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 Galchen, 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 17, 2024

May 13, 2024 Issue

I’m delighted to see that several passages from Gary Shteyngart’s brilliant “Shaken and Stirred” (newyorker.com, April 24, 2024) are reprised in the “Pick Three” column of this week’s issue. One of them is the inspired “smoky as fuck” description of Tigre’s vodka-based Cigarette Martini, which makes me smile every time I read it. The “Pick Three” passage is different from the original. The words “and named after Stephen King’s pyrokinetic character Charlene McGee” are omitted. But that’s okay. The “Pick Three” version is still excellent. Here it is:

The highlight of Tigre’s Martini menu is the vodka-based Cigarette, which Platty immediately qualified as “smoky as fuck.” Austria’s Truman vodka is shot into flaming orbit by an inventive liquor made by Empirical, a Danish distillery, which presents on the tongue as a flavorful burst of smoked juniper, hence the feeling that a draw of nicotine and tar can’t be far.

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