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.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

April 25, 2011 Issue


Amidst all the hectic dunking, fracking, handbag marketing, and neuronal computation going on in this week’s issue, I’d like to pause a moment to celebrate the bonnet-wearing bunny on the delicious pink-yellow-and-white Maira Kalman front cover. Of the many great New Yorker cover illustrators, Kalman is the most brilliant colorist. This week’s cover, titled “Everywhere I Go I See Hats,” is ravishing. Kalman produced my all-time favorite New Yorker cover – the March 14, 2005, “Just Duckie,” showing a blue-billed duck comfortably nesting on a woman’s reed-like green hair. Kalman is a genius – right up there with Matisse, in my humble opinion. I see she currently has a show at the Jewish Museum [“Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)”]. If I lived in New York, I’d definitely check it out.
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