New Yorker Out Loud Review: The No-Guilt New Yorker

Few know such angst as the New Yorker reader. So much great journalism! So little time.

While it's basically impossible to read the entire issue in any given week, people still hang on to them for months—years!—with their shame growing proportionally to the height of the magazine stack on their nightstand.

I was finally able to circumvent this agony when a friend told me that he got rid of an issue as soon as he had read at least one story in it. Maybe it was the one-page Shouts & Murmurs, maybe it was a two-page book review, maybe it was the 12-page masterpiece on Bosnia. (Yeah, mostly it was Shouts & Murmurs.) That rule, which I have accepted as my own, has saved me a great deal of heartache over the past few years.

Now I have an even better rule: I can get rid of a New Yorker without even cracking the cover—as long as I listen to the New Yorker Out Loud podcast with the magazine's online editor, Blake Eskin.

Eskin conducts a 10- to 15-minute interview with one story's author each week. It might be music critic Sasha Frere-Jones on singer Lily Allen, author Zadie Smith on the role of comedy in her family, or Bruce McCall on cartooning. The interviews define the broad outlines of the story, offer a few details that didn't make the story, and often make you want to read the whole thing—even if you were pretty sure beforehand that you were not interested in the world of lesbian separatists in the 1970s.

Eskin is an adept interviewer, always keeping the spotlight on the interviewee, not himself. And he's often able to draw out just a bit more than the story reveals on the pages of the magazine, which ultimately makes reading the story more enjoyable. (Did I think that I cared about Lily Allen from the hundreds of posts by Perez Hilton? No. After listening to Sasha Frere-Jones discuss her—and the perils of fame—in his recent Out Loud interview? Definitely. It was the only story I read that week. And at least now I can identify a couple songs she wrote, thanks to the clips on the podcast.)

It's lovely to hear authors behind the bylines, to get a sense of their writing and researching process, and to realize that you might not have to fear striking up a conversation with them at a dinner party. (It's hard not to love author Donald Barthelme and critic Louis Menand when you hear Menand tell a story about the time they met at a party and Barthelme asked him, "If could steal one thing in this apartment, what would it be?")

Out Loud also catalogs the major stories in the New Yorker that week, but the best part is that it's a guide. You might hear that Katherine Boo has a story that week (in which case: carve out two hours of time NOW so you can read it), but you might just decide that the story being profiled is the one thing you want to put on your New Yorker to-do list for the week.

That, in itself, will save you an awful lot of suffering. And any podcast that can do that should be at the top of your download list.