The New Yorker & Me: March 30, 2026 Issue

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, April 3, 2026

March 30, 2026 Issue

For those of us hoping for regime change in Cuba, Jon Lee Anderson’s report, in this week’s New Yorker, is discouraging. He seems to be saying that even though the situation in Cuba has never been more dire, the Cuban people blame Trump, not their own rotten Communist government. Anderson says, “During my visit, everyone I talked to was worried about the country’s vulnerability, but few were worried about whether the government would survive.” His point that “Cuba has been through hard times before. The mythos of the Revolution is built around the people’s ability to endure” is true. My son-in-law Dayan, who is Cuban, says the same thing: “We’ve been through this before.” He’s quite fatalistic. He doesn’t see any change coming out of it. Is he right? Anderson seems to think so. He says,

Even if negotiations with the U.S. yield an agreement to hold elections, Cuba has no organized political opposition that could run against the Communist Party, let alone take over the country. As a friend in Havana pointed out, there is no local equivalent of María Corina Machado, the opposition leader who helped encourage the intervention in Venezuela. The best-known dissidents are dead, imprisoned, or in exile, too far removed from recent politics to be taken seriously. The likelier scenario is that the next ruler will come from within the existing power structure—which, my friend suggested, means that little will change.

It’s too bad. What a waste of a golden opportunity to overthrow the bastards.

Postscript: Rossana Warren’s poem “Coots,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. I love that “Jagged surface of the city reservoir.” And “It would snow soon, / we walked fast, night was spreading its cloak, / the western skyline sparkled its broken glass, / and the birds in their tuxedos tightened their rings / so the water rippled glossily / out around them, catching glints” is inspired! I’m going to pay more attention to her work. She appears to be a sharp observer of nature.