On the Horizon: "3 Great Thematic Travelogues"

I enjoyed doing “3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place” so much that I’ve decided to keep it going. For my new series, I’ve chosen three brilliant thematic travelogues – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013). Each is a collection of travel essays threaded with a theme – walking (The Old Ways), swimming (Waterlog), drinking (The Wet and the Dry). The books are beautifully written. I want to study them in detail. A new series then – “3 Great Thematic Travelogues” – starting January 1, 2026.

December 8, 2025 Issue

Jorie Graham, in this week’s issue, interprets Elizabeth Bishop’s great “At the Fishhouses.” She notes, as many readers before her have noted, the poem’s spellbinding shift in register: "The poem has moved from the conversational, the anecdotal, to the divinatory." Seamus Heaney called it "a big leap." But Graham adds something new when she says, 

The final word, “flown,” seems to glide etymologically right off the watery “flowing,” before morphing, as if by miracle—the miracle of language—into the action of a bird. The vision lifts away. Was it a visitation? An annunciation? But it is gone. And we are back in our strange solitude, our individuality—in history.

The vision lifts away – this is interesting. I’ve read and reread this transfixing poem many times. I’ve read many commentaries on it: see my recent “Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’: Five Interpretations.” It never occurred to me that “flown” means the vision departs, flies away. I always thought it referred to Bishop’s idea of knowledge. Consider the poem’s last six lines:

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

In other words, we know what is now happening (“flowing”) and we know what has passed away (“flown”). But I’m open to Graham’s take on it. The idea of Bishop’s harbor epiphany suddenly flaring and then vanishing appeals to me. 

The Netflix Documentary "The New Yorker at 100" Is Excellent!

The documentary “The New Yorker at 100” is currently streaming on Netflix. I watched it last night. It’s excellent. It artfully interweaves key publishing moments in the magazine’s vast history – John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind” – with segments on what the current staff is up to, including production of the magnificent “100th Anniversary Issue” (February 17 & 24, 2025). As an avid New Yorker fan, I was thrilled to get a look inside the magazine’s offices and see the editorial process in action. I enjoyed the whole thing immensely. Highly recommended. 

Tables for Two Tango: Helen Rosner's "Foul Witch"

Photo by Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Foul Witch"

This is the second post in my series “Tables for Two Tango,” a celebration of Hannah Goldfield’s and Helen Rosner’s wonderful New Yorker restaurant reviews. Each month I select a favorite piece by one or the other of them and try to say why I like it. Today’s pick is Rosnor’s deeply sensual “Tables for Two: Foul Witch” (December 18, 2023).

This piece does not start promisingly. Rosner describes Foul Witch’s neighborhood: “feels neither hip nor interesting.” She says, 

The restaurant, too, is oddly short on ambience: the long, narrow, high-ceilinged dining room is like a hallway to nowhere; the rough brick walls and exposed ductwork make the space feel unfinished, rather than artfully gritty; the open kitchen, built into the back of the space, has a startup-garage haphazardness, eschewing any aesthetic grace.

So far, so meh. But the next lines surprise and delight:

Thank goodness, then, for early winter sunsets, and low interior lighting, and food so fascinatingly delicious that you don’t care where you’re sitting to eat it. Every meal at Foul Witch begins with a complimentary portion of bread and butter: a wedge of crisp, oil-slick focaccia; a length of sour baguette, bien cuit; an enormous dollop of yolk-yellow butter, soft as cake frosting, salted like the sea. It’s a struggle not to finish every bite, which would be strategically unwise, given what’s to come. 

Wow! Food so fascinatingly delicious that you don’t care where you’re sitting to eat it – can restaurant praise get any more effusive than that? As a matter of fact, yes. Rosner is just getting warmed up. Here’s her next passage:

Foul Witch is ostensibly an Italian restaurant, though it is seemingly unconstrained by any known definition of that cuisine. The wines are global, and err on the side of bizarre. I was enraptured, one evening, by a Slovenian pinot grigio that my server described (accurately) as “entirely un-green.” On another visit, I fell hard for a gravelly Ryšák, an uncommon Czech blend of red and white grapes. The food, meanwhile, is luscious, almost libidinous; Mirarchi’s motivating principle seems to be the pursuit of suppleness and surrender. For an appetizer, pale rounds of pawpaw, the custard-like North American fruit that tastes like the tropics (and which ought to be a star on far more menus), are served at the bottom of a small, deep bowl, bathed in cream, beneath an obscene, slumping scoop of Golden Kaluga caviar. Tortellini, soft and curvaceous, have a velvet filling of veal sweetbreads; they swim in a golden broth made strange and beautiful by a butterscotch splash of Amaretto. A tender filet of wagyu, grilled over charcoal, comes with an earthy, almost animal, sunchoke béarnaise.

That “The food, meanwhile, is luscious, almost libidinous” makes me smile. Rosner is a voluptuary. Her review of Foul Witch is one of her most voluptuous pieces. Dig her conclusion:

What unites the menu is a concentrated sensuality. Even the kitchen’s more pointed preparations, with piercing flavors that break up the menu’s otherwise relentless rolling softness, are almost unnervingly alive: a needle-sharp salsa verde dressing a plate of yielding Sorana beans; an anchovy-drenched celery salad, the vegetable sliced lengthwise into curling tentacles. Often, when restaurants are called “sexy,” that means sleek-lined and hard-edged; the food at Foul Witch is sexy, not in the way of a fast car or a low-slung couch but like actual sex: a physical indulgence, a sinking in, an embodied experience of pleasure.

That last line is one of my favorites in all of “Tables for Two.” Rosner is a brilliant carnal writer.

December 1, 2025 Issue

The two pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: I’m Donut ?” and Alex Ross’s “Written in Stone.” Rosner’s piece is a review of the new Times Square doughnut shop called I’m Donut ?. Her description of the store’s doughnuts is delectable. Here’s a sample:

There are chocolate and matcha variants, their subtle flavors baked into the dough. Then there are filled doughnuts, whose puffy centers are pumped with flavored creams, all of them vivid and none too sweet: custard, more matcha, fragrant sake gelée with Chantilly, airy peanut-butter cream swirled with tart Concord-grape jelly. There are some New York-exclusive flavors, like a ring doughnut glazed in neon-pink strawberry icing, freckled with bits of freeze-dried berry that crackle and melt on the tongue, or a chocolate variety with a caramel-espresso cream filling that was unexpectedly, thrillingly bitter and complex. The somewhat controversial scrambled-egg doughnut features a sugary original doughnut piped full of soft curds and a squirt of a sweet-savory tomato mayonnaise—a bold and bizarre breakfast manifesto that refuses to be definitively sweet or definitively savory. I loved it unreservedly, though I imagine I might be in the minority.

Mm, I’ll have one of those chocolate ones with the caramel-espresso cream filling, please.

Ross’s “Written in Stone” is a paean to the Orkney Islands. He says, “Orkney is one of those places where the veil over the distant past seems to lift.” He visits various Neolithic ruins: the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar, the tomb at Maeshowe. His favorite site is Stenness. He writes,

During a recent visit to Orkney, I kept returning to Stenness, at all hours and in all weather. On drizzly days, with skies hanging low, the stones resemble ladders to nowhere. In bright sun, hidden colors emerge: streaks of blue against gray; white and green spatters of lichen; yellowish stains indicating the presence of limonite, an iron ore. Pockmarks and brittle edges show the abrading action of millennia of wind and rain. I watched as tourists approached the stones and hesitantly touched them, as if afraid. When I put my own hands on the rock, I felt no obvious emanations, though I did not feel nothing. One evening, I leaned on a fence as the sun went down, the horizon glowing orange against a cobalt sky. A whitish mist stole in from the lochs, encircling a nearby house until only its roof and chimneys remained. Spectral shapes caught my eye: sheep were trimming the grass around the site. When they detected my presence, they streamed away en masse, fading into the fog, which matched their coats. The stones loomed as black silhouettes. I felt a sweet shiver of the uncanny.

I love that description of the sheep, “streaming away en masse, fading into the fog, which matched their coats.” “Written in Stone” is a wonderful tour of Neolithic Orkney. I enjoyed it immensely. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Conclusion

This is the sad part of the journey, my final post in this series. Today I’ll try to express what these three great books – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – mean to me.

These books are excellent examples of literary explorations of place. The locations explored – the Pine Barrens, the Meadowlands, Pine Ridge Reservation – are on the margins of society. That’s one of the things I relish. Another is the immersive way they’re explored – the walking, canoeing, driving, and roaming. McPhee climbs a fire tower to get the view:

From the fire tower on Bear Swamp Hill, in Washington Township, Burlington County, New Jersey, the view extends about twelve miles. To the north, forest land reaches to the horizon. The trees are mainly oaks and pines, and the pines predominate. Occasionally, there are long, dark, serrated stands of Atlantic white cedars, so tall and so closely set that they seem to be spread against the sky on the ridges of hills, when in fact they grow along streams that flow through the forest. To the east, the view is similar, and few people who are not native to the region can discern essential differences from the high cabin of the fire tower, even though one difference is that huge areas out in this direction are covered with dwarf forests, where a man can stand among the trees and see for miles over their upper-most branches. To the south, the view is twice broken slightly – by a lake and by a cranberry bog – but otherwise it, too, goes to the horizon in forest. To the west, pines, oaks, and cedars continue all the way, and the western horizon includes the summit of another hill – Apple Pie Hill – and the outline of another fire tower, from which the view three hundred and sixty degrees around is virtually the same as the view from Bear Swamp Hill, where, in a moment’s sweeping glance, a person can see hundreds of square miles of wilderness. 

Sullivan and his friend Leo Koncher, age eighty-three, gingerly cross an old railroad bridge forty feet over the Passaic River:

Many of the railroad ties on the bridge were burnt out so that the path was like the smile of a man with no teeth. I was walking slowly in an effort to keep from falling in, and at several points we both had to get on our hands and knees to climb between faraway ties. I expressed concern. “What are you worried about” he finally asked me. I said I was worried about falling into the river. Leo shook his head in bemused disgust. When we got to the end of the bridge, he had me look up to see the elevated span stuck straight in the air like a rusted knife. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” he said. “This is really the best view.” 

Frazier attends a powwow, walks around, observes all the activity, and then suddenly decides he wants to be somewhere quiet and empty:

I maneuvered through the crowd, went by the taco and lemonade stands, out the gate in the chain-link fence, through the field full of parked cars. The carnival had shut down and the rock-and-roll no longer played, and only one generator still purringly ran. I walked to downtown Pine Ridge, past the tribal building, up the hill to the old hospital, and then onto the open field of the Path the Doctors Walk On. I went half a lap around and sat down. The grass was damp; dew had begun to fall. I could hear the amplified voice of the announcer at the powwow. Then his voice stopped, and the only sound was the singing and drumming. It came through the darkness high and strong and wild as if blown on the wind. It could have been ten voices singing or it could have been a thousand. At moments it sounded like other night noises, coyotes or mosquitoes, or like a sound the land itself might make. I imagined what hearing this would have done to me if I were a young man from Bern, Switzerland (say), travelling the prairie for the first time in 1843. I knew it would have scared and thrilled me to within an inch of my life.

Or like the sound the land itself might make – how fine that is! These books are deeply in touch with the land. That’s another thing I love about them. To me, it’s their main message. 

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three wonderful books. I picture it like this: the fire tower on Bear Swamp Hill; Fred Brown’s house in Hog Wallow; an old and weirdly leaning catalpa tree; the ruins of the great paper factory in Harrisville; a wild blueberry bush; Chatsworth General Store; a mud-colored 1948 De Soto; a Ryan monoplane; a pine tree with a splendid green crown and a trunk that is still black from an old fire; a green wood orchid; a whippoorwill; a big red polyethylene canoe; a muskrat; Kearney Library; a carp; stalagmites of pigeon dung; a Muscovy duck; a mosquito; Leo Koncher’s workshop, with salvaged cedar stumps on the roof; the Pulaski Skyway; the PJP landfill; the old Penn Station; the Stadium Restaurant in downtown Secaucus; a catfish covered in slime; an eagle feather on a buckskin thong; portrait of Le War Lance; Big Bat’s Texaco; a sun-dance pole; a star quilt; aerial view of White Clay; page from the Billings Gazette showing full-color photo of Frazier’s car upside down in snow-filled ditch; portrait of SuAnne Big Crow; fatality marker on Interstate 90 where SuAnne’s fatal accident occurred; grove of cotton woods; spiderwort; tumbleweeds. Overlap these images and paste them at crazy angles to each other. I call my collage “Sulpheezier.” 

November 24, 2025 Issue

The Earth is burning up. Science is clear: fossil fuels are to blame. What to do about it? Stop using fossil fuels; use an alternative such as hydroelectricity, nuclear energy, solar power, wind power. These are the alternatives most commonly mentioned. But there’s another one, not often considered, that might be the most promising of all – geothermal power.  Rivka Galchen writes about it in this week’s New Yorker. She tells how it works:

In some ways, the process of harnessing geothermal energy is simple. The deeper you dig, the hotter the temperatures get. For direct heating, you dig relatively shallow wells (typically several hundred metres deep), to access natural reservoirs of hot water or steam, which can be piped into a structure. For electricity, wells are dug farther down, to where temperatures are above a hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. (In Iceland, this temperature is reached at around one thousand to two thousand metres deep.) Pressurized steam spins a turbine that in turn spins a generator. Thermal energy (steam) is translated into mechanical energy (the spinning turbine), which is translated into electrical energy (via the generator). Geothermal energy is essentially carbon-free, it is available at any time of day and in any weather, and it leaves a small—albeit very deep—footprint on the landscape.

Galchen visits the Krafla Geothermal Station in Iceland. She points out that “more than a quarter of the country’s electricity comes from geothermal.” But not every country has Iceland’s hot springs and volcanoes. In landscapes that lack these turbulent geological features, the costs and uncertainties of drilling deep in search of sufficient heat have curtailed development. This, she says, “partly explains why, in the field of clean energy, geothermal is often either not on the list or mentioned under the rubric of ‘other.’ For decades, both private and government investment in geothermal energy was all but negligible.”

But, as Galchen reports, “All this has now changed.” She writes,

In the past five years, in North America, more than a billion and a half dollars have gone into geothermal technologies. This is a small amount for the energy industry, but it’s also an exponential increase. In May, 2021, Google signed a contract with the Texas-based geothermal company Fervo to power its data centers and infrastructure in Nevada; Meta signed a similar deal with Texas-based Sage for a data center east of the Rocky Mountains, and with a company called XGS for one in New Mexico. Microsoft is co-developing a billion-dollar geothermal-powered data center in Kenya; Amazon installed geothermal heating at its newly built fulfillment center in Japan. 

My favorite part of Galchen’s piece is her description of a project that aims to demonstrate the feasibility of an ambitious geothermal system to serve Cornell University’s seven-hundred-and-forty-five-acre campus. She writes,

In the summer of 2022, a rig set up not far from Cornell’s School of Veterinary Medicine drilled for sixty-five days through layers of shale, limestone, and sandstone, passing beyond the geologic time of the dinosaurs to a crystalline basement dating to the Proterozoic eon, more than five hundred million years ago. 

What a marvelous sentence! I think geothermal is the way to go. When Lorna and I built our house here on Prince Edward Island, we installed a geothermal furnace. It heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. I highly recommend it. 

Tables for Two Tango: Hannah Goldfield's "Eyval"

Photo by Cole Wilson, from Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: Eyval"

This is the first post in my series “Tables for Two Tango,” a celebration of Hannah Goldfield’s and Helen Rosner’s wonderful New Yorker restaurant reviews. Each month I select a favorite piece by one or the other of them and try to say why I like it. Today’s pick is Goldfield’s ravishing “Tables for Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023).

I love the beginning of this piece – no throat-clearing, just jump right in:

I’ll start with the cocktails at Eyval, a Persian restaurant that opened last year—and so should you. Gin tends not to agree with me, and yet I couldn’t help but steal sips of a friend’s orange-blossom Negroni, a cold and viscous concoction that lingered on my tongue and in my memory (I can taste it now!), the intoxicating, floral perfume of the orange-blossom water achieving thrilling alchemy with the herbal gin, bitter Aperol, and sweet vermouth.

That sensuous passage sets the tone for the rest of the piece. Taste, scent, texture, color, pleasure – all are covered in this first delectable paragraph. The second paragraph continues the theme:

For myself, I ordered a Conference of the Birds—a sour-candy-like mix made with more orange-blossom water and Aperol, plus vodka, lemon, and honey—and the tart, smoky Limoo Margarita, featuring mezcal infused with limoo amani (dried lime), an ingredient used in Iran in soups and stews, the rim of the glass coated in coarse salt and flakes of mild, fruity Aleppo pepper.

Mm, more delicious description. Note the pungent specificity of the drinks’ names and ingredients. Specificity is one of the hallmarks of Goldfield’s style. She lists ingredients; she evokes their flavors (not just “tart,” but “tart, smoky”). Every detail is charged with vividness (“the rim of the glass coated in coarse salt and flakes of mild, fruity Aleppo pepper”). 

The opening sentence of her next paragraph segues beautifully to her main subject – Eyval’s food. She writes, “I’m happy to report that the dynamite drinks portended dynamite food.” With that, she takes off on a flight of glorious food description. Here’s Eyval’s bread:

You can choose between two options for bread or, better yet, get both—an oblong barbari, with grooves like a racetrack and a speckling of nigella and sesame seeds, and a round komaj, a soft, sweet bun made from a dough enriched with milk and eggs and seasoned with turmeric, perforated into quarters, brushed with butter, and adorned with cumin seeds. Both are perfect for scooping up dips, including a sharp whipped feta with walnuts and radish and a broccoli-rabe borani: strained, salted yogurt topped with blanched florets, an herb purée, pistachio, coriander seed, and chili oil and flakes.

Here's Eyval’s salads:

The Green Tahini Salad, a mix of Little Gem, frisée, radicchio, radish, and seasonal fruit (navel and blood orange, recently), is elevated to transcendence by the inclusion of warm medjool dates, a powerful kick from grilled serrano pepper in the tahini dressing (which also contains honey and mint), and a generous sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds. “Kashke Bademjan” appears in quotes on the menu because it’s an interpretation of the traditional appetizer: an eggplant lightly fried and roasted whole, the charred, silky flesh then drizzled with kashk, made from cooked yogurt, and finished with crushed walnuts, fried garlic and onion, mint oil, and fresh mint. Fat crosshatched coins of supple trumpet-mushroom stem, skewer-grilled and served with pickled beechwood mushrooms over beluga lentils simmered in fenugreek-spiked cream, were reminiscent of scallops and even more delicious than the actual scallop kebab, though that was nice, too, four plump bronzed mollusks over a luscious emulsion of tamarind pulp and squid ink.

Who would not want such exquisite description to continue forever? And it does continue! Here’s Goldfield’s concluding paragraph – one of the great finales in all of restaurant-reviewing. Are you ready? Tuck in your bib. Here goes:

There’s also a chicken kebab, as well as a ground-beef-and-lamb iteration, both excellent. (One thing that distinguishes Eyval from Sofreh is inspired riffs on street-food staples.) But, unless you’re ordering the whole menu (a valid choice), I’d prioritize the lamb ribs, sticky-sweet with date and tamarind, scattered with walnut, barberries, and pickled chilies, and the larger dishes, including a kebab-inspired, flawlessly grilled rack of lamb, sliced into beautiful, buttery chops, served with a bowl of perfectly steamed, rose-and-saffron-scented basmati rice. Saboor’s version of ghormeh sabzi is a particular showstopper, a braised veal shank (don’t forget to check the bone for marrow) crowned with a crisp disk of herbed-rice tahdig and rising regally from a rich stew of tender kidney beans and melty greens and alliums, including parsley, spinach, and leeks, plus fenugreek and limoo amani. Plucking out a puckered leathery lime and eating it whole, sticky and sour, left me feeling as lucky as if I’d found the baby in a king cake. Speaking of cake, desserts included a squishy square of it, soaked in cardamom syrup and topped with saffron ice cream, second only to the noon e khamei, ethereal, crackly choux pastry sandwiching dreamy rosewater cream. 

Wow! I’m salivating. That “Plucking out a puckered leathery lime and eating it whole, sticky and sour, left me feeling as lucky as if I’d found the baby in a king cake” is inspired! The whole review is inspired – one of the best “Tables for Two” ever written. The question is: Can Rosner match it, perhaps even top it? We shall see in our next post in this series. 

November 17, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I enjoyed Hannah Goldfield’s “Takes” tribute to Anthony Bourdain’s “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” She says,

The voice he introduced in “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” is not just brash and ballsy; it reverberates with style and poetry, from its tantalizing opening lines: “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish.”

Yes, I agree. Bourdain’s voice is transfixing. I first encountered it in The New Yorker’s great September 6, 2021 “Food & Drink” archival issue. The essay is called “Hell’s Kitchen.” It originally appeared in the April 17, 2000 New Yorker. What a piece of writing! It's a first-person-present-tense account of a day in Bourdain’s life as chef at the Manhattan restaurant Les Halles. Here's a sample:

It’s noon, and already customers are pouring in. Immediately, I get an order for pork mignon, two boudins, one calf’s liver, and one pheasant, all for one table. The boudins—blood sausages—take the longest, so they have to go in the oven instantly. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so that they don’t explode; then I grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them into a sauté pan with some butter. I heat butter and oil for the pork in another sauté pan, throw a slab of liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, and in another pan heat some more butter and oil. I take half a pheasant off the bone and place it on a sizzle platter for the oven, then spin around to pour currant sauce into a small saucepan to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, sauté the liver, and slide the pork straight into the oven on another sizzler. I deglaze the pork pan with wine and stock, add sauce and some garlic confit, then put the pan aside; I’ll finish the reducing later. The liver, half-cooked, goes on another sizzler. I sauté some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red-wine vinegar, give it a shot of demiglace, season it, and put that aside, too. An order for mussels comes in, followed by one for breast of duck. I heat up a pan for the duck and load up a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine, and seasoning. It’s getting to be boogie time.

“Prick,” “grab,” “throw,” “heat,” “throw,” “heat,” “take,” “place,” “spin,” “pour,” “sear,” “sauté,” “slide,” “deglaze,” “add,” “sauté,” “deglaze,” “give,” “put,” “heat,” “load” – over twenty action verbs. Bourdain's writing thrillingly enacts the kinetic reality of his Les Halles kitchen.

2. The title of Hilton Als’ piece (the newyorker.com version) caught my eye: “Robert Rauschenberg’s Art of the Real.” I thought to myself, Real? What’s real about it? Rauschenberg’s art isn’t real. It’s about as unreal as you can get. The art of the real is a matter of seeing things as they are. Rauschenberg fails this test. But after reading the piece, I get what Als is saying. He’s referring to Rauschenberg’s use of real materials – real tires, real quilts, real chairs, real bicycles. “Art is more powerful when it incorporates the real,” Als says. Okay, but look what Rauschenberg does with these real things. He combines them, daubs them with paint, and makes them his own. Look at Monogram (1955-59). A stuffed Angora goat girdled with a tire. Als describes it: 

The goat had a goatee, horns, and a long-haired silver torso. Its head and neck were streaked with several colors of paint, as though it had put on makeup while drunk. Not only that—there was a black-and-white rubber tire around its middle.

Als describes his youthful encounter with Monogram as “one of the more destabilizing experiences of my life.” I’m sure it was. Monogram is an unforgettable artwork. But it’s not realism – not even close. Some critics have suggested that it signifies anal sex: see, for example, Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (1981). Leo Steinberg found this interpretation too reductive. He saw the imposition of the tire as “an act of appropriation.” In his great Encounters with Rauschenberg (2000), he wrote,

As the artist would later encircle a car key with paint and a bicycle with neon tubing, so here – to make it his own. The goat alone – even with signature paint on its muzzle – did not look Rauschenbergian enough, until joined with its tire in definitive incongruity. 

Als, in his piece, also refrains from extracting any specific meaning from Monogram. The closest he comes is by asking these questions: 

I thought about “Monogram” ’s layers for years. I knew that goats in mythology were often mischievous, symbols of randiness and disorder—“queer” animals. Was that goat a combination of the real, the queer, and the mythic? Was I?

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram (1955-59)

On the Horizon: Tables for Two Tango: Goldfield and Rosner

Hannah Goldfield and Helen Rosner are two of my favorite New Yorker writers. Goldfield used to write “Tables for Two.” Rosner writes it now. I want to compare their work. Over the next twelve months, I’ll pick twelve “Tables for Two” pieces – six by Goldfield, six by Rosner – and review them. I’ll choose one per month, one by Goldfield, then one by Rosner, and so on, alternating back and forth. It’s sort of like a “greatest hits” package of the two writers’ work. A new series then – “Tables for Two Tango: Goldfield and Rosner” – starting November 25.  

Credit: The above portraits of Hannah Goldfield (left) and Helen Rosner (right) are from The New Yorker.

November 10, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Reading Margaret Talbot’s absorbing profile of Joachim Trier, I recalled the strange sequence in Trier’s great The Worst Person in the World, in which the film’s central character Julie is the only person moving; everyone else is frozen still. Why? What is Trier’s point? Talbot mentions this scene. She writes,

In an inventive scene in which Julie runs to find Eivind again, Oslo kindly stops and freezes for her—a sequence shot with extras standing stock still, not with C.G.I.—so that she can capture stolen time with him without having to end things yet with Aksel. 

So she can capture stolen time with him? I don’t know about that. Time stops for everyone else, but Julie keeps moving. Time doesn’t stop for her. Anthony Lane, in his illuminating review of the film, provides a different take. He says,

Or what about the instant at which the surrounding world—humans, vehicles, dogs, the flow of coffee from a pot—freezes in mid-action, allowing Julie, the solitary mover, to run through the motionless streets toward Eivind, whom she badly needs to embrace? How better to illustrate the ecstatic indifference with which, in the throes of a silly love, we obscure everything that is not our object of desire? 

To me, this makes more sense. Julie and Eivind are so absorbed in each other, it’s as if the rest of the world doesn’t register. They see only each other. All else is irrelevant. Trier’s freezing of the action around Julie is his way of showing the obsessive nature of romantic love. 

2. James Wood, in his excellent “Last Harvest,” reviews Georgi Gospodinov’s new novel Death and the Gardener. Wood likes it. He says, “This is inevitably a sad book in places, yet it is lit with remembered warmth, happiness, laughter, and a kind of lightness characteristic of its writer.” My favorite passage in Wood’s piece describes Gospodinov’s exploration of his childhood in the Sovietized Bulgaria of the nineteen-seventies and eighties: “These investigations are meticulous, tender, palpable: buildings and radios, cars and first kisses, songs and streets are all made newly alive in memory.”

3. Hannah Goldfield went to an awful lot of trouble to host a World Series party. She describes it in her wonderful “Tableau Vivant.” Here’s a sample:

On Thursday, the day before the game, I braised the pork shoulder and mixed the crab dip, feeling triumphant in my preparedness. On Friday afternoon, I found myself in an exhilarated fugue state. Doors and drawers flew open and shut as I broiled bananas covered in brown sugar, grilled steaks, and roasted pounds of wings. I chopped scallions, toasted sesame seeds, wrenched lids off of cans of beans and condensed milk. For hours, I thought of nothing but my next move, the narcotic draw of my phone blissfully suppressed. It didn’t go without a hitch. Fifteen minutes before my guests were due, the point at which Pelosi suggested I deep-fry the shrimp, I had failed to so much as set up my dredging station. I noticed that the black T-shirt I’d been wearing since 7 a.m. was smeared with whipped cream. The doorbell rang.

Wow! I hope Goldfield’s guests were appreciative. And I hope they rooted for the Jays. Otherwise, what a waste of great food.  

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #10 Jonathan Franzen's "The End of the End of the World"

Illustration by Blexbolex, from The New Yorker

Let’s begin this series with an account of a luxury cruise to Antarctica – Jonathan Franzen’s brilliant “The End of the End of the World” (May 23, 2016). Franzen tells about inheriting money from his Uncle Walt; about wanting to take his girlfriend to Antarctica; about booking with Lindblad National Geographic for a three-week expedition to Antarctica, South Georgia island, and the Falklands; about his girlfriend backing out and his brother Tom subbing for her at the last minute. Franzen writes, “Tom reported being excited, but my own sense of unreality, of failure to pleasurably anticipate, grew only stronger.” It’s a strange start to such an exotic (and expensive) trip.

Franzen puts us there with Tom and him on board the National Geographic Orion. The ship departs Ushuaia, Argentina. Franzen is a birder. He wants to see birds unique to Antarctica. When the Orion arrives off the coast of the Antarctica Peninsula, the crew arranges a landing on Barrientos Island. Here Franzen sees thousands of gentoo and chinstrap penguins: 

Some of the chicks had fledged and followed their parents back into the sea, which is the preferred element of penguins and their only source of food. But thousands of birds remained. Downy gray chicks chased after any adult that was plausibly their parent, begging for a regurgitated meal, or banded together for safety from the gull-like skuas that preyed on the orphaned and the failing-to-thrive. Many of the adults had retreated uphill to molt, a process that involves standing still for several weeks, itchy and hungry, while new feathers push out old feathers. The patience of the molters, their silent endurance, was impossible not to admire in human terms.

For the first time on the trip, Franzen is happy: “Although the colony was everywhere smeared with nitric-smelling shit, and the doomed orphan chicks were a piteous sight, I was already glad I’d come.” 

The expedition crosses below the Antarctic Circle. Franzen is delighted with the views. In one of the piece’s most beautiful passages, he says,

I’d never before had the experience of beholding scenic beauty so dazzling that I couldn’t process it, couldn’t get it to register as something real. A trip that had seemed unreal to me beforehand had taken me to a place that likewise seemed unreal, albeit in a better way. Global warming may be endangering the continent’s western ice sheet, but Antarctica is still far from having melted. On either side of the Lemaire Channel were spiky black mountains, extremely tall but still not so tall as to be merely snow-covered; they were buried in wind-carved snowdrift, all the way to their peaks, with rock exposed only on the most vertical cliffs. Sheltered from wind, the water was glassy, and under a solidly gray sky it was absolutely black, pristinely black, like outer space. Amid the monochromes, the endless black and white and gray, was the jarring blue of glacial ice. No matter the shade of it—the bluish tinge of the growlers bobbing in our wake, the intensely deep blue of the arched and chambered floating ice castles, the Styrofoamish powder blue of calving glaciers—I couldn’t make my eyes believe that they were seeing a color from nature. Again and again, I nearly laughed in disbelief. Immanuel Kant had connected the sublime with terror, but as I experienced it in Antarctica, from the safe vantage of a ship with a glass-and-brass elevator and first-rate espresso, it was more like a mixture of beauty and absurdity.

But the best is yet to come. In Lallemand Fjord, Franzen sets up a telescope on Orion’s observation deck and immediately glimpses what looks to be an emperor penguin. He tells the ship’s captain. The captain maneuvers the ship for a better view. Franzen’s sighting is confirmed. The crew arranges for a landing. Franzen writes,

I’d already made a quiet, alienated resolution not to take a single picture on the trip. And here was an image so indelible that no camera was needed to capture it: the emperor penguin appeared to be holding a press conference. While a cluster of Adélies came up from behind it, observing like support staff, the emperor faced the press corps in a posture of calm dignity. After a while, it gave its neck a leisurely stretch. Demonstrating its masterly balance and flexibility, and yet without seeming to show off, it scratched behind its ear with one foot while standing fully erect on the other. And then, as if to underline how comfortable it felt with us, it fell asleep.

The expedition continues. The Orion’s route takes Franzen north again and then far east to South Georgia island. South Georgia is the principal breeding site for the king penguin, a species nearly as tall as the emperor and even more dramatically plumaged. Franzen says, “To see a king penguin in the wild seemed to me, in itself, sufficient reason not only to have made the journey; it seemed reason enough to have been born on this planet.” He continues,

When I sat on the ground, the king penguins came so close to me that I could have stroked their gleaming, furlike feathers. Their plumage had the hypercrispness of pattern, the hypervividness of color, that you can normally experience only by taking drugs. 

That last line is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of the best travel pieces I’ve ever read.