No need free New Yorker. New Yorker sufficiently liberated already, thanks.
Whiskey, Sexy, and cryptic cartoons.
My method of subscribing to the new yorker is, I believe, overpriced and totally suboptimal, but does not hit the threshold of being annoying enough that I actually try to solve it.
With every click get 1 lb New Yorker.
No need free New Yorker. New Yorker sufficiently liberated already, thanks.
Maybe to you immigrants from the heartland. A native would probably disagree.
I think we've officially hit peak bougie on the blog.
Also, fuck Apple and the absurd Newsstand app. What purpose does it possibly serve?
We were given a gift subscription last year & I felt oppressed by its relentlessness. Both schedule and voice. Was very relieved when subscription lapsed.
absurd Newsstand app. What purpose does it possibly serve?
So right. Oh, you're in Newsstand? That's why I forget to read you.
I was given a gift subscription. A friend came over, noticed it and said "You'll have to quit your job to keep up." A year later I was much behind and relieved when the subscription ended.
At least my subscription isn't paper. That's the worst.
The subscription on clay tablets has made a dusty, cluttered mess of our living room.
For some reason they never revoked my access to the online NYer (including the full archive, which is great) after I dropped my subscription 5-6 years ago. Wonder if that'll dry up when they implement the new paywall in the fall.
I like the paper magazine. The covers are colorful.
I've vowed to read every issue (though am allowed to skip articles, according to my self-inflicted rules) this year. I've probably said that for the last five or six years, but for the first time ever, I'm actually managing it and it doesn't feel oppressive.
I don't even know who you people are. My completion percentage is somewhere between 90 and 95%.
No wonder you all are so smart.
I think most years I'm at something like 40-50%. But since I am completionist, once I get behind the weight of catching up feels oppressive and I can't just do the sensible thing and start from the latest issue.
I do not read the fiction, generally. I read the first three paragraphs of a lot of the fiction, and then I develop a nagging itch someplace, or notice that the stove isn't clean, or that the plants have wilted. Better people than I am read the fiction.
Oh yeah, fuck the fiction. A) I don't care for most literary fiction. B) If I do care, I'll read the damn book they're excerpting without acknowledgement when it comes out.
I'm LB.
(Occasionally I do manage to read the books that come after the stories, but I really don't get on very well with short stories.)
11: I don't know what you're talking about. I always get a good workout hauling a year's worth of back issues down to the recycling.
I think the New Yorker is the only paper subscription I've had as an adult. Two years, heavily discounted - I thought, how could it go wrong? - glad to see it stop, formed a substantial amount of the weight of paper I got rid of about a year later.
The New Republic remains the magazine I should not have subscribed to at all, though. At the time, I signed up for the book review stuff, not really knowing what I was getting into.
Even when I "read" a New Yorker issue instead of just putting it on the unread pile, I probably rarely read more than 20-30%. Maybe I'd read an article or two and a book review.
The New Yorker, like The Economist, seems like a good shape to read over the handlebars of a stroller.
Why avoid reading piled up issues of the New Yorker when I can do the same with my piled up issues of the New York Review of Books
I got mother Jones at one point which was so goddamn depressing that I could not handle it. Online it's fine, an article here and there. But not cover to cover.
And 1 has had me chuckling for the past few hours.
I still love The New Yorker because I don't think of it as this thing I have to read all of all the time; just a thing that shows up and usually has something interesting in it. Often lately I read half of Talk of the Town, one of the main articles and possibly the reviews, though I mostly don't like the current reviewing staff. It's not like the issue explodes and kills you if you don't read everything in it. The only real danger of reading is that I'll look at the cultural listings and get sad.
It's not like the issue explodes and kills you if you don't read everything in it.
It does, and it gets guilt all over you.
2: Speaking of whiskey, TIL that while bourbon on an empty stomach and a sleep deficit while watching a chess match in a conference room after work isn't exactly a terrible idea, it does make me pretty useless afterwards.
London Review much shorter and digestible than NYRB, most importantly they publish Jenny Diski. But appalling position refusing to publish more women, so all not roses.
The best thing I ever tea in the NYer was a short story by Nicholson Baker, possibly one of the most wildly romantic tales I have ever read, here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/02/03/china-pattern
It's short, too.
read not tea but in context not too awful I suppose.
Sadly my friend lost 3 of four games, and could have won the other on time but offered a "kindness draw". On the plus side, now I'm not that guy who never shows up to watch sports anymore.
||
That would be in the cloud, Bob.
|>
LRB is funnier than the NYRB. Hadn't heard about refusing to publish more women though? Seems out if character.
It's been an ugly situation for years.
37, 33.1 Yeah that is strange. And wrong. Also, LRB is the shorter pile next to my NYRB. And now I'm reminded how much I miss reading Tony Judt.
Hmm not really fair to say, as I did, they "refuse" to publish more women, but they my they do stand out for mulishness on the issue.
I eventually get through most of most NYer issues, excluding fiction, fawning celebrity profiles, Denby, and the briefly noted stuff. But it is a tremendous relief not to have back issues staring balefully at me.
I can't just do the sensible thing and start from the latest issue.
The Kindle is so helpful with this. Oh look, there's the new issue, right up at the top of the list. Do I really want to go back and read that article from last week now? Nah.
I love, love, love reading magazines on kindle.
New Yorker fiction is the damnedest thing. When I was getting my MFA it was understood to be the capstone of the pyramid, immediately above Harper's and The Atlantic, and when someone we knew landed a story there, the accepted reaction was to vomit with envy. At the same time, Big Anecdata makes clear that no one reads the stories, or novel excerpts awkwardly presented as stories. Half the time, not even we breathless aspirants could be bothered to finish them.
This is the kind of thing that makes young writers pen manifestos on rifts in the culture, which they alone are equipped to mend; but the manifestos are also dull reading and only n+1 will publish them.
The only magazine I've been reading regularly is The Nation, which I'm usually managing to read cover-to-cover although mostly in bursts of three or four issues at a time every few weeks. (I'm also on track to read slightly more than one book per week on average this year, plus I've been writing more papers than usual. Maybe my blog participation is down?)
The several years when I was getting free copies of Nature and Science delivered every week were the worst for massive piles of paper accumulating that I would read only a tiny fraction of.
They did at least up to the early oughts and might still. Their fiction editor was famous for sending back personalized rejections indicating he'd actually read your story, which got everyone's hopes up unreasonably. They also famously published one of the less stupid "what's wrong with modern fiction" diatribes, by B.R. Myers.
I guess it quit. I remember it used to.
Speaking of modern fiction, you know what's not a good book? Steven Moore's The Novel: An Alternative History.
I think the only New Yorker fiction I've read were a Stephen King story and "Miss Winters and the Wind". There's probably more that I just never knew were New Yorker stories. I assume they published Thurber.
It's funny that no one even feels the need to comment on not reading the poetry in the New Yorker.
I feel confident in the assessment in 55 even though I've read very, very little of the book.
I read both the poetry and the short stories, which is one reason I don't subscribe.
I have read none of the book assessed in 55 but find the assessment prima facie credible. I don't think it's even original revisionism; didn't Margaret Anne Doody try to do the same thing a couple of decades ago?
Someone gave me The New Yorker Book of Poems. I didn't read that either.
I feel pretty good about my keeping up with the magazine, but my two-year experiment with the NYRB was a dismal failure.
It was shortly after Paul Muldoon took on the poetry editorship of the New Yorker that he came by our English department. At the reception he asked me what I worked on, I said Joyce.
"Ah, Jim!" he said. "There's no one like him, is there? But tell me," conspiratorially, "do you think Finnegans Wake was a mistake?"
I read the poems in the LRB! Probably doesn't count tho, just like how the UU get kicked out of the tent the MORMONS are invited into despite you know the space aliens & weird underwear.
Not that I'm bitter or anything...
46: Honestly I only read the fiction every four years when there's a new Lorrie Moore. I feel like I am now saying "I love the New Yorker except for everything in it" but I swear
I'm not. It's just...the fiction is not of interest any time I check back in with it.
60 wins the thread.
I of course
do not
Read the
poetry
Because I do
not generally understand what
the fuck
Poetry is shooting for.
I liked when the LRB published this one; there was spacing that doesn't come through on the web.
Based on a careful reading of portions of the Wikipedia page, I don't think I'll be reading Finnegans Wake but I will remember that there is no apostrophe in the title.
71: I understand the one about having never seen a moor.
I want to like Finnegans Wake, but mostly because I used to drink in a bar named for James Joyce. Maybe I'll try Ulysses.
I used to read the NYer cover-to-cover in high school, including the fiction and occasionally even the poetry, but I stopped during college when I began reading blogs, which pretty much entirely replaced magazines as my main non-book reading. Then blogs began to stagnate and now I just read Unfogged comments.
Anyway, I haven't read the NYer consistently in years and don't particularly miss it.
I learned to read upside-down as a little girl so I could read The New Yorker across the table from my mother. But then my parents switched to only getting National Review and even at preschool age I could tell the cartoons weren't as good.
With Joyce, people often start with Dubliners and go forward till it gets to be too much. I think it's one of those strong-cheese tastes that can be acquired, but predisposition helps.
Finnegans Wake is best read in a group, with alcohol... and I'll go ahead and admit that the local Wake group is one of my very few social activities that has survived parenthood.
Oh, and there's a dirty picture on page 293.
The very idea of a magazine having a short story stuck in the middle of all their non-fiction articles seems like a strange anachronism to me. I generally enjoy the entirety of every issue of The New Yorker, and similarly The Atlantic except for the nonsense by Gregg Easterbrook, David Brooks, Caitlin Flanagan and Sandra Tsing Loh, and similarly Harper's except for the obligatory personal memoir from a now-intellectual who grew up in brutish working-class surroundings and spent his/her 20s wandering the globe in search of truth. Except the fiction. If I accidentally start reading the fiction, no later than the second sentence I react as if I'd started eating olives under the misconception that they were grapes. The only things more out of place are those 3,000-word rants against fat-shaming that used to show up every month or so at the Lawyers, Guns And Money blog.
I do remember reading a couple pieces of New Yorker fiction in the early to mid 1990s, as makeshift pornography. The excerpt from "Sabbath's Theater" was particularly exciting.
Wait, what's wrong with olives? Olives are great!
But if you're expecting one thing and get another, you recoil. Fiction is great, but totally out of place in The New Yorker. Harper's use of visual art is way better.
I dunno, I mean, AFAIK the New Yorker has always published fiction throughout its 90-year existence. Given that I find it hard to see how it's out of place.
We have our grapes salted and stuffed with pimento.
No french fries on top, Moby? I'm disappointed!
I wondered for a while about the flood of Silicon Valley reporting in the New Yorker, and then I looked again at the ads and figured it was just a sincere effort to attract the eyeballs of the target market. (No, not the target market of people seeking inpatient treatment at McLean, because indeed creative literature has fallen out of the prestige system.)
neb, did you ever get to Pavel's book? (I say "ever" because I tried several times to read it in French before the translation.) I should probably start it, like, tonight.
I'm glad for the explanation of that "ever" because at first it reminded me of the time—just last week!—when a man who started talking to me on bart because he saw I was reading Strait is the Gate ("Have you read The Immoralist?" was his opening gambit, repeated on the bart ride home by a different person that very day, I don't mind telling you) eventually asked me "have you read Proust yet?". No, not yet!
Anyway, the answer is "no", but I believe it's come up and seemed interesting to me before.
Fiction is great, but totally out of place in The New Yorker.
This is wrong, but the olives/grapes thing makes a certain amount of sense. If I sit down with a New Yorker, I can read the fiction, or I can read the rest of the magazine. Has to be separate sittings.
I've started enjoying short fiction again by making more of an effort to read the stories in the NYer. Rebecca Curtis: two for two. Last week's Wagner in the Desert felt uncannily like it was a more exciting/depressing version of my life taking place inside my head.
My sister not only reads but actually enjoys the fiction and poetry in the New Yorker. I suppose this is why she's a successful literary agent and I am not.
My mother reads the entire New Yorker and has a full time job, but she's usually anywhere from 6 months to a year behind. The newer issues just lie in stacks around the house.*
My sister's ex works for the NYRB, and according to her he wrote a review where he made some oblique reference to their love life. This effectively prevented me from going anywhere near the magazine. Not that I expect this would actually be an issue, but I wouldn't want to read through the magazine with heightened sensitivity to double entendres or oblique sex references and then have to wonder if they were about my sister.
*They should offer a heavily discounted subscription where they send you issues on a several month delay. So, like, you pay 30% normal subscription fee but the issues you get are all 4-5 months behind.
I thought the Heller article on San Francisco wasn't very good. I can't remember the Packer stuff in much detail but it seemed better.
It's almost as if a magazine called The New Yorker isn't particularly good at in-depth coverage of other parts of the country.
OT!
A few days ago, I get a call from the vice director of foreign student affairs at the university who's sponsored my residence permit, asking if I'm around because the police would like to have a chat with me. I start immediately freaking out, and ask her if something is wrong. In a totally calm and pleasant tone, she says that nothing is wrong at all and there's no reason they want to talk, and that when I have some free time I should let her know. I tell her I'll be free in a few days time and she says great. Then this morning, I call her to let her know I can go to the police station at any time. After talking to the police, she gets back to me and tells me to be at this restaurant at a particular time. Then I get a call from an unknown number, and it's this police officer who apologizes that something came up, and can he call me tomorrow morning to reschedule?
At this point I am sensing that they maybe want to ask a favor of me, but I have absolutely no idea what it would be or what is going on.
In a totally calm and pleasant tone, she says that nothing is wrong at all and there's no reason they want to talk
Exactly, we just like to take people out to lunch at random. Oh, wait, no we don't! OMG WHAT DID YOU DO? FLEE TO A COUNTRY WITH NO EXTRADITION TREATY RIGHT NOW.
I'm just joking. It'll be interesting to have someone commenting from inside Guantanamo.
It seems like if they wanted to arrest her for something they would have just done it by now, so there's probably some other reason they want to talk to her. Not that that's likely to be very comforting.
My understanding is that Buttercup is currently in China, where police procedures may be a bit different from the US.
The Kindle is so helpful with this. Oh look, there's the new issue, right up at the top of the list. Do I really want to go back and read that article from last week now? Nah.
This may be the difference this year - I do still read old ones but it's made easier by the Kindle.
I read most of the poetry, especially when it's by someone I like like W.S. Merwin (in this issue, haven't gotten to it yet), but so much of it is just not to my taste.
I already read the Economist and the New Scientist every week - the New Scientist in seven equal-sized servings with breakfast, the Economist in one large perspiration-soaked lump in the gym. I don't think I'd have time to read the New Yorker as well.
It's not like the issue explodes and kills you if you don't read everything in it.
"This copy of the New York Times will flood your house with toxic gas if the crossword is not finished in ink by the end of the day."
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_12191.html#1461113
103 actually makes 97 somewhat less disturbing, because I assume they are angling for a bribe of some sort.
I find there's usually only one "must read" article in the New Yorker, and it's not enough to justify buying it every time. I do subscribe to the NYRB and Harper's (as much for the Readings as for the long-form articles), and I have an LRB subscription though I don't read it all that much any more. I don't technically subscribe to it, but I read every issue of Private Eye. And that's about it these days as far as traditional magazines go these days. I used to get half a dozen titles or more.
We have our grapes salted and stuffed with pimento.
Damn! Why didn't I think of that?
105.1 is me too, s/Economist/LRB/, but I am currently three issues adrift with NS and six with LRB. The reasons are clear: Thomas Piketty and Christopher Clark, plus I'm already suffering from acute deferred gratification syndrome because I've promised myself I won't start the new Laundry novel until I've done with Piketty, Ch.12. So the magazines are not realistically going to get a look in for quite a while.
57: I like the poetry in the New Yorker! Donald Hall anyway. And there was one about a linguistics professor I knew in college that was kind of interesting.
I enjoy the New Yorker. The profiles generally interest me. I try to like Harper's, but I generally find that it's too much.
At one point I got my Dad a subscription to the NYRB, and he seemed to enjoy it a lot.
Did Buttercup used to comment under another pseud? Relatively recently?
(Because if so, LB probably sent the police to disappear her.)
112: possibly a pseud related to Gillian Jacobs? Yes, I was wondering that.
I had to look up Gillian Jacobs -- because I don't even own a tv (of less than 52") -- but yes, that's what I was wondering.
I wondered the same thing. Britta has commented since Buttercup showed up, but that might have just been a slip.
I'm still waiting for Den E. Crumb to come back. He was great and you all chased him away.
117 Not to mention Ray Cyst. In fact, please don't mention Ray Cyst ever again.
I wondered the same thing. Britta has commented since Buttercup showed up, but that might have just been a slip.
So, she Britta'd it?
I sometimes read the fiction. Usually it doesn't grab me when I glance at it. There was a recent story about a Soviet dissident artist that I thought was very good. The Fugitive by Lyudmila Ulitskaya.
It'll be interesting to have someone commenting from inside Guantanamo.
Meetup with CharleyCarp!
I actually had a pretty reliable method of dealing with the NYer (sit on the front hall bench the day it arrived, leaf through reading cartoons, discarding subscription cards, sometimes reading reviews, and noting articles for future reading (which I would often get to)). But what actually broke my back was realizing that at least every other issue featured not only the worthless fiction*, but also an article that was thousands of words too long. I'd be happily reading along about whatever idiosyncratic corner of the world, flip the fourth page, and realize I wasn't even halfway. Fuck that shit. I told my sister to skip the annual gift subscription.
*for the record, our best couple friends both read the fiction; I don't know if it's cheating that one of them was a published magazine writer and the other is an actual New Yorker
Atul Gawande is pretty good. Some of the archived articles can be saved as pdf (via an enabled print function) but others can't.
an article that was thousands of words too long
Not like in the glory days of things like E.J. Kahn's five-part series on grains, though.
Making room for monster articles like the Snowden one is what earned the LRB its pile of undeservingly unread copies in my house. Only print sub I have atm after regretfully cancelling Arts of Asia.
E.J. Kahn's five-part series on grains
Didn't Silent Spring originally appear as essays in the New Yorker?
And she got so famous that she has a bridge named after her.
So that was interesting. As of now not arrested. Three police took me out to coffee and interviewed me for two hours on pretty much everything about me--my educational background, family background, current research, future plans for publication etc. Interspersed with this they asked me general questions about America, how I enjoyed living in the city, and my opinions on China and its government. Everything I said they wrote down in a little notebook. Now the Chinese govt. has an written record of my siblings' careers, the fact I enjoy Chinese food, and that I've climbed the local mountain several times, among other things. They were both relentless and thorough, but also exceedingly friendly. They ended the interview by saying that if I had any problems they would help me solve them, and then suggested I move permanently to the city. I understand that disarming friendliness can be a good interview technique, so I tried not to relax too much. I tried to be completely honest on anything they could verify with outside information, innocuous enough in any description of my project, and chatty enough on non-sensitive things that they wouldn't think I was being guarded. I guess I'll see if I got the balance right. There are probably things I was too forthright on, but I'm hoping nothing too serious. Two hours is a long time to talk about yourself.
China's political climate is pretty unstable and everyone is on edge right now, so it's almost impossible to get a read on the situation. People are on high alert, but it's hard to know how the various factors in my situation are playing out. Having a foreign researcher from what is considered one of the top US universities could be a point of prestige, or it could be a major threat. Last time the local govt. here thought thought I was a spy treatment was radically different, so I'm guessing they're flattered but wary.
Glad to hear it seems to have gone okay.
Strange. Did they pay for the lunch?
I used to get magazines and worse yet, those that compiled book reviews because they made me desperately unhappy that I'd never get to read all the words--magazines, reviews, the reviewed books, everything.
Now I take comfort in my ignorance of my ignorance (which threads like this don't help).
132
Yeah, they paid for everything.
Last time the local govt. here thought thought I was a spy treatment was radically different
What did they do that time?
Also, did they ask you any questions about "an eclectic web magazine?"
136: Yeah, the guy was probably wondering, "When is she ever going to ask about me?"
128: Happy to read about her Chris Kimball obsession. I'm not similarly obsessed, but I can totally see where she would be.
136
Hahaha.
There were three of them, and older man (early 40s, maybe?) and a man and woman that looked to be in their 20s. The guy in his 40s did all the asking, and he had some sort of extensive list he would hold under the table and occasionally flip through. The younger man wrote everything down in the notebook, and I think the woman was brought along in case I needed a translator. The younger cops would also explain my answers if the older guy was confused.
It's possible they're in a polyamorous relationship and scouting out a fourth. I know the one dude is a cop because he showed me his badge at the beginning of the conversation. I didn't get verification from the other two.
136: TPYRCL.
The police you reprobates call lunchies.
135
When they thought I was a spy, they ended up eventually putting me under informal house arrest. I had a 24-7 minder who had to report my daily activities to the police and all that.* It sounds more scary than it was, more like the keystone cops trying to be the KGB than actually the KGB. The real issue wasn't so much that they were convinced I was a spy that that they were worried, should I turn out to be a spy, they would all be royally screwed and probably end up a labor camp or something.
When that happened they ended up intimidating anyone I spoke to rather than me directly, and no one would tell me what the problem was. If I asked they told me "it's nothing, " when clearly something was really wrong. At one point they did come by the house to scrutinize all my papers and ask lots of questions about my research. They weren't all that friendly and there was definitely no coffee involved.
*It was a little awkward because the minder had a full time government job at the village HQ, so she couldn't watch me 24-7 and work if I sat at home. A compromise was she was allowed to take me to work, so long as I sat in an empty room. I would sit in the room surfing the internet all day and visitors to the HQ would pop their heads in to gawk at the foreigner. She was actually a very nice woman who felt terrible about the whole thing, and I felt terrible about all the problems she had to deal with (like, dealing with the police all day long). One night she snuck me out for dinner with friends and group line dancing.
I no longer feel bad about all the Chinese people here complaining about dealing with visa bureaucracy.
143 sounds a lot like Havel's play Audience. Congratulations on not being threatened.
It was a little awkward because the minder had a full time government job at the village HQ, so she couldn't watch me 24-7 and work if I sat at home. A compromise was she was allowed to take me to work, so long as I sat in an empty room. I would sit in the room surfing the internet all day and visitors to the HQ would pop their heads in to gawk at the foreigner
Are you sure it was you who was under quasi-house arrest and not her?
This sort of thing wouldn't happen in Beijing. There they either leave you alone or you're in serious trouble. Here in the sticks everyone is worried about accidentally messing things up and getting in trouble with the higher ups, so things tend to be a little more, uh, fun. My spy incident ended with finding a person high enough up politically who understood was social science research was, and the whole thing was resolved in about 5 minutes.
If you're still in touch with that person, could you see if he'll call Senator Coburn?
146
Oh yeah, it was definitely me. I mean, she was kind of in trouble too,* but she was free to whatever she felt if she arranged appropriate back up care for me.
*It's a somewhat complicated story, where a delicate situation in which wasn't handled well got set off by an innocent action of hers, so she felt she'd brought it on me, and I felt bad she'd been put in the situation, since she'd been following orders from her boss.
143
Yeah. One of my advisors did her work in Cold War Eastern Europe, and she was shocked I'd experience something so similar to what she went through. My other advisor works in China and was completely flabbergasted by the whole thing. I'm the only person I know of who's has an experience like this in China and isn't actually breaking the law and/or researching Uyghur transgender separatists with AIDS who sleep with wealthy govt. officials and practice Falun Gong, or whatever.
150.last: pppft, so you're a conformist.
I heard of a couple cases like this happening in seventies/eighties EE. They almost all seemed to involve wanting the westerner to become an informer/spy. In one case the dude agreed, then a few years later the files were opened and his advisor found out. So much for any recs. The only exception to this was with an anthro researcher, where they just plain found her activities extremely suspicious - she was spending lots of time asking people detailed questions about their lives.
They ended the interview by saying that if I had any problems they would help me solve them, and then suggested I move permanently to the city.
Is this to be read that they are uncomfortable with all the hassle your presence makes for them given all the weird higher-level stuff going on, and wish you were out of their hair and in another jurisdiction that's more used to foreigners?
154: technically it's a SIPRnet covert channel appliance that then auto-reposts from a domestic host connected to the civilian internet, but same basic deal.
Unfogged has become my New Yorker in that I've gotten so far behind that I feel like I can't catch up. It's rare that I get to a thread while it's still live.
The New Yorker is also still my New Yorker.
156: Sir Kraab! You can bring any thread you want back to life just by commenting!
Are you ever still near this area?
That wasn't a very good sentence.
157: I forgot that I have the opposite effect on threads.
peep, you are super sweet.
Moby, no, I'm back at my regular gig.
154
Usually, but not right now. This website, you will all be devastated to learn, manages to fly under the radar of the censors.
153
Sorry I was a little unclear. By city I mean the place I'm currently in, which is technically a city though considered by most of its inhabitants to be rural because it's a tiny-for-China unindustrialized city in an unindustrialized part of China. Also, wherever you are in the city you're usually no more than a 5-10 minute scooter ride away from the countryside. So I use 'rural' and 'the city' somewhat interchangeably, since the whole area is rural, broadly speaking.