Italics are mine

The Met's Young Associates Preview Party

I attended the Young Associates Preview Party at the Metropolitan Opera a few weeks ago - I am not a Young Associate but I get their emails for their events open to non-members, it happened to be an evening I'd be in town, it would feature singers from the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program and I've always enjoyed more events with up-and-coming singers than big stars (a reason why I've enjoyed Opera Philadelphia so much in recent years), so I thought, why not. 

In the end I have mixed feelings about the preview party. As a party, it was great, with excellent food, open bar and no less than Peter Gelb giving introductory remarks before two young singers alternated singing a few arias. The party didn't really preview anything, since no mention was made (at least that I can recall) about the upcoming season. The ambiance music before the musical program was a cross between club music and elevator music - not opera. The event, apparently heavily advertised to non-opera young New Yorkers, drew crowds more interested in the food than in the music. Of the two singers, the one who sang easy crowd-pleasers drew loud appreciative whistles, while her colleague, who raised the bar by singing difficult pieces (such as the equivalent of The Little Mermaid in Czech, whose name eludes me, and yes she sang in Czech), drew polite but lukewarm applause by an audience who clearly had little clue how good she was. Her name is Clarissa Lyons, and she was truly phenomenal. Remember that name! 

The most amusing moment at the party came when I realized that I was the only woman in pants. This was an early-evening "party", from 7pm to 9pm if I recall correctly, and every other woman was in skirts or dress and stilettos (some had come with their stilettos in their purse and argued with the security guard when he didn't let them in early into the opera house to take off their flats and put their pretty shoes on). My pants were nice, mind you - appropriate for a business party or a night at the opera - but, well, they were not a dress. In addition, I was wearing heeled booties rather than stilettos, a long tunic and an unusually long scarf, which also did not seem to be something the crowd of young wealthy New Yorkers was used to seeing in this context, although I liked that my outfit was both sophisticated and unconventional. I've never been someone who liked abiding by other people's ideas of what I'm supposed to wear, what can I say. I'll respect the spirit of the rules (dress up for the party) but not the norm (wear a socialite's outfit). And I have a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, but after the looks I got that evening, I've never felt I've done something more pioneering than wearing pants at the Met's Young Associates Preview Party. I'm not sure how I'm going to top that! Maybe next year I should bring a book. 

So I have mixed feelings because I'm not sure how this event furthered the Metropolitan Opera's long-term goal of drawing more youngish people to opera. It was a great party, and the Met got plenty of business cards from people who entered a raffle with several over-the-top prizes (I don't think they had anything to do with the Met itself, but consisted of goods donated by the sponsors), and thus the contact information of many potential attendees to send emails to. But nothing happened at the party that would really make people want to buy a ticket for a forthcoming opera. (Using the event to gather names of potential attendees to one of the "Fridays Under 40" cocktails+performances is a good idea but once you have seen the sort of crowd attracted by the preview party, you might think twice about going to the "Under 40" event, if you love opera.)

I suppose that people don't need to attend opera to give to the Met (the real goal of the party might be to cultivate future potential donors rather than attendees) but hoping to achieve that goal without promoting the season does seem curious to me. There were small brochures about the season on a table and that was about it. No video of highlights, no handout about what - if anything - made the season special and a must-attend. The names of the Lindemann artists weren't even provided in writing anywhere, so that I had to walk up Lyons afterward and ask her to repeat her name for me because it was so obvious she is enormously talented and has a wonderful career ahead of her. But, plenty of alcohol and plenty of food. And the opportunity to stand six feet away from Peter Gelb, which at least is something.

I'll leave you with a 60-second video of this season's highlights that I found on the MetOpera YouTube channel. Enjoy - and buy tickets!

"Broadway: The Golden Age" vs "Broadway: The American Musical"

I'll spare you the nerve-racking suspense: "Broadway: The Golden Age" is a far better documentary than "Broadway: The American Musical", although the latter consists of a six-part, six-hour series, against the puny 1h51 minutes of The Golden Age. The reason that Golden Age is significantly better is that it focuses on performers' stories - not in great depth, of course, given the time allotted, but enough that one comes away with some names who have marked Broadway and salient facts about their lives, for instance Laurette Taylor and Kim Stanley. This makes the Golden Musical documentary much more engaging.

You'd think PBS would know a thing or two about story-telling, but the part of the documentary about the golden age of Broadway pales in comparison with its competitor. Instead, it is a kaleidoscopic collection of fragments with no thread. That was the first part I watched of the PBS series after seeing The Golden Age and I was extremely disappointed. But I then proceeded to watch the whole series from the beginning and obviously it does cover much more ground than "The Golden Age", with important asides on giants such as Rodgers and Hammerstein or Ethel Merman. So while an opportunity to make a truly landmark series was lost, the PBS series is definitely worth the purchase too.

In a different genre, The Teaching Company also offers a series of sixteen 45-minute videos on Great American Music: Broadway Musicals that is well worth watching too. 

Women and Leadership (2/2)

This is the second part of my post on Women and Leadership. While the first part focused on comments by Xerox CEO (and a thoroughly inspiring leader) Ursula Burns at the 92nd Y and a MIT Club of NY event I attended, this part will be on the comments by PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi and Barnard President Debora Spar made during the 92nd Y panel discussion. 

Nooyi shared critical experiences in her childhood, where her mother made Nooyi and her sister imagine at the dining table every evening they were a famous public figure and write & give speeches about the key actions they were about to undertake in that public-figure capacity. Then Nooyi's mother would decide which of the two sisters would have her vote. (This daily ritual, when Nooyi was about 8 or 9, is even more remarkable when you know that Nooyi's mother held rather conservative views and did not work outside the home. Yet, she was adamant her daughters could do anything they wanted, and made sure they were aware of that.) Nooyi's paternal grandfather also taught her to do a job well or not do it at all.

I enjoyed hearing her talk about the environment she has faced as CEO, especially the controversies a few years back surrounding her decision to focus on healthier foods and drinks. She touched upon the push for incredible performance levels in 2001-06 before she became CEO without considering how those performance levels would be achieved and the time in 2006-08 where many CEOs had to change and companies pursued an expectations reset.

She also mentioned impatient investors, unprecedented attacks on the food industry and the pressure to break up companies without giving details, but as it so happens the part of her strategy related to design thinking is also the focus of an article in this month's Harvard Business Review, where you can learn more about what happened. She made an interesting point about the drinks at the PepsiCo meetings that gave her an early warning of the shifting trends in the population at large: from full-sugar drinks in the early 2000s to diet drinks around 2006-8 and now Aquafina (yes, a PepsiCo product) in 2015. She also made the point that "spreadsheets don't run companies", which Ursula Burns expanded upon in her remark that just about anything is possible on paper - something I discussed in my previous post. Nooyi praised great boards as a necessary condition for success as a CEO, where a great board is defined as a board who takes the time to understand strategy as well as the details of this strategy. 

Debora Spar had a refreshing take on her childhood and teenage years, which she described as rather dull years spent growing up in Westchester, NY. Her attitude was to "shut up and do your work". She also shared some key moments as a pregnant young assistant professor at Harvard Business School at a time where the faculty had very few women, trying to prepare a case about baby food in Poland with an Excel spreadsheet that was not cooperating, and gaining more and more confidence in herself in those early years. She spoke very positively of HBS, where she was promoted quickly.

She made interesting comments about the situation two-income families face today: while women today are raised to believe they can do everything, if both parents work outside the home, who is going to take care of the home? She contrasted her time at HBS when it was a very male dominated environment and her time now at Barnard which is an almost completely female dominated environment, and made the point that power is displayed in different ways, conflict is handled in different ways, so that it is important to recognize the different ways men and women approach leadership, otherwise the issues women face in male-dominated environments (most companies today, one has to admit) will not get resolved. She also pointed out that women tend to drop out from the workforce when they have kids, but extending the maternity leave may not be the sole answer, because even if the maternity leave could last two years at full pay, when it ends you then have a two-year-old to take care of, and then what do you do? Later come the parent-teacher conferences, the bake sales, and all these events that are (more often than not) attended by mothers rather than fathers. Spousal support was emphasized by all three panelists as particularly important, but Nooyi pointed out that she feels some accomplished young women today still believe they have to make themselves be smaller than they are in order not to have their husbands feel threatened or diminished. 

Spar also asked the rhetorical question during the Q&A on how to teach college students such as Barnard students resilience, especially those students who have had an "easy glide" in their academic path all the way into college (not meaning they don't challenge themselves, but instead that they have easily succeeded so far in the challenging endeavors they have pursued). How do you create safe situations for students that will stretch them, allow them to fail and help them grow? 

The conversation then drifted to the importance of mentorship. Both Nooyi and Spar had fascinating insights into this part. Spar pointed out that one sees a willingness to learn in the good mentees - a desire to become better and to improve their contribution to the company, rather than a pure focus on success. Nooyi shared that she receives multiple requests every week from people who would like her to mentor them, but good mentorship doesn't work that way. You don't pick mentors, mentors pick you. 

***

I'll end with something I forgot to write in my previous post about Ursula Burns. Someone asked the inevitable question about discrimination, and Ursula Burns's answer was most telling. She said she had expected gender/racial discrimination, but the one that had taken her a bit by surprise was age discrimination. By that she explained that some people had had trouble taking her seriously because of her young age when she was starting out and getting promoted. This is an issue that will resonate with many talented twenty-somethings, I'm sure. She also asked audience members to think about their own biases, instead of assuming that they have none.  

All three women at the 92nd Y came across as remarkable and thoughtful leaders who make wonderful models for younger women today.

Women and Leadership (1/2)

(This is a repost from my professional blog.) I attended a panel on Women and Leadership at the 92nd Y the other day, where I was fortunate to hear Xerox CEO and Chairwoman Ursula Burns (the first African-American woman to head a Fortune 500 company), PepsiCo CEO and Chairperson Indra Nooyi (consistently ranked as one of the world's most powerful women, as well as the company's first Indian-born and first female CEO) and Barnard President Debora Spar. I also had the good fortune to attend the MIT Club of NY event "A Conversation with Ursula Burns" a few days later, and found myself utterly inspired both times by the advice those women generously provided the crowds in attendance. 

Below are some of the notes I took at each event, grouped by speaker. (At the panel, of course, each question was answered by all three speakers taking turns.) The speakers are in alphabetical order. 

Ursula Burns was my favorite panelist because of her no-nonsense attitude - I think she calls it her "New Yorker attitude" - and straightforwardness. In these days where leaders constantly worry about being misquoted and prefer bland answers to ones with substance, it is refreshing to meet a CEO who tells it like it is and makes no apologies for it. This also reflects well on Xerox, which has substantially expanded the reach of its operations since its beginnings and is now a leader in activities such as e-discovery for legal firms or back office for health care records. The company used to be about copying, and then scanning; now it seems that the ability to (machine-read and) index scanned documents is the next frontier of document processing. 

At both events, Burns spoke in very positive terms (glowing terms, in fact) about her predecessor, Anne Mulcahy, who seems to have had a personal and professional path very similar to Burns's and whom Burns counts among her most important mentors. Burns specifically described the great leadership skills Mulcahy demonstrated when Xerox teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in the early 2000s. Mulcahy also gave Burns, when the latter was about to become CEO, the advice that she didn't have to be the same type of leader that Mulcahy had been. (Apparently Mulcahy was profoundly loved by her troops and she embodied the "saintly leader" style of leadership.)

Burns's loyalty for and profound commitment to Xerox shone through her speeches at both events. She described a conversation she had with someone at the time where the future of Xerox looked extremely bleak and Burns could have left, where that other person, who was very close to her, asked the married Burns to compare the situation at Xerox (where Burns had by that point worked for twenty years) and the potential job offers elsewhere with her 13-year-or-so marriage and a romantic opportunity elsewhere. It was obvious for Burns she'd stick with her husband no matter what. That helped her articulate the answer to her professional dilemma. Not everyone would have reached the same answer, but it is to Xerox's credit that it's been able to attract and keep people with high degrees of loyalty to the company. (Put another way, I think the type of people who do well at a place like Xerox are people who have "loyalty" as one of their key values.) Maybe - which is what Burns explained at the MIT event - a reason why she never wanted to leave was that she's held at least 25 jobs at Xerox during her tenure there. Sometimes people think that changing companies is the only way for them to do something new, but that may also show short-sighted thinking on their part.

Burns also came across as a humble leader, in the sense that she was very quick to point out again and again that Xerox's success today belongs to its 140,000 employees rather than any one leader. This was made clear when she talked about how she was sometimes asked "how did you do it?" about Xerox's turnaround. She said that there is a false belief that "Superman flew in" but really it was the work of her 140,000 employees. She advocated allowing employees to see possibility and then taking a chance - allowing them to be confident enough and surrounded by the right people to make the right decisions on their own. She also said she doesn't like when people come in to ask if they can do something, because they typically know more about the situation than she does, and the most suitable approach for her at that point is to ask them questions to help them clarify their thinking.

Burns also touched upon the "Bring your whole self to work" model at Xerox, which she thinks is key to longevity in the workplace, and pointed out that many role models at the moment look differently from the way women and minorities look, but women and minorities should not try too much to assimilate - don't pretend you like country music if you don't but work for a Southern company, for instance - because that's really not what is being asked of them. In other words, focus on authenticity. One of her key mentors, besides Anne Mulcahy, was a Caucasian gentleman with whom she had absolutely nothing in common (opposite political views, no overlapping tastes in anything, etc) but who became a great friend. This also highlights the fact that there really is no formula to make mentorship work, and might explain why so many formal mentorship programs fail. (At the MIT event she also quoted with attribution Debora Spar's take on mentorship during the 92Y panel, but more on that in the second part of this post.) 

Burns also said repeatedly there is much too much emphasis on money these days, especially when looking at the placement record of engineering students who then go to work for finance companies instead of contributing to the discovery of new products or processes. But she was also careful to say in the Q&A when asked about the advice she would give to people nearing 50 that those people should be careful with their money so that they keep options open and can take action if they feel they're getting stuck doing things they don't like at that stage in their career. They should also, she said, give some serious thought to what they're going to do with the rest of their life - a question she said too few people at that age ask themselves.

In the Q&A she also discussed the ongoing sustainability efforts at Xerox and its commitment to corporate social responsibility, as well as what she is doing to mitigate a repeat of what happened in the 1980s at Xerox Research Center, which made critical discoveries in modern computing that it didn't use. This allowed Apple to get these discoveries and grow to the company it is today. She talked about the importance of partnerships, but was also quick to highlight that Xerox would not have used the technology the way Apple did, so in a way the technology was able to "find" the company that would use it best. Xerox's future plans seem to focus on innovative business processes (especially for document-intensive processes) in a wide range of industries.

I'll end this post with something that Burns said at the 92nd Y, following a question to Indra Nooyi about the challenges she had faced a few years ago when it was not clear she was making the right bet in focusing on healthier products and an activist had advocated she break up the company. She emphasized (and I'm writing this in my own words, so this is not a direct quote of how she phrased it) that it is quite easy to "make the math work" on paper for many strategies that outside observers may think of, but one also has to recognize that the current strategy of a company is the result of careful considerations by the company's leadership team taking into account not only shareholder returns but the long-term impact on customers and communities.

Coming up in the second part of this post: Indra Nooyi's and Debora Spar's comments at the 92nd Y.

Berkshires

Here are a few pictures from a last-minute weekend trip I took to the Berkshires back in July out of Boston. It was a weekend filled with art and theater. I stopped by MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA on the way and stumbled into a wonderful Sol LeWitt retrospective, then saw Kyra Sedgwick in William Inge's recently rediscovered play "Off the Main Road" (played in a comical deadpan way in the first half that had the audience laughing at the characters' drama, until the play took a turn for the much darker in the second half, which could have benefited from tighter editing).

 I also enjoyed a long stroll through the galleries of the Williams College Museum of Art. Williamstown struck me as a delightful little town, although the college grad working as a waiter at the MASS MoCA cafe seemed to find it very, very isolated and looked forward to finding a job in a bigger city. I stayed at the Williams Inn for the night - literally across the street from the Williamstown Theater Festival - and am excited to report I ate the very best chocolate croissant I've ever eaten at the inn's breakfast. (Being French, I fancy myself an expert in chocolate croissants.) I also highly recommend the inn's tavern. It's become a marketing tool for a restaurant to say it's "farm-to-table" and only uses locally sourced ingredients, but the food at the Tavern at the Inn really tasted amazing. 

In Williamstown I was also fortunate to see the Van Gogh exhibit at the Clark Art Institute, Van Gogh and Nature. It was amazingly good, with several paintings I had never seen before and that have now become my favorites by the artist. While there were a lot of people, the crowds did not compare with those that would have attended such an exhibit in New York City or Philadelphia. (I mean that as a good thing.) If you missed it, you can still look at the exhibition catalog.

Then I headed down to Lenox, MA to see Henry V at Shakespeare & Co, and Alonzo King LINES Ballet at Jacob's Pillow. Henry V was one of those bare-bones productions where each actor is multi-cast and audience members have to use their imagination a lot, but it worked. Such productions rarely resonate with me - this one did. What did the trick, I think, was the use of the very minimal furniture and an extra here and there to help the audience's imagination along - for instance, a chair draped with a blanket and an actor pretending to pray, to evoke being in a church. Sadly, the chairs were by far the most uncomfortable I've ever sat in as far as theaters are concerned, which took away from the enjoyment of the production. But overall the production was very powerful. 

But the best part of the trip was Jacob's Pillow, which was deemed by the New York Times to be the center of dance in the United States, or something of that order, according to Jacob's Pillow's promotional materials. And, frankly, it is. The dancing was first-rate, there was a lot of young or young-ish (like me!) people, and the audience seemed to really appreciate the modernity of the ballets. (I sat next to a Juilliard grad who used to run her own ballet school and now is head of ballet training or similar at a local dance school. She actually was at Juilliard the last year Martha Hill worked there.) I love ballet and modern dance - I used to dance as a teenager - and for some reason I lost touch of that over the years, until very recently. I find myself fortunate to have reconnected to it at the right time. I would only advise to arrive very early to also enjoy the restaurant or the pub on the premises. If your schedule allows, also consider taking a free morning community dance class. And if you can't go, at least you can enjoy Jacob's Pillow Interactive. 

I didn't get to go to Kripalu or Tanglewood this year. That's one more reason (two, technically) to try to return to the Berkshires next year! 

Writing!

Someone asked me the other day why I wasn't posting updates on my writing or my novels anymore on this blog. So, if you're curious, I'm writing as much as ever - perhaps more than ever in fact - but because I write so much, when I write a blog post it is more relaxing to write about something else, so the blog has taken a performing-arts flavor over the past few months. I hope you enjoy it. Also, it makes more sense to blog about the novel once it is about to get published, so writing-related posts don't seem timely right now and probably won't for a bit more time, although I might write something about craft or inspiration once in a while. I'm re-reading my creativity go-to book, Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (I love, love, love that book) and I'll definitely write something soon on a new painting of mine that I'm particularly proud of.

A lot of good things have happened to me writing-wise this year, the most important of which being the Writers' Program at the UCLA Extension School. I took an online course there with the phenomenal Robert Eversz, co-founder of the Prague Summer Program for Writers, who has been hands-down the very best writing instructor I've ever had. My writing has improved tremendously thanks to him, and I like to think I was a good writer before. I feel so blessed to have found a writing program where the instructors hold the students to high standards and want them to be the best they can be, instead of simply pocketing tuition money and letting students get away with being "lazy" writers (if you're a writer you know what the expression means, if you're not it's not important for this post). In my line of work it is very rare that someone gives me direct, thoughtful, constructive feedback solely aimed at improving the job I'm doing and I have felt really grateful at the opportunity. I've also much enjoyed the whole class and the other students' novels-in-progress. I only wish I lived in the LA area so that I could meet more of my fellow novelists in person!

I've also been nominated for a writing award, and I'm waiting to hear whether I've been accepted to a Master Class in Novel Writing. In the meantime, I keep polishing my draft, and on occasion I slowly prep for the next book I have in mind, although slowly is the key word there, given the other commitments I have. I am ecstatic with how positive this year has been on my writing. Things started falling into place after I returned from Utah, and I hope the year will finish on an even stronger note. All this to say, I'm not writing about Writing at the moment but I'm Writing instead! And that's a very good thing.

Pricing at @NewYorker

(This is a repost of a piece I wrote for my Engineered blog. Enjoy!) It occurred to me the other day that the New Yorker has increased its retail price by over 28% in a year, in two increases of $1 each, so that the price is now $8.99. (See picture.) The Economist, being smarter about those things, doesn't print its retail price on the copies it sends subscribers, but I saw at the bookstore that its retail price is $7.99. I found The New Yorker's price increases interesting for multiple reasons. I'll try to list them below while giving my thoughts some semblance of order.

First of all, I'm sorry to disappoint all The New Yorker fans who read my blog, but I don't think it is worth more than The Economist. Actually, to formulate this in a stronger way, when you use as a basis of judgement whether a publication is important to understand the world we live in today and as a quantitative metric of its importance the retail price it charges its customers, I think The New Yorker is worth less than or perhaps just as much as The Economist, but definitely not more. A lot of articles in The New Yorker are hit-or-miss: some articles are stunningly good (especially those by Alex Ross, Joan Acocella or Peter Schjeldahl) and certain in-depth investigations or profiles fill an important need in today's media landscape (anything by Jane Mayer or Dexter Filkins), and then there are entire issues of The New Yorker that I put straight into the trash bin right after receiving them because there's nothing in the table of contents that makes me want to read. Please spare me the song of "The New Yorker is so great it should charge even more" or variations thereof such as "The New Yorker deserves to be more expensive than a cup of coffee at Starbucks". I don't know what you buy when you go to Starbucks but the cups of black coffee at Starbucks are massively cheaper than $8.99. (They're of the order of $2 and change at Port Authority Bus Terminal. Really.) Heck, I don't even think the venti Frappucino with an extra shot is $8.99. So it's a bit easy to give The New Yorker a free pass on its price just because it's The New Yorker. (I have included a list of recent articles I've enjoyed at the bottom of this post. I swear, there have been plenty.)

My first reaction when I noticed the price increase was: uh-oh, The New Yorker either has money problems or is under pressure by its owners to make more of a profit. (The magazine is published by Conde Nast, in case you're wondering. You'd think, though, that with The New Yorker festival and ancillary merchandise such as books, desk diaries and more, that they'd be among the best positioned magazines to be financially healthy.) But I'm also reading Subscribe Now! Building Arts Audiences Through Dynamic Subscription Promotion by Danny Newman, and if you're ever tempted to buy this book I'll save you the price of the paperback and summarize the book for you in one sentence: subscribers are the solution to all (performing arts organizations') problems.

The long version of the book summary is: subscribers are the solution to all (performing arts organizations') problems and don't believe anyone who says that their performing arts organization can behave differently because every single time the author has been involved in a subscription drive he's been able to help sell many more than expected, put more people in the theater than expected and find more subscribers than anyone thought possible. You've got to admire someone who was able to write an entire book short on specifics around one sentence, but he did, and clearly the man has a very strong track record in sales, both of subscriptions and of his book (which is now a bit dated anyway).

Having the book in the back of my mind, it then occurred to me that perhaps, just perhaps, the increase of The New Yorker's retail price could reflect not any financial trouble or pressure by owners but a desire to push more occasional buyers of The New Yorker toward subscriptions, which provide more financial stability for the magazine and allows for the funding of the in-depth features that have less commercial appeal by the success of those that do. Introductory subscription offers are $12 for 12 weeks (it is interesting that the introductory subscription webpage states that subscriptions will be automatically renewed after the 12-week introductory rate but doesn't state at which rate). Gift all-access (print + digital with archives access) subscriptions are $70 (rather, $69.99) while renewals of all-access subscriptions are $100 per year ($99.99 to be precise), or $2.13 per print issue. So now, even if you only read one New Yorker issue out of four, you are better off renewing your subscription rather than canceling and buying it in the newsstands once in a while. (You can't be too precise with those calculations, though, because the subscription price might increase and you also have to factor in the value of the convenience to get the magazine in your mailbox rather than remembering to trek to the newsstand to buy one and the value of having access to the online archives.)  

It is worth pointing out that the New Yorker operates under an automatic auto-renewal model when you renew online: your credit card gets automatically charged at auto-renewal time. Other magazines offer auto-renewal as an option but let renewing subscribers renew their subscription without auto-renewal. Of course the magazine will refund you if you cancel your subscription later, but it does increase the hurdle for a subscriber to drop out. Which, from a revenue management perspective, is a very good thing. From a customer care perspective, it is maybe not quite as good. If there is also an increase in subscription price, then two things may happen: (1) you may not notice it because they don't tell you in advance and then your credit card is charged and it's done, (2) you may actually begin to think that perhaps since you don't have time to read much of The New Yorker anyway, you could spend the money on something else. On the other hand, for people who do subscriber to The New Yorker, the subscription can be an "identity symbol": they're the sort of people who care about the topics The New Yorker writes about, and will renew no matter what (unless the price really becomes exorbitant), in which case it might be just as well to make auto-renewal automatic because subscribers would then be very price-insensitive.

So what is the summary of this long post?

(1) Revenue management and pricing are topics that fascinate me. Unsurprisingly, I do research in them.

(2) The New Yorker should take a page from The Economist's playbook and not print the retail price on the issues it sends to subscribers, because people like me notice the tiniest things. And then they write 1,200-word blog posts about it and feel very happy about their posts. (Go to point (1) for a refresher.)

(3) The New Yorker is very good at ramping up prices to move people toward a subscription model and keep them subscribed.

(4) Even if you only read one issue of The New Yorker out of four, you're better off staying subscribed.

Finally, as a random idea, The New Yorker should consider having prizes for the best in-depth feature published in its pages in a given year, the way Harvard Business Review does. It could also involve subscribers by running contests where readers would pick the best articles from the online archives over a certain period. It seems to me that the online archives are a bit underused, and their format is not easy to read online, unless perhaps on a tablet. While The New Yorker has published some collections of its articles over the years, there is the potential to do a lot more. Perhaps it could involve subscribers in picking the articles that would be included in some of the anthologies. Another worthwhile question would be how to create more of a community among New Yorker readers and subscribers beyond the New Yorker festival, perhaps through a network of book clubs where people meet and discuss certain articles. Of course it all depends on the objectives The New Yorker has for its readership and how its readers fit into its big-picture strategy. If the goal is for the articles to have maximum impact (either for their intrinsic worth or to keep advertisers happy or both), then strategies to make current occasional readers and subscribers read more articles or read articles in depth might be worth investigating.

Some recent New Yorker articles I think highly of:

• Ai WeiWei's Freedom by Fiat by Evan Osnos.
• The Legacy Of Srebrenica, Twenty Years Later by John Whitaker.
• What Else Can Art Do? The Many Layers Of Mark Bradford's Work by Calvin Tomkins
• The End Of The Erdogan Era? by Dexter Filkins
• A Century of Silence: A Family Survives The Armenian Genocide And Its Long Aftermath by Raffi Katchadourian
• The Scene Of The Crime: A Reporter's Journey To My Lai And The Secrets Of The Past by Seymour Hersh