You had me at superfluous umlauts....From Longform:
The New Yorker has lifted its paywall on stories published since 2007. The following picks are available free for the first time.
Jul 2007Bonobos are celebrated as peace-loving, matriarchal, and sexually liberated. Are they?
Oct 2011How Taylor Swift made teen angst into a business empire.
Aug 2011Rin Tin Tin and the making of Warner Bros.
Oct 2010
She was brilliant. Was she also a fraud?
...MUCH MORE
And since we're talking back issues, here's The Atlantic, October 1, 1906:
New York After Paris
"New York is trying to create for itself a new mind as well as a new body."...MORE
To the Parisian who sees New York for the first time, it must appear a wilderness of sprawling ugliness. He is shocked rather than dazzled by most of the things with which he is expected to be impressed; and his eyes, nose, and ears are constantly and cruelly assailed by sights, smells, and sounds to which New Yorkers through long familiarity are oblivious. "A big iron bazaar, and dirty beyond belief!" was the verdict of a Frenchman who fled from it in dismay and disgust at the end of twenty-four hours; and while not every Frenchman who arrives in New York takes to his heels in this inglorious fashion, the criticism is fairly typical of the way New York strikes the fastidious Gaul.
To the American returning to New York with a point of view gained by a long residence in Paris the New World metropolis must spell disillusion. The squalid, sagging, lurching wood-and-iron wharf line—the thing above all others he would most willingly have missed—confronts him on his arrival practically unaltered, except that it seems to him, in comparison with the trim and tidy banks of the Havre he has just left, more insufferable than his memory pictured it. Everything else has changed, and changed, it seems to him, for the worse.
Trinity spire and the Produce Exchange tower, which used to refresh his vision down town, are hidden by a score of nondescript sky-scrapers, and the beautiful lines of the Brooklyn Bridge are broken by these same intruders. The exquisite City Hall suffers likewise from their proximity, and will soon be perceived but dimly, like a jewel at the bottom of a well. The Bowery, which was erstwhile gay and piquant with glitter and gaud, has degenerated into sodden commonplaceness. Broadway (from City Hall to Fourteenth Street) has become completely Semitic, without having acquired thereby a scrap of Semitic charm.
The old-fashioned dignity of Washington Square has been irretrievably compromised by a modern corporation building which adds insult to injury by wearing on its façade the Latin motto perstando et prestando utilitati....
