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.

Saturday, September 10, 2022

September 5, 2022 Issue

Not a whole lot in this week’s issue to get excited about. Richard Brody reviews an old movie, Pretty Poison, that I recall seeing when it first came out in 1968. I can’t remember a thing about it, other than that Pauline Kael liked it, and that’s probably why I went to see it. Brody likes it, too, calling it “a hectic pastiche that takes off from Psycho and grafts tropes from spy thrillers, teen romances, domestic melodramas, and police procedurals onto the highly textured realism of life in a small New England town, complete with its narrow-minded moralism.” I might give it a second look, although that "pastiche" isn't exactly enticing.

There’s a line in Anthony Lane’s review of Fernando León de Aranoa’s The Good Boss that made me laugh. The film stars Javier Bardem. Lane says, 

Think of the parts that Bardem played last year—the expansive Desi Arnaz, lording it over a broadcasting fiefdom in “Being the Ricardos,” and the sapphire-eyed chief of the Frenemy tribe, or whatever it was called, in “Dune.” Bardem has confessed that, in the sequel to the latter, he would very much like to ride a giant sandworm. Wouldn’t we all?

Best sentence in this week’s issue also belongs to Lane: “His hand alone is enough to fill a room, and my favorite shot shows his wandering finger, as big as a canoe, brushing against the keyboard of a laptop, which, with a soft pdoing, powers up” (“What You Wish For”). 

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