Fanfic at The New Yorker

I feel like I should mark it on my calendar: four days ago, The New Yorker published The True History of Jewish Wizards at Hogwarts by Nathaniel Stein. There've been earlier edge cases at the magazine, like their Bill Gibson/Sabermetrics mashup, but all of them have had plausible deniability. Stein's piece is clearly fanfic. Arguably, it's self-insertion.

Why does our beloved genre and its epiphenomena keep breaking through into the mainstream? IMO, because we have so many cool toys, and writers have near-zero resistance to them. The privileging of the mainstream was a social construct built around a distribution channel, and Main Street's been in bad shape for a while now, but there's nothing theoretical about a case of the plot bunnies. Ask any writer who's had one. The only way to get rid of a plot bunny, even a disreputably fannish one, is to write it.