NYT magazine: makeover

Cafe Society
1

The small ovoid in the Venn diagram of Dopers who read the NYT will know what I’m talking about: the Times has done a makeover on the Sunday magazine. They had a 220-page whopper last week to launch it. This week was more ordinary. But it kept whacking at me with little hammers.

It’s a pretty makeover, very 2015, very online-influenced. Nice, clear layout and good organization - light years ahead of some mag makeovers that reduce the rag to a jumbled mishmash of trendy design and ads that can’t be distinguished from content - at all. It’s not one of those redesigns by some 26yo Parsons graduate that throws all the rules out the window, including readability and being able to find content except by random browse. Nice, overall.

But then the subsonics kick in. There’s a full-page ad with only two lines of copy:

nyt mag
think again.

…and I can’t do it justice, because the first line in the Time’s title gothic, which looks just like old German Fraktur. The ad page is black. The type is white. There is a very strong Third-Reich vibe to the whole ominous thing.

Which is compounded by the black cover with a smallish portrait shot of Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose six-volume autobiography - titled, ahem, My Struggle - has wowed Swedes and English readers of the three volumes translated so far. Very much the Proust of the 21st century. More faint sounds of goose-stepping.

Then it gets beyond hilarious. The cover ties to an article by Knausgaard, titled “My Saga, Part 1” and in a nutshell is about his first few days of his first visit to the US. It’s eleven pages long plus a two-page opening splash. Knowing the, er, volume of his magnum opus, I could only laugh harder as I turned each page to see it continue yet again. I don’t think Harvard Lampoon could have crafted a better parody. And oh, thank god, it’s only part 1.
Anyway, all four of you who care… I found it a weird combination of nice work, nazis-I-hate-nazis creepiness and self-referencing absurdity.

2

Must agree. I saw the Think Again add and was immediately struck by the thought “wow; fuck you.” Like I wasn’t thinking while you weren’t around?

There is much to like about the NYTimes, but yeah, that was tone deaf…

3

Hah! I was going to start a thread about the new format last week, but the first edition of the new format had about 2-3x the number of ads as usual, and I thought I’d wait for the next edition to come out. Fortunately, the ads are back to about normal.

I’ve been getting the NYT on Sundays ever since I was in college (which was long before the internet as we know it, btw). Mainly, I like the Book Review section, The Week in Review, and The NYT Sunday Magazine. I’m pretty much OK with the new format. Still has in-depth articles, still has The Ethicist (although significantly different format). Still has the food recipes. Looks like the they got rid of the short essay on the final page, and that I miss (or did they move it?).

I pretty much had a “meh” reaction to the “Think Again” page. Do they take themselves too seriously? Yeah, but I don’t have to. I still like reading it no matter the silliness.

4

Yeah, Click and Clack take on ethical breakdowns. I was appalled - it’s like having Miss Manners, Dear Abby and one of the teen problems columnists chat about each issue. They should have dropped the feature rather than… have three or four random Dopers take over for Cecil in a pissing-contest thread format.