Pro Strats for Demolishing Your Stack of New Yorkers

Thanks to an endlessly-shared tweet, we all now know that Isaac Newton won a Nobel Prize during a plague. Well, we're not Isaac Newton. Most of us would do well to read his Wikipedia entry, let alone forever changing the course of humanity's understanding of the physical world.

In this time of quarantine and never-ending distracting, we must set our sights lower: working our way through our stacks of New Yorker issues. Here are some pro strats I've learned from reading, conservatively speaking, 20 million words of that shit over the last decade.

1. Unless you actually live in New York, skip everything up to and including the Talk of the Town. In fact, even if you live in New York, you should probably skip it. Having never lived there, I can't say that for certain – maybe there are some who lounge in their Eames chairs in their affordable LES apartment, stroking their chins over a glass of Merlot about whether to attend a delightful-sounding gallery opening. But I doubt it.
2. Skip the Shouts and Murmurs.
3. Cast a wary eye over the Personal Histories. Sometimes good, often tediously self-indulgent.
4. Read the articles, even the ones that look super-boring. These will later be turned into Important Books.
1. If you're reading this digitally, like a proper person, I suggest not using the official app, which is apparently designed for 70 year olds because the smallest font size is like 3x the size of that in the printed magazine. 
2. Instead, read the articles from the website. With an adblocker (it's OK, you're a subscriber, right?). And manually remove those fucking awful auto-playing videos. Didn't you get the memo, New Yorker? That stuff doesn't monetise for the likes of you.
3. Bonus points: just fling it over to Pocket or Instapaper.
5. I am a bad person and I don't read the fiction.
6. I used to read all the Critics stuff, but after a few years I realised I was never going to grow into someone who cared about modern opera or future rap or something.

Congratulations, you made it! Just twenty more issues left in your pile.