPHEW: Why?

ME: Because needs are so ephemeral. I think it was Maslow who said, “It’s a rare and difficult psychological achievement to know what we want.”
 

With my 21 month old niece staying with me the past few days, I was reminded of this humor piece for the New Yorker by Jesse Eisenberg.

Incidentally, while Eisenberg is an accomplished actor, I'm way more impressed with his body of writing for the New Yorker. I suppose that's largely because I think of him as an actor first, but being published under that banner is an accomplishment in and of itself. 

Ricky Jay

Deborah Baron, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where Jay lives, once invited him to a New Year’s Eve dinner party at her home. About a dozen other people attended. Well past midnight, everyone gathered around a coffee table as Jay, at Baron’s request, did closeup card magic. When he had performed several dazzling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, “Come on, Ricky. Why don’t you do something truly amazing?”

Baron recalls that at that moment “the look in Ricky’s eyes was, like, ‘Mort—you have just fucked with the wrong person.’ ”

Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, “The three of hearts.” After shuffling, Jay gripped the deck in the palm of his right hand and sprung it, cascading all fifty-two cards so that they travelled the length of the table and pelted an open wine bottle.

“O.K., Mort, what was your card again?”

“The three of hearts.”

“Look inside the bottle.”

Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke up immediately.

It's been a while since I've seen one of those lists of articles to peruse from the New Yorker's temporary open archive. This profile of Ricky Jay from 1993 is one of my favorites.

While I was living in LA, I saw him perform live twice. This description of Jay from the profile is perfect: “He has a skeptically friendly, mildly ironic conversational manner and a droll, filigreed prose style.”

Life of a condom

When MetroCard meets GameStop PowerUp Card Jordi Hirschfeld, he looks at me and says, No wonder Jordi Hirschfeld not yet use you. I become confused. Use me for what?

That night, MetroCard tells me many strange things about myself. At first, I do not believe what he says. But he insists all is true. When I start to panic, he laughs. He says, What did you think you were for? I am too embarrassed to admit truth, which is that I thought I was balloon.
 

Simon Rich, son of Frank Rich, is one of my favorite humorists. I wrote here about his great four-part comedic story “Sell Out” a while ago (you can start with Part One), and another of his comic masterpieces “Guy Walks Into Bar” has been atop The New Yorker's Most Popular list for much of the time since they opened their archives for the summer.

The excerpt above is from his short “Unprotected: Life of a condom.” It reminds me of this Google commercial.