Comment by atombender | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atombender | Hacker News Reader

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If you like this sort of coverage, I highly recommend The New York Review of Books.

Contrary to the name, their articles aren't book reviews so much as excuses to write solid, expert articles on topics that happen to be written about in recently published books. The articles are almost always interesting even when they are about books, because of their extremely high-quality contributors — Joyce Carol Oates, Tony Judt, Gore Vidal, Zadie Smith and J. M. Coetzee come to mind. They also publish lots of global, topical analysis. During the Egypt conflict of 2011-2014, they had some of the best coverage, for example.

I also enjoy the sheer lack of pretentiousness. They have world-class writers, yet they never seem full of themselves the way some other "liberal intellectual" publications (The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Monocle, etc.) do.

(Their book coverage is great, though. They also publish books, and are responsible for keeping a lot of obscure out-of-print stuff in print.)

The New Yorker does come off a bit odd because it's a middle-brow publication aimed at a mass audience and sold as 'what high society reads', hence it's motivated to try to look 'intellectual' while being as unsophisticated as possible to maintain a high school, or nowadays middle school, reading level. Since people are most comfortable at a few grades below their actual reading level.

It's a common paradigm for many 'intellectual' publications

Actual high-brow literature, such as the Physical Review Letters or the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, have no need to pretend but then they assume a bare minimum of a college graduate reading level, plus specialized knowledge on top of that for their niche. Hence they're impenetrable for the vast majority.

Physical Review Letters is not "high brow"...

"High brow" is work intended for public consumption by well educated and perhaps a bit snobby laymen. Scholarly journals by contrast are intended for specialist audiences and are considered "academic", not "high brow".

Your thinking of middle-brow.

High-brow is aimed at a much smaller audience, typically implied as 'high society' or 'the elites' but not necessarily.

I chose the two examples because they are publicly accessible and high-brow not because they are the most representative of the class.

both seem straight-up scientific journals ("the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal") for specific disciplines. Calling them "high-brow literature" and comparing them with The New Yorker (and its essays on random topics) seems... strange?

I don't care much if comments on HN seem strange, I care more about if they are correct.

FYI: The New Yorker != The New York Review of Books, which your parent talks about.

NYRB is totally different:

https://www.nybooks.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Review_of_Books

> They have world-class writers, yet they never seem full of themselves the way some other "liberal intellectual" publications (The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Monocle, etc.) do.

Did you not see this part?

Oof my bad; thanks for pointing it out. I got a bit confused about what you were referring to, since I believe that GP didn't think of New Yorker as highbrow, given the quotes on "liberal intellectual".

But yes, sorry about the mistake.

And if you want something Anglocentric instead of US-centric, there's the London Review Of Books.

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