January 3, 2011 Issue

If you delight, as I do, in surprising word combinations verging on the surreal (e.g., “falling chocolate trunk filled with frozen chocolate powder, on a forest floor of lime-and-mint yogurt, with almond praline, puffed quinoa, and green-pistachio streusel”), you will devour Adam Gopnik’s “Sweet Revolution,” in this week’s issue. Gopnik’s charming, sensuous piece begins and ends with soufflé. In between, it takes us to some exotic restaurants in Barcelona, and immerses us in table talk (“This opened us up to the whole question of tiramisù – opened an incredible world to us”) that’s almost as surreal as the avant-garde desserts it describes. Sitting next to the woodstove, looking out at the thickly falling snow, I soaked this piece up the way trifle sponge cake absorbs cognac, and I hungered for more. What a great way to start the year! And it’s proof, at long last, that Gopnik hasn't lost his wonderfully light touch.

Second Thoughts: I’ve decided to revisit this post because I feel I’ve failed to do justice to two other excellent pieces in the January 3rd issue. The two items I’m referring to are John Colapinto’s “Just Have Less” and Jeffrey Toobin’s “Casualties of Justice.” I just want to briefly say that I enjoyed the Colapinto piece immensely, particularly the description of the weaving technique called intrecciato. Regarding the disturbing “Casualties of Justice,” I was impressed by the way Toobin constructed his narrative from myriad interviews and transcripts. The narrative slant against Marsh (“Marsh and his colleagues took an important but fairly routine political corruption investigation in Alaska and tried to leverage it into a prosecution of one of the leading political figures in the country. In doing so, they failed themselves and the Justice Department”) that emerges late in the piece seems at odds with the story’s tagline (“The Justice Department clearly wronged Senator Ted Stevens. Did it also wrong one of his prosecution?”). Toobin appears to answer the tag’s question in the negative on the basis of little more than that Marsh was part of the legal team that botched Stevens’s prosecution. The article leaves me wondering what exactly Marsh did that constituted misconduct.