Words and ideas:
New York Magazine
Excerpts from pieces up for National Magazine Awards
By Diego Vasquez
Mar 19, 2010
Last year New York magazine was nominated for six National Magazine Awards, second behind only The New Yorker’s 10 nominations. This year New York received 10 print nominations, its most ever, tying it with The New Yorker for most among all titles. One of those nominations was in the new magazine of the year category, which aims to honors publications' use of both print and digital media in combination. The title actually received 14 overall NMA nods, including four in the American Society of Magazine Editors’ new National Magazine Awards for Digital Media, winning two of those. On the print side, besides its nomination for magazine of the year, New York was recognized for general excellence among titles with circulations between 250,000 and 500,000, print design, photojournalism, photo portfolio, single-topic issue, magazine section, personal service, leisure interests and profile writing. Today, to kick off an ongoing series on this year's NMA nominees, Media Life excerpts passages from a few of the New York pieces that earned nominations.
Profile Writing
One of New York’s nominations came in the profile writing category, for Jonathan Van Meter’s piece “A Nonfiction Marriage,” about author Gay Talese. Here’s an excerpt:
Fair or not, it is a commonly held opinion in publishing circles that Talese’s career can be pretty much divided into pre– and post–“Thy Neighbor’s Wife”—that the writer and his gift never fully recovered from the shock waves. By 1980, he rarely wrote for magazines anymore, and it was a full twelve years before he published another book, “Unto the Sons,” which traced his Italian family’s immigrant history. Rumor had it that he was blocked, though Talese insists that wasn’t the case. He did, however, seek professional help. “One guy I saw for years was a Freudian,” says Talese. “The shrink was a very nice guy. He liked the book. But he said, ‘What you did was commit literary suicide.’ ”
It’s difficult to recover from such a leap into ignominy, and Talese has spent the decades since collecting material—photos, letters, anecdotes—about himself and [his wife] Nan, as if looking for clues to his character’s motivations. In recent years, the collecting has grown more purposeful, and Talese has settled on an ambitious new project, the subject of which will take him right back to the scene of the crime, to the spot where everything went off the rails: a book about his marriage.
I ask him if the marriage book is an attempt to analyze what happened all those years ago.
“Yeah,” he says. “I have never dealt with it.”
Personal Service
Another of New York’s nominations was for personal service, for Michael Idov’s story “For and Against Foreskin,” about the pros and cons of circumcision. Here’s an excerpt:
The idea of separating the prepuce from the penis is older than the Old Testament. The first depiction of the procedure exists on the walls of an Egyptian tomb built in 2400 B.C.—a relief complete with hieroglyphics that read, “Hold him and do not allow him to faint.” The notion appears to have occurred to several disparate cultures, for reasons unknown. “It is far easier to imagine the impulse behind Neolithic cave painting than to guess what inspired the ancients to cut their genitals,” writes David L. Gollaher in his definitive tome “Circumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery.” One theory suggests that the ritual’s original goal was to simply draw blood from the sexual organ—to serve as the male equivalent of menstruation, in other words, and thus a rite of passage into adulthood. The Jews took their enslavers’ practice and turned it into a sign of their own covenant with God; 2,000 years later, Muslims followed suit.
Medical concerns didn’t enter the picture until the late-nineteenth century, when science began competing with religious belief. America took its first step toward universal secular circumcision, writes Gollaher, on “the rainy morning of February 9, 1870.” Lewis Sayre, a leading Manhattan surgeon, was treating an anemic 5-year-old boy with partially paralyzed leg muscles when he noticed that the boy’s penis was encased in an unusually tight foreskin, causing chronic pain. Going on intuition, Sayre drove the boy to Bellevue and circumcised him, improvising on the spot with scissors and his fingernails. The boy felt better almost immediately and fully recovered the use of his legs within weeks. Sayre began to perform circumcisions to treat paralysis—and, in at least five cases, his strange inspiration worked. When Sayre published the results in the “Transactions of the American Medical Association,” the floodgates swung open. Before long, surgeons were using circumcision to treat all manner of ailments.
There was another, half-hidden appeal to the procedure. Ever since the twelfth-century Jewish scholar and physician Maimonides, doctors realized that circumcision dulls the sensation in the glans, supposedly discouraging promiscuity. The idea was especially attractive to the Victorians, famously obsessed with the perils of masturbation. From therapeutic circumcision as a cure for insomnia there was only a short step toward circumcision as a way to dull the “out of control” libido.
General Excellence
New York was also nominated for general excellence among titles with circulations between 250,000 and 500,000, for its April 20, Oct. 5 and Oct. 26 issues. The April 20 issue included a feature entitled “Waking Up to New York,” a collection of accounts of people’s first experiences in the city, including musician Rufus Wainwright, newswoman Connie Chung and model Naomi Campbell. Here are a few excerpts:
Connie Chung, newscaster
Arrived: 1983
I came to New York to work at NBC News. They put me up at the Helmsley Palace hotel, and I thought New York was incredible, fully based on the fact that I was staying at the Helmsley Palace hotel and ordering room service. NBC finally asked me, “When are you going to get an apartment?” So I finally did.
Andy Samberg, comedian
Arrived: 1998
I moved to New York with three friends from summer camp. Two of us were going to NYU, and the other two were in that self-loathing, debaucherous postcollege year of self-destruction. We crammed into what probably should have been a two-bedroom on Bleecker and Macdougal and sectioned things off into a four-bedroom by putting up a lot of curtains.
That was an absolute disaster. We were all really broke, and those dudes were out of control. There was no one in the house that did any cleaning, so by halfway through the year there were rats and mice everywhere. I grew up in the Bay Area, so I’m fairly “at one” with nature, but this was different. California nature is lovely. New York nature is disgusting. At first, I was really grossed out by it, but by summertime, I remember lying on my couch watching TV with a water gun, and every time a mouse would run out from behind the TV, I would just spray it. There was no “Let’s try and catch them”; it was just like, “Take a hike, buddy.”
The mice kind of became a part of the house. We weren’t feeding them or anything, but we definitely got less skittish around them. It’s interesting how much you can adapt to when you don’t have the means to fix it. We did get the sticky traps once. But when one got stuck, we were all too scared to get it and throw it out or kill it. Literally, we were four college-age dudes curled up on the couch listening to it scream for three days. We took turns going back and peeking at it and yelling, “Oh God, it’s there! It’s dying! It’s dying! What do we do?” But you can’t get it off; if you pull it, you rips the limbs off. The humane thing to do would have been to smash it with a hammer, but no one had the stomach to do that, so it was pretty awful.
Maggie Gyllenhaal, actress
Arrived: 1995
I grew up in L.A. and moved back here to go to college at Columbia, where I lived in the dorm for the first two years. I had a boyfriend who lived on Ludlow Street, and I couldn’t believe a place as alive and wild as that existed. I wanted to drop out of school and hang out there. I remember there was this guy who would take PCP. And when he did, everyone on the block would stop what they were doing and lock the doors and hide from him as he smashed car windows. My boyfriend had a teeny, tiny apartment that he shared with another guy. They had built bunk beds. And I would sleep over. The roommate would still be there, but we figured it out, like you do when you’re that age. We would use the Pink Pony like it was our kitchen and living room. I felt it was such a great way to live. I don’t know how I’d manage that now.
Mike Myers, comedian
Arrived: 1988
I was from Toronto and had this fantasy that the only time I would ever come to New York is if I had an audition for Saturday Night Live. They were very exclusive conditions. But in fact, that is what happened. I landed at La Guardia and the cabbie took the 59th Street Bridge. I looked up at the city as we crossed the river, and it brought me to tears.
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