That Ineffable New Yorker Style

Just want to make a note on the New Yorker style, or maybe a better way to put it is the New Yorker approach to profiles. It is a subtle and maddening approach, often implying far more than it is willing to say outright. It can also be brilliant in its evisceration of a subject, sometimes performed with such surgical skill that many readers don't notice the blood or the missing organs.

That's how I read this ostensibly glowing profile of James Dyson, inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner. In fact, the story does contain a lot of positive information about Dyson, and many people took it to be a puff piece (here is an example).

But I think all you really need to know about the piece's portrayal of Dyson is contained in these two passages:

Dyson describes his company: "'We don't have industrial designers. All our engineers are designers and all our designers are engineers. When you separate the two, you get the designers doing things for marketing purposes rather than functional reasons.'"

Marketing purposes rather than functional reasons! Imagine that. Later in the piece, we visit a Dyson testing facility and R&D lab:

"(According to a Dyson representative, American machines are louder than the European and Asian models, because Americans associate noise with power and don't trust a quiet machine.)"

Oh Dyson. Dyson Dyson Dyson. What the hell, man?

Note: It occurs to me, on reading the piece again, that the Dyson representative may have been speaking of competitors' vacuums, or machines generally. Sigh. Well, I think the better reading is that Dyson intentionally makes its American models louder for marketing, not functional, purposes. Of course the idea that marketing should be separate from design is famously contested in Malcolm Gladwell's profile of Ron Popeil.