The New Yorker has unlocked some of its archives for the rest of the summer
You might only know The New Yorker for its often-bizarrely captioned cartoons, which once famously flummoxed Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes and served, for many years, as Roger Ebert’s white whale. But the Condé Nast-published news magazine has also been home, for nearly a century, to celebrated pieces of longform journalism, humor, and opinion writing, including work from people like Tina Fey, Woody Allen, Calvin Trillin, Malcolm Gladwell, and hundreds more. Normally, that trove of content is hidden behind paywalls, never to be seen by the happily freeloading hordes of the Internet.
But lo, the trumpets have sounded—i.e., the magazine has a new site design they want to promote—and the paywall has fallen! At least, for articles published since 2007. And only for this summer.
Still, given that the magazine publishes several long stories every week, that’s a lot of averages-out-to-pretty-good writing to dig through before autumn. Journalism blog Longform has a decent list of unlocked articles to get you started, including this one about an Amazon-based tribe that’s proven surprisingly resistant to cultural contamination, and a piece by author Haruki Murakami about his relationship with running. The New Yorker has also released selected older pieces in their archives, including profiles of master magician and frequent David Mamet-collaborator Ricky Jay, and legendary Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan.
There’s also a lot of Malcolm Gladwell writing suddenly available. There are more than 140 pieces by the Outliers author in the unlocked archives, which might make a dent in the 10,000 hours of reading Malcolm Gladwell essays that you’d need to become a master of them, according to something Malcolm Gladwell made up one time.