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.

Thursday, November 4, 2021

November 1, 2021 Issue

Shauna Lyon, in her delectable “Tables For Two: Le Pavillon,” in this week’s issue, describes the location of her table in Le Pavillon as slightly evoking “a Hilton Hotel in Toronto.” Why Toronto? Is that her idea of restaurant Siberia? Never mind. Her piece is delightful, starting with a wonderful decorative detail (“A fanciful blown-glass chandelier, by the artist Andy Paiko, drips from the room’s cathedral ceiling”), and ending with a delicious description of Le Pavillon’s Noisette Chocolat (“controlled whimsy, precise geometry, silken mousse, flawless chocolate coating, a crumbly, nutty praline croustillant, and a strong hit of salt”). Mm, I’ll have a piece of that, please. 

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