New Yorker, are you listening to me? And: thoughts about cell phones and fiction

Is it possible that the editors of The New Yorker are listening to me? Has anyone else noticed that after several years of using the fiction pages of TNY mainly to give us advances of novels soon to be released and to offer minor works by world-class writers late in their career who don't need the boost or the $, finally TNY is coming around to, a least occasionally, printing a real story and to introducing a young author. Current issue has a story, Sun City, by a writer who just published her first collection, Caitlin Horrocks - a very good story that focuses intently on two women coming together uneasily after a death: youngish woman goes to Arizona home of her grandmother and deals with the aftermath with grandmother's "roommate" - it is unclear, at least through most of the story, whether grandmother was involved in a relationship with her roommate; the granddaughter is out as a gay woman, and this has produced various tensions in all of her family relationships. This isn't totally my kind of story, it's kind of bleak and very circumscribed in its action and scope, but it's very effectively told and faces real social and family issues in a direct and striking manner. Only other character in the story is the daughter of deceased/mother of main character - who appears from time to time through cell-phone conversations. What a great new device the cell phone is - for authors! Allows them/us to bring a character or voice into a story at any time or place, without the narrative setup of a phone call - builds in an editing and splicing capability that we never had in narrative. Remember Richard Ford's American Trilogy - it seemed to me that his protag was on the phone all the time, talking with current loves and exes. Would be much easier for Ford to script these scenes today!