The Entire New Yorker Archive Is Now Digitized

When a lot of content was being put out on CD/DVD, a number of publications did but they are not straightforwardly accessible these days because they're usually on an old version of Windows. (Yes, if you want to make a project of it, you can probably get into them but has never been worth it for me.)

If I’m reading this correctly, they now have all their historic articles loaded into their CMS. I think they previously just had a system where you could page (and maybe search?) through scans of old issues, which is also cool but not as versatile.

Normally when laymen say "digitized" they mean one of two things: scanned images in a PDF or fully transcribed (and possible formatted) text extracted from the scan. The Complete New Yorker you're thinking of was mostly the former, with a bit of indexing (table of contents pointing to the PDFs if I remember correctly).

This latest digitization project does the latter, transcribing the text into their existing content management system and as far as I can tell, preserving much of the formatting. This comes with full text search, allows cross linking between articles, and all that good stuff.

I suspect that since they include an LLM summary and started this digitization project in early 2024, this was enabled by LLMs.

Nice, reminded me of this classic https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/23/the-maraschino...

My personal favorite is Louis Menard’s piece on how bad Microsoft Word is.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/06/the-end-matter

Possibly friendlier link:

https://old.reddit.com/r/longform/comments/1e8m5s1/the_250_b...

(old.reddit.com takes you to the old UI)

That's a very neat idea! If you ever have the time to do it you should try it out, in fact you've gave me an idea of trying to do the same for my city, Bucharest, just need to find some relevant data-sources.

It also speaks to what we lose when we lose magazine listings of events (New Yorker effectively gutted this section within the past decade), movie showtime listings via newspaper, etc

We have a very strong archive going back a century until about 2015, but now wading through linkrot circa 2017 is miserable

in addition to making a map, it would also be a fascinating timeline: you could show venues (as they appear/disappear through time) and artists, and filter/search those

imagine seeing listings for John Coltrane or Miles Davis or Benny Goodman...

let me know if I can help - it's a beautiful & great project idea!

That’s an incredible idea and I hope you do this! If you do, you should consider adding restaurants too.

I think you can download the entire issue from the archive

Haha, I can't read long articles anymore because I want to reply, a habit I picked chatting LLMs.

The Atlantic has this. Related articles going back to the 1800s.

I’ve happily lost hours to following links at the bottom of one story to the next. The new archive still feels a little clunky (search needs a fair bit of work and the OCR clearly struggled in places), but it’s fun to chase down old classics and they’ve done a great job of highlighting greatest hits from the past 100 years.

Plus the (really high-quality) crossword puzzles often have an Easter egg where the big revealer is linked to an essay from the past.

hopefully a lot of local libraries will have access. i could spend hours sifting through this.

Fun (unrelated) fact:

My favorite product that I got to build there was “Cartoons at Random”. You’ll never guess what it did/was!

I miss it terribly, just swiping images off a stack to reveal a new random cartoon underneath.

The developer (Justin) did an amazing interaction on iOS app (seamless, no Hank) and web version decent too.

Such delight. Sigh.

Any idea what changed, if anything? Court decisions made in the meantime simplifying things?

Hopefully the content fits in a few buckets (cartoons, fiction, non-fiction) as far as different terms for rights might go. And then from there, you can lop off anything that's past its copyright term (?). Then maybe the next step is grouping works by the agent/publisher, if any? Or maybe all the contracts with the New Yorker are signed by individuals, with the New Yorker as a publisher. I don't know.

Did this change? I stopped reading the print version for lack of time a few years back, and there was definitely some full-page and margin advertising throughout the paper. I recall some of it being clearly directed at much wealthier customers than I was.

I see why people like it, but personally, I find their brand of longer form journalism extremely tiresome. Most often I read articles because I want to know the facts, and not just for the pleasure of reading for its own sake. Ponderous and meandering details of how the journalist interviewed so-and-so at such and such location and what the journalist thought about the food and the ambience and all of that just makes me furiously angry at what a waste of time it feels like. I just want to know the facts. I feel like AI is a godsend for impatient people like me who just want instant information And I have no interest in what a cool experience the journalist had or particular details of how they got paid or who they borrowed money from while they were writing.

I’m a longtime New Yorker lover myself. I think there is some truth to this though: https://open.substack.com/pub/persuasion1/p/how-the-new-york...

For anyone with Apple News+ or Apple One subscriptions, The New Yorker is included:

https://apple.news/I8nGwNFiZSGKO9nZxZQ8jMQ

I could never get into the New Yorker. It has a teasing, meandering style I find boring and drawn out. They take you to the precipice of something interesting only to pull back into an origin story, over and over again. I think it's the opposite of good writing: bloated, conceited, style over substance. I'm sure it earned its place at the table long ago but the only part of it I can enjoy are the cartoons.

My biggest reading pleasure used to be the LRB but it was infected with the politics virus years ago. It used to be a place to read experts quibble about the most obscure topics in wonderful language and now it feels mostly like virtue signalling. I don't know where the best writing is these days but it sure as shit doesn't feel like it's in major print.

I subscribe, but stare right through ads, unnoticing. Do they really not have that margin ad for berets anymore?

If you have a library card with Libby access, you can get digital issues for free