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, May 5, 2023

April 24 & May 1, 2023 Issue

A detail in Lauren Collins’ Talk story “Decorative,” in this week’s issue, caught my eye: Owen Wilson uses a Brompton to get around Paris. Collins writes, “Wilson arrived on a Brompton folding bike, which he padlocked to an iron fence.” Bromptons are great bikes. Lorna and I travelled Scotland and the Netherlands on them. You can take them on trains, hop off, unfold them, and away you go.  

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