The entire New Yorker archive is now digitized

With every passing year the New Yorker stands out even more. High quality long-form journalism and short fiction with minimal advertising (in the print issue it’s just a few at the front and one at the back) is very hard to find. I love getting my issue in the mail every week and I’ve never once thought that reading it was a waste of my time.

I’d highly encourage anyone who loves great writing to subscribe.

I hope this gets incorporated into the existing website. I'm not an active subscriber but I used to be and I always thought there was a very fertile "other articles you might like" grounf that the New Yorker never took advantage of, given it's reputation and legacy.

I’ve long thought about trying to map of how the locations of music and maybe theater events listed in the magazine have changed over time.

There are performances of some kind in pretty much every corner of NYC but it’s interesting to see which neighborhoods have had events deemed relevant to The New Yorker readership in different eras.

I think that a better link (even though it lacks the context) is this new archive (which is mostly good as it lets you quickly see all cover pages) - https://www.newyorker.com/archive

But yeah, without a subscription, this still mostly just leads to walled off pages.

Accessing the actual archived version of every issue at https://archives.newyorker.com/ is truly wonderful as they are fully digitized back to back.

Slightly different question, but does anyone have any info about Google’s digitisation of Mainichi Shimbun’s pre-war articles? The work was announced 3 years ago, but it’s been radio silence since: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20221110/p2a/00m/0bu/00...

About 10 years ago, when I was at The New Yorker, I worked on launching the redesign, paywall, and the move to WordPress. We actually had most of the archive technically ready to go. The data wasn’t the hard part.

The real blocker was permissions and rights. Contracts going back a century obviously never contemplated digital publication, domains, or the internet at all. Untangling who owned what, and securing the right to republish everything online, was a massive legal and logistical undertaking.

That’s what held us back then, not so much the technology. Really glad to see that chapter finally closed.

I am a subscriber but still would love a tarball of PDFs of each issue.

Honestly this got me to subscribe. The back catalog is pretty stellar with pretty much every major writer of the twentieth century making a contribution. Zooming in on PDFs just wasn't how you wanted to read them.

Here’s a place to start, a list of 250 “best” articles from the New Yorker. I guess this is from previously available articles.

https://www.reddit.com/r/longform/s/zRJgAEdagi

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46327909

I saw no way to pull down a PDF. That's unfortunate as I prefer to browse offline.

Nice! 100 years worth.

How soon can we chat with it via RAG?

Could have sworn they did this years ago. I even have the first 80 years or whatever on DVD in the closet.

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