Today, I went to the New Yorker Fiction page on this blog and updated it for the new week. When I do that, I add the current week’s short story and add one to extend the history one more week into the past.

This time, the story from the October 16, 2017 issue was by the same author as this week’s, Tessa Hadley. Last week, my update of two weeks also included the same author twice. Both October 30, 2017 and January 26, 2026 had stories by Joseph O’Neill. I hadn’t noticed such coincidences in past updates.

When I looked more closely, I found that this is less exotic than it seems. Tessa Hadley has 9 stories in my table between 2017 and 2026. Joseph O’Neill has 8.

The process of building the table has changed recently. For past issues, I search Google. Today, for example, I searched “site:newyorker.com tessa hadley funny little snake”. The top of the search results had the story, a blog post interviewing the author, and the author reading the story. I find the author and title by looking at the issue’s home page, which has a consistent URL: https://newyorker.com/magazine/yyyy/mm/dd where the date of the issue is used for yyyy/mm/dd

Just recently, I’m switching to Google for the current issue. When I search the New Yorker website for the information, the URL has extra bookkeeping characters. I need to remove them before I add the links to the table which is annoying and error prone. The results from Google don’t need that extra step.

In case you can’t tell, I really like the short stories in the New Yorker.