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, June 17, 2022

June 20, 2022 Issue

The only piece in this week's issue that appeals to me is Steve Futterman’s delightful “Goings On About Town” note on jazz pianist Alan Broadbent:

The pianist Alan Broadbent is likely known to a wider audience as the astute arranger who helped finesse popular recordings by Natalie Cole and Diana Krall. But he was also the not-so-secret weapon behind Charlie Haden’s “Quartet West,” providing both bopping and rhapsodic keyboard work and offering such romantic, noir-inspired originals as “Hello My Lovely” and “Lady in the Lake.” A trio that joins him with the bassist Don Falzone and the hypersensitive drummer Billy Mintz is a textbook vehicle for Broadbent to display his multifarious gifts as an improviser.

Postscript: Please, no more blurry photos by Ioulex. Looking at them is like looking through a lens smeared with butter. Seek clarity and sharpness, e.g., that extraordinary black-and-white image of the horse by Vanessa Winship, illustrating André Alexis’s short story “Houyhnhnn.”

Photo by Vanessa Winship


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