Rebecca Mead writes the New Yorker [Mead's per­sonal web­site has dis­ap­peared; track her down at the New Yorker]: “Ash­tanga is hard-​​core yoga; and Pat­tabhi Jois’s school in Mysore is for those prac­ti­tion­ers who are at the crys­talline cen­ter of the hard core. Ash­tanga, like any insti­tu­tion, has a sharply defined hier­ar­chy, and get­ting your train­ing from Jois him­self has a sta­tus rather like that, among early psy­cho­an­a­lysts, of hav­ing been treated by Freud. Begin­ning in the six­ties and sev­en­ties, Jois instructed a trickle of West­ern­ers who made it to Mysore, and they spread his teach­ings back home, prompt­ing more fol­low­ers to make the pil­grim­age. In the past sev­eral years, yoga has become wide­spread in the Amer­i­can main­stream, and Ash­tanga has expe­ri­enced a cor­re­spond­ing boom: these days, Jois often has as many as eighty stu­dents from the West study­ing with him, pay­ing around five hun­dred dol­lars a month for the priv­i­lege. In India, where the annual per-​​capita income is less than four hun­dred dol­lars, this makes him a wealthy man. He is the engine of any num­ber of local busi­nesses – inns, restau­rants, Internet-​​access out­lets – that have sprung up to accom­mo­date the tastes and needs of all the spirituality-​​seeking West­ern­ers flock­ing to the city to absorb his wisdom.”

Rebecca Mead wrote this arti­cle for the August 14, 2000 issue so it is already dated in many respects. Four months later, she penned another sig­nif­i­cant New Yorker arti­cle about weblogs [link no longer avail­able]. It put blog­ging “on the map.” This kind of lit­er­ary archae­ol­ogy is inter­est­ing, because it informs the present. The article’s pre­cur­sor of the Kadet­sky book men­tioned below. This kind of social com­men­tary is a New Yorker trade­mark. To show that she can be ecu­meni­cal in apply her wit to yoga styles, she also wrote about Birkam Choud­hury: Call­ing all heat-​​seeking New York­ers [link no longer avail­able] about the same time.