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.

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

January 22, 2018 Issue


Pick of the Issue this week is Talia Lavin’s “Bar Tab: The Narrows,” containing a couple of great drink descriptions [“As for the house drinks, the Pilar (mezcal, Cappelletti, Cocchi Americano) is a pure amber color in a globe-shaped glass, and splutter-inducingly smoky; the Babushka, a simple concoction of ginger, lime, and vodka, offers enough succor to allow the possibility of returning to the bitter cold of the street, where a lone bicycle lies in a snowdrift, buried up to its chain”], and this inspired detail: “In a corner booth, a man gently plucked a down-coat feather from a woman’s sleeve and blew it into the air.”

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