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, June 8, 2022

June 6, 2022 Issue

Best sentence in this week’s issue is Andrea K. Scott’s “In the densely collaged, billboard-size ‘LODA,’ a cartoon image of a Black astronaut reading Jet magazine underscores that Halsey is building both a time capsule and a long-range plan, the latter realized here, to exuberantly funked-up effect, in ‘My Hope,’ an eighteen-foot-long model of a teeming block, in which low-rider cars cruise a South Central dreamscape of golden palm trees and Nubian pyramids” (“At the Galleries: Lauren Halsey”). That "exuberantly funked-up effect" is inspired!

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