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 22, 2024

On the Horizon: "Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb 'New Yorker' Essayists"











Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023) are two of the great New Yorker essay collections of the last twenty years – where “great” means original, acerbic, perceptive, evocative, analytical, passionate, illuminating, stylish. To celebrate them, I’m going to select four of my favorite pieces from each book (one per month, for the next eight months) and try to express why I like them so much. A new series then – “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists” – starting April 15, 2024.
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