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.

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

January 3 & 10, 2022 Issue

Shauna Lyon kicks off the year with a wonderful “Tables For Two.” She reviews Agi’s Counter, a Brooklyn eatery specializing in “Hungarian-inspired breakfast and lunch dishes.” I love breakfast. What’s Agi’s Counter serving? Lyon tells us:

On a recent morning, breakfast included the hearty Leberkase, in which a thick slab of spongy pork pâté is sandwiched, with fried egg and pear mostarda, between even thicker slabs of Pullman-style bread. But it was the tender herb-flecked biscuit—dill aroma meeting your nose as you lean in to bite, spread with mayo and stacked with a soft fried egg and assertive Alpine Cheddar—that made for the perfect morning snack.

Mm, that “dill aroma meeting your nose as you lean in to bite” is very good. I savor it. 

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