Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Mid-Year Top Ten






Well, we’re slightly past the mid-year point, and I thought it might be fun to look back and pick my ten favorite 2010 New Yorker articles to date. Here they are (note the first three are from the fantastically great April 19th "Journeys" issue):

1. Lauren Collins’s “Angle of Vision”
2. Elif Batuman’s “The Memory Kitchen”
3. Burkhard Bilger’s “Towheads”
4. Susan Orlean's, “Riding High”
5. Alex Ross’s “The Spooky Fill”
6. Tad Friend’s “First Banana”
7. Alec Wilkinson’s “Immigration Blues”
8. Kelefa Sanneh’s “Boxed In”
9. Ben McGrath’s “Strangers on the Mountain”
10. Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills”

Credit: The above artwork is Laurie Rosenwald’s “On The Horizon” illustration, which appeared in the July 12, 2010 issue of The New Yorker.

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