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, March 10, 2023

Acts of Seeing: After the Rain

Ferrara, 2013 (Photo by John MacDougall)










Last night, reading Hisham Matar’s A Month in Siena (2019), I encountered these words: “The rain was now a drizzle and the black cobblestones shone darkly.” They recalled for me the time Lorna and I were cycling in Ferrara. We got caught in a shower. We sheltered in the archway of a galleria and waited for the rain to stop. When it did, we biked on. Now everything looked so bright and fresh. I relished the way the wet pavement shone. I took a few photos, including this one of the Cattedrale di San Giorgio.  

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