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.

Sunday, January 14, 2018

January 15, 2018 Issue




















Bendik Kaltenborn is one of The New Yorker’s best illustrators. He has a dandy picture in this week’s issue, showing Trump swaddled in a bathrobe, lying on the Oval Office carpet, blissfully watching his favorite morning show, “Fox & Friends.” It’s an illustration for Andrew Marantz’s “Friends in High Places,” in which Marantz brilliantly describes “the thin fourth wall between Trump and his TV.” Kaltenborn captures Trump’s infatuation perfectly.


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