What's happened to the short story?

Sarah S-L Bynum's story is the 20 under 40 entry in this week's New Yorker - again leaving me a bit puzzled. It starts off well with a pretty good sassy attitude, a mom, apparently a Manhattenite?, with young daughter anxious about admission to preschool, attends some screening events, gets a letter saying daughter not going to be admitted, she writes a "thank you" note back, feels like a jerk - okay, good premise, but where is the story going, where did it go, I can't even remember how it ended - maybe because, like so many stories recently in the magazine the story didn't end, in fact it isn't even a story - it's a fragment, something from a larger work - I'm just guessing but don't you think that's the case? So what's happened to the "art of the story"? Stories, generations ago a a great way for writers to a. make a living and b. try out elements of their craft, have totally evolved - in the 80s stories were a very "hot" medium, publishers were looking for the next great collection - this the aftermath of raymond carver and anne beattie, two great writers who showed how much the form could accomplish with economy of space and language and keen attention to detail. So a lot of writers emerged with stories - and some went on to pretty successful careers, though primarily as novelists - the vogue for the story passed, as publishers realized that, though "reader" like stories, "book buyers" want a novel. But stories live, in a sense, in graduate writing programs, though even there the vogue has been for "connected stories," another '80s outgrowth (though there were a handful of earlier versions, e.g., sherwood anderson, even faulkner) - a neither here-nor-there format but an easy step through way for a young writer who can't summon the courage to climb the mountain of a novel on the first go can patch together a quasi-novel, made of pieces. And here we are today with the opposite -novels broken up into stories so that magazines can find pieces to show off a writer's work, they're really sample cases trailers, informative in their way but just not a complete reading experience. Does anyone else notice this? More on this in future posts.