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Comment by mturmon | Hacker News Reader

Easily half of the NYRB writings are about non-fiction, FYI.

Above, you have confined yourself to technical non-fiction, and a narrow range of technical non-fiction at that (math and computer science). So the same observation you make about Parks (unconsciously assuming "books" equals fiction) could be made about you.

And in fact, the NYRB has had a series of articles by Stephen Weinberg (http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/steven-weinberg-2/) and by Freeman Dyson (http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/freeman-dyson/) providing a broad, humanist perspective on technical subject areas and their history.

One of my favorite of their non-fiction writers is Mary Beard (http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/beard-mary/) who has an amazing command of Greek and Roman history, and can integrate multiple perspectives to put you back at that far-off time (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/cleopat...).

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> Easily half of the NYRB writings are about non-fiction, FYI.

So, it's non-fiction mostly because it is reviews? But nearly all the reviews are about fictional literature, right?

Before I posted, to learn more about the NYR I went to their Web site and to their page "About the Review" at

http://www.nybooks.com/about/

and read.

There, yes, I saw

"Freeman Dyson described the scientist as rebel"

but that's not Dyson's science, e.g., what he did to clean up Feynman's math, what he did in operations research in WWII, etc.

I also saw that they describe themselves as "a literary and critical journal". So, it's about fictional literature.

> Above, you have confined yourself to technical non-fiction

Really, I just gave some examples, but from long reading of HN I do have to conclude that my computer science examples are really typical of some of the best of what is of interest here at HN. So, the "books" of the NYR are not much like the books of HN.

> So the same observation you make about Parks (unconsciously assuming "books" equals fiction) could be made about you.

Not about me but maybe about HN.

I didn't see mention of the Weinberg articles.

Really, the several categories of books, fiction, non-fiction, humanism, literature, etc. aside, the more clear dichotomy is C. P. Snow's Two Cultures -- just two. There HN is firmly in one of these two and the NYR, the other.

NYRB reviews many non-fiction books. I would go as far as saying that 3/4 of the books they review are non fiction.

I chose an archived issue at random:

http://www.nybooks.com/issues/2014/jul/10/

There are only 4 works of fiction reviewed there. Everything else is either world politics, finance, or historical events. Science and philosophy are very heavily reviewed also.

If you never read an issue of the NYRB I highly encourage it. It is one of my favorite publications and it's bi-monthly so the quality is very high.

Daniel Mendelsohn's pieces alone are worth the price of a subscription

I'm big on long tail Web sites and much more in specialization, regard these, via the Internet, as potentially major sources of progress for civilization, literally.

So, the NYRB should change their "a literary and critical journal" which, in my case, of course, takes me back to senior English with the teacher leaning back, gazing at the ceiling in some state of ecstasy about some belle lettre thing and, thus, makes me want to reach for a fire ax and swing at anything related, for art as communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion.

If the NYRB has some non-fiction, i.e., some stuff that is actually true, then terrific.

"Easily half of the NYRB writings are about non-fiction" means that easily half of the books reviewed are non-fiction books. And, looking over the books listed in the current issue (http://www.nybooks.com/issues/2014/oct/23/), there certainly seems to be a solid majority of non-fiction books.

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