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.

Saturday, March 1, 2025

The Ugly Americans

Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times













America, America, shame on you! 

Yesterday, I watched the video replay of the meeting between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky in the Oval Office. Trump and Vance yell at the Ukrainian President, calling him “disrespectful” of the U.S., berating him for not signing a peace deal on whatever terms they dictated. It was a disgraceful, nauseating, ugly spectacle. But it did make one thing crystal clear: Trump has sided with Putin. Evil has triumphed. One dictator has embraced another. America has turned ugly.

I want no part of American culture right now. That’s my gut reaction. I hold Americans responsible for what happened yesterday – all Americans, including Democrats. Trump is a product of your sick bipolar politics. Whether you like it or not, he represents all of you. The New Yorker is about as anti-Trump as you can get. I realize that. Nevertheless, I’m tired of reading about him in your pages. I’m sick of the cartoon covers, too. Trump loves attention, good or bad. The New Yorker lavishes it on him.

Once again, I, a Canadian, find myself questioning why I should continue a blog that celebrates an American magazine, American literature, American art. A couple of weeks ago I went through this same soul-searching when Trump threatened Canada with punishing tariffs and suggested we’d be better off joining the U.S. as the 51st state. He even referred to our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, as Governor Trudeau. But I got over it. Did I want to terminate a fifteen-year-old blog, which I love writing, just because of Trump’s bullshit? I decided no, and resumed blogging. But now, after seeing the way Trump and Vance bullied Zelensky in the Oval Office yesterday, I don’t want to have anything to do with America. America has turned ugly, ugly, ugly. I don’t recognize it anymore. 

So I’m back in the same quandary I was in a few weeks ago. I want to go on, but I don’t want to go on. I’m going to take a few days to think about it. In the meantime, The New Yorker & Me is suspended.  

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