November 27, 2017 Issue

Nick Paumgarten has two items in this week’s issue – the Talk story, “Good Taste,” and the reporting piece, “Confidence Game.” Both are terrific. “Good Taste” is about a “listening party,” featuring a three-hundred-and-forty-thousand-dollar speaker system called the Imperia. Paumgarten’s description of it is a gem:

Two seven-foot steel towers, each with a couple of huge flared wooden horns, one atop another, along with some smaller aluminum-alloy horns. Between them, on the floor, are the boxed bass horns. The standing horns, fashioned out of Pennsylvania ash, bring to mind an old gramophone, or a morning glory. They make it sound as if the musicians are in the room.

The party takes place in the loft of Jonathan Weiss, principal and founder of Oswalds Mill Associates, designer and manufacturer of the Imperia. Here’s Paumgarten’s rendition of the Imperia’s sound:

The guests fanned out around the towers, and Weiss snuck in behind them to fiddle with some dials and place stylus on vinyl. Kick drum, E string, pedal steel, an intake of breath: the players were as present in the room as Weiss himself, as he nervously checked on his components.

That “an intake of breath” is delightful. The whole piece is wonderful, putting the reader squarely there, in the loft with the partygoers, as they listen to the extraordinary Imperia.

Paumgarten’s other piece in this week’s issue, “Confidence Game,” is a profile of World Cup slalom skier, Mikaela Shiffrin. Paumgarten visits her in Park City, Utah, where the U.S. ski team and its training facility, the Center of Excellence, is based. He watches her work out “under the lash of her coach Jeff Lackie” (“By the end of the third circuit, as she crawled along the mat, leaving a trail of sweat, I had to look away”). He talks with her parents Jeff and Eileen Shiffrin. He talks with her former coach, Brandon Dyksterhouse, and her close friend, Bud Pech. Most vividly, he describes Shiffrin’s second run in the 2015 World Cup slalom at Aspen:

As the leader, Shiffrin was the last out of a field of thirty to ski a second run (forty others had either crashed or failed to qualify), and was thus facing a degraded snow surface. She wore a tight white bodysuit and a stars-and-stripes helmet—a touch of Evel Knievel. The north-facing slope, in full shadow, was a crepuscular blue, out of which the fluorescent yellow trim of her shin and knuckle guards popped like the chest feathers of a chat bird. Banner ads for Milka chocolate (the venue may have been Stateside, but the main television audience was still overseas) lined the run, along with the dim silhouettes of course workers, many of them wearing crampons to maintain their footing on the icy pitch. (It never looks as steep on TV.) Often, Shiffrin’s first few turns are careful, as she establishes a tempo, but on this occasion, despite her almost impregnable lead, she came out “blasting,” as the TV commentator said, so that, by the time she hit the eighteenth gate (out of sixty), the speed and some cruddy snow seemed to cause her to stumble. But she recovered her form—metronomic tempo, skis parallel, body crouched, “knees to skis and hands in front,” as the family mantra goes—and took on the meat of the course with calm determination, to the extent that calmness can be attributed to a woman punching aside heavy, rubbery poles at a rate of more than one a second, while pogoing from side to side in flat light down a wall of rutted ice. Her style was “quiet,” in the argot, the upper body still, skis biting, tip to tail, with hardly a chatter. (Watching the race again recently, on YouTube, I thought of her in high summer, sliding side to side in her socks, holding a medicine ball.) She knocked away the second-to-last gate with both arms, so that for a moment they were raised as though in triumph, and then she ducked across the finish line, swooped into a big turn to check her speed, and finally, snowplowing (pizza!), looked up at the scoreboard. She seemed almost disappointed. She’d won by 3.07 seconds, the largest margin of victory ever in a World Cup slalom race, breaking a record that had stood for forty-seven years.

That “The north-facing slope, in full shadow, was a crepuscular blue, out of which the fluorescent yellow trim of her shin and knuckle guards popped like the chest feathers of a chat bird” is inspired! The whole passage is brilliant, a top contender for Best New Yorker Paragraph of 2017.

Postscript: Other notable pieces in this week’s New Yorker: Talia Lavin’s “Bar Tab: The Penrose” (“The sound of fashionable boots striking the white floor was muted by a staccato prog-rock soundtrack; a young woman in a clinging leather blazer frowned at her companion by the light of a tiny candle and flicked beer foam at his lush red beard”); “James Wood’s “All Over Town” (“In ‘The Waves,’ Woolf returns, at regular intervals, to painterly, almost ritualized descriptions of the sun’s passage, on a single day, from dawn to dusk: wedges of prose like the divisions on a sundial”); Peter Schjeldahl’s “Masters and Pieces” (“How many times in a row can you swoon to marks that sound the same chord of rippling anatomy?”).