The New Yorker & Me: September 24, 2018 Issue

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.

Friday, September 28, 2018

September 24, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The newyorker.com version of Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Sofreh” features six images by my favorite New Yorker photographer, William Mebane, including a wonderful portrait of Sofreh’s chef and owner, Nasim Alikhani, that is sure to make my 2018 “Top Ten Photos” list.

2. Great to see illustrator Angie Wang back in the magazine (see “Goings On About Town: Modern Dance” by Brian Seibert). Her portrait of the singer Nellie McKay, in the December 13, 2010 issue, is one of my all-time favorites.

3. Neima Jahromi, in her “Bar Tab: Apothéke,” mentions an alluring drink called the Devil’s Playground (gin, absinthe, local dragon fruit, prickly pear) I’d love to taste.

4. What’s the most interesting line in this week’s issue? Three contenders: (1) “His late-July set for the Australian radio station Triple J’s ‘Mix Up’ series is a sauntering, slow-burn disco workout, highlighted by a reëdited version of the Jimmy Castor Bunch’s eternally goofy ‘Troglodyte (Cave Man)’ ” (Michaelangelo Matos, “Night Life: Tim Sweeney”); (2) In a saffron vesper, mixed with gin, vodka, and Lillet, it’s too intense—like taking a glug from a perfume bottle in your grandmother’s bathroom—but in desserts it’s more subtle, an intoxicating footnote” (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Sofreh”); (3) “The picture has time in it, the residue of innumerable side-to-side shifts of scrutiny” (Peter Schjeldahl, “Only See”). And the winner is: Hannah Goldfield for that inspired “like taking a glug from a perfume bottle in your grandmother’s bathroom.”