In which I just give in and subscribe to the New Yorker again.

I don't want to get into a whole thing here, but I subscribed to The New Yorker for years, and, as much as we all love Susan Orlean, Roger Angell, and that guy selling those berets, after a while I just couldn't take it. And so I bailed on my subscription, which sent shockwaves through my grad school circle of friends at the time, who were all kind of like, "you'll be back."  Eight years later, they're right, although I only really regularly talk to like three of them anymore and so most of them will never know their triumph. It turns out that it's way, way easier to just give the NYer a bunch of money for complete access to their archives than it is to spend many, many days at the university library tracking down every baseball article Roger Angell ever wrote for them and photocopying (I only made it back about fifteen years before that got pretty old).  "Why didn't you just buy all the Roger Angell collections?" you might well ask, but they're not all in there is the answer to that entirely valid question.  And basically I am at a point in my life that for a variety of reasons I'm pretty sure I need to have access to everything Roger Angell ever wrote.  If A. J. Liebling isn't the best American sports writer ever -- and I guess he might be -- then it's Roger Angell for sure, right?  And, unlike A. J. Liebling, Roger Angell is pretty active on the NYer blog.  I was a little disappointed we didn't get a World Series article out of him last year, and when I mentioned this to Neil, Neil was like, "Kendall, I don't know how to tell you this, but Roger Angell is dead" and only after some frantic googling did I realize that I had been had (note: fuck you, Neil). 

Anyway: there's a really good Ben McGrath article about the Bonds trial in this week's NYer that is totally worth your time, but it's subscription only, and not in a way where I can just copy and paste it for you.  They're totally on to that over at the NYer.  Somebody must have told them people would do that.  So they made it so you can't.  It's quite crafty of them, and the interface is pretty god damn annoying, actually.  But they have the Roger Angell archive, and so they have my money.   

KS