10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #4 Ian Frazier's "On the Prison Highway"

Photo by Igor Mikhalev, from Ian Frazier's "On the Prison Highway"

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is Ian Frazier’s unforgettable “On the Prison Highway” (August 30, 2010).

This is one of the most profound travel pieces I’ve ever read. It takes us to the Russian heart of darkness – a deserted Siberian prison camp. Most of the physical travel takes place in the first paragraph:

In early March of 2005, I flew from New York to Vladivostok and met my Russian guide, Sergei Lunev, whom I’d travelled with before. Sergei, a hale fellow in his sixties, is the head of a robotics lab in St. Petersburg who guides various expeditions for the adventure and the extra cash. From Vladivostok Sergei and I flew to Irkutsk, took a train around the southern end of Lake Baikal to Ulan Ude, went partway up the lake by bus, continued to the lake’s northern end in a hired car on Baikal’s winter ice road for two hundred and twenty miles, caught the Baikal-Amur Mainline at the tip of the lake, rode for fifty-some hours on the train, and then hired other cars to take us farther north, to the city of Yakutsk and beyond.

That is an immense journey. If you want to know the details, you can find them in Frazier’s superb Travels in Siberia (2010), one of my all-time favorite books. The purpose of the journey is to find Soviet-era prison camps. Frazier has read about them. He wants to see them. He says, “On previous Siberian journeys, I had looked for prisons, without much success. This time, I was determined to find them.”

Past Yakutsk, Frazier and his guide travel on prisoner-built roads, the last of which, called the Topolinskaya Highway, no longer functions year-round. Frazier says of it, “Its ingeniously engineered log bridges were falling down and the streams they spanned had to be crossed on the ice.” 

Stalin-era prison camps (“lagers”), long abandoned, appear at regular intervals along this road. About thirty miles from the reindeer-herder village of Topolinoe, their driver points to a guard tower and other structures on one side of the road. They stop. Frazier and Sergei get out and wade toward them in thigh-deep snow.

Frazier’s description of the camp is extraordinary, becoming ever more immersive as details come into focus.

He begins,

The lager lay in a narrow valley between sparsely wooded hills. The gray, scraggly trees, which did not make it to the hills’ higher slopes, grew more thickly near the lager and partly surrounded it; a few small birches had sprung up inside what had been the camp’s perimeter. Their bare branches contrasted with the white of the snow on the roof of the barracks building, whose wall, set back under the eaves, was dark. In the whiteness of an open field a guard tower tilted sideways like someone putting all his weight on one leg. A ladder-like set of steps still led up to it, and two eye-like window openings added to the anthropomorphic effect. In the endless and pristine snow cover I saw no tire tracks, road ruts, abandoned oil drums, or other sign that any human had been here since the camp was left to the elements, half a century before.

He continues:

At first view, the camp looked as I’d expected. There were the fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s, the ink-black barbed wire, the inch-long barbs shaped like bayonets. Some of the posts leaned in one direction or another, and the barbed-wire strands drooped or fell to the ground; the fencing, and the second line of fence posts, several metres beyond, and the low, shameful barracks, with its two doors and three windows, fit exactly with the picture of a Siberian prison camp that one has in the mind. Sergei had drifted off to the left to videotape the lager from the side. I went in by the front gate, which was standing open. When I was inside the perimeter, the camp lost its generic-ness and became instead this particular Russian structure of its own.

He describes its fence posts and walls:

To begin with, the whole place was as handmade as a mud hut. The fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s weren’t factory stock that had been produced elsewhere but plain logs, peeled and smoothed, with narrow boards atop them to complete the L. And the side of the barracks wall, which from a distance had appeared to be stucco, was actually a daubed plastering over thin strips of lath that crossed each other diagonally, like basketwork. I broke a piece of the plastering off in my hand; at one time it had been painted a pale yellow and it crumbled easily. It seemed to be nothing more than a spackle of mud and river sand.

Aside from the nails and the barbed wire, I could see almost no factory-made product that had been used in the construction. Next to the windows were white ceramic insulators that had probably held electrified wire; no trace of mullions or window glass remained. The roof beam ran parallel to the building’s length, and along the slope of the roof at each end a facing board about five inches wide had been nailed. These boards covered the raw edge of the roof and extended from beam to eaves, and at the end of each board a very small swirl of scrollwork had been carved. The embellishment was so out of place it caught the eye. I wondered what carpenter or designer had thought to put a touch of decoration on such a building.

He describes the barracks:

The floor of the barracks was worn planking, tightly joined and still sound. I saw nothing on it but a few twists of straw and the wooden sole of a shoe. A short, cylindrical iron stove rusted near a corner. Its stovepipe was gone and the hole for it in the plank roof above had been covered over. Prisoners who had lived in barracks like this reported that the stove usually heated a radius of five to six metres. As this building was maybe ten metres from end to end, areas of it must always have been cold. From inside you could see the logs that the walls were made of. The cracks between the logs had been chinked with moss. The barracks space had been divided into several rooms, with bunks set into the walls. The bunks also were made of bare planks—some planed on both sides, some planed on only one. Planks with the bark still on them had been fitted into the bunks so that the bark side faced down.

Looking at the interior of the barracks, Frazier thinks of the enormous amount of suffering that occurred there:

Often prisoners in places like this had to sleep on the unimproved planking, or on thin mattresses stuffed with sawdust. For covering they might have had a single blanket, or nothing besides the clothes they wore during the day. Mornings began as early as 4 a.m., when the guards would awaken them by pounding with a hammer on a saw blade. That wakeup alarm and the screeching of the guard dogs’ chains on the wires stretched between the watchtowers as the dogs ran back and forth were characteristic sounds of the camps. Before the prisoners went out to work, they were given breakfast—usually soup with a small piece of fish or meat, and bread. Even in 1977, not a lean time, the diet in Soviet strict-regime camps provided only twenty-six hundred calories per prisoner per day, and less in the punishment blocks and sick wards. The international standard for a person actively working is thirty-two hundred to forty-two hundred calories per day. Like almost all labor-camp prisoners, the ones in this barracks would have been hungry almost all the time.

He notes that the death toll could be cruelly high in camps like this one: 

Well over a million died in the camps just in 1937-1938, the Great Purge’s peak years. A main goal of the Soviet labor-camp system was to take those citizens the Soviet Union did not need, for political or social or unfathomable reasons, and convert their lives to gold and timber, which could be traded abroad.

He says,

When I looked at the barracks’ tiers of bunks I pictured male zeks—the word for gulag prisoners—lying on them, but the prisoners here might have been women, too. Female zeks worked in timber-cutting camps and on road-building details, and even mined gold. Their resilience was greater than men’s, as was their ability to withstand pain. Or perhaps this barracks had been one of those occupied by and completely under the control of criminals. This distressingly numerous class played the camp system to exempt themselves from labor and, with the encouragement of the authorities, preyed on the political prisoners. The criminals’ ethics and speech seeped into everybody’s life. Political prisoners later said that the criminals in the camps were more dangerous than the meagre food and the killing work conditions. The gulag also had lagers for children. Eugenia Ginzburg, who served eighteen years in the camps of Kolyma, wrote that when a camp of child prisoners was given two guard-dog puppies to raise the children at first could not think of anything to name them. The poverty of their surroundings had stripped their imaginations bare. Finally, they chose names from common objects they saw every day. They named one puppy Ladle and the other Pail.

What strikes Frazier most forcefully is the camp’s “overwhelming aura of absence.” He writes, 

The deserted prison camp just sat there—unexcused, untorn-down, unexplained. During its years of operation, it had been a secret, and in some sense it still was. Horrors had happened here, and/or miseries and sufferings and humiliations short of true horrors. “No comment,” the site seemed to say.

Frazier wants the secrecy dispelled. He wants these prison camps marked as historic sites, reminders of the horror of Stalinism and man’s inhumanity to man. He says,

I thought that this camp, and all the others along this road, needed large historical markers in front of them, with names and dates and details; and there should be ongoing archeology here, and areas roped off, and painstaking excavation, and well-informed docents in heated kiosks giving talks to visitors. Teams of researchers should be out looking for camp survivors, if any, and for former guards, and for whoever had baked the bread in the bakery. Extensive delving into K.G.B. or Dalstroi files should be finding out who exactly was imprisoned here when, and what they were in for, and what became of them. The zek engineers and builders who made the hand-constructed bridges should be recognized and their photographs placed on monuments beside the road, and the whole Topolinskaya Highway, for all its hundred and eighty-nine kilometres, should be declared a historic district, and the graves, of which there may be many, should be found and marked and given requiem.

What monster was responsible for these camps? Frazier points his finger directly at one man – Stalin. He says, 

The camp I was looking at, and all the camps along this road, and the road itself, were Stalin. His was the single animating spirit of the place. The road project and its camps had come into existence by his fiat, had continued to exist in fear of his will, and had ended like a blown-out match with his death. The fact that the world has not yet decided what to say about Stalin was the reason these camps were standing with no change or context; the sense of absence here was because of that.

The piece ends unforgettably:

The strange feeling of absence that prevailed in the frozen silence here had to do with the secrecy and evil of the place’s conception, and with its permanent abandonment, in shame, after its author was gone. Now the place existed only nominally in present time and space; the abandoned camp was a single preserved thought in a dead man’s mind.

May 11 & 18, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is James Wood’s absorbing “Visiting Hours” – a review of Harriet Clark’s novel The Hill. Wood calls it “superb” – “a brilliantly deprived bildungsroman.” What’s it about? Why is it “deprived”? Wood tells us:

It is narrated by Suzanna, who lives with her grandparents in New York City. Nearly every weekend—first with her grandfather, then with a nun named Sister Claudine, and, finally, once she’s nearly a teen-ager, on her own—Suzanna makes a trip out of town to visit her mother in a hilltop prison. Only gradually does it emerge that her mother is serving a very long sentence for her role in a bank robbery that resulted in the death of a security guard. It has the form and emphasis of a coming-of-age story but is devoid of the usual content. We see Suzanna through her developing phases—at nine, at twelve, at fifteen, and then about to graduate from high school, a period when “a great venturing forth had commenced” (though not for Suzanna, who does not apply to college). 

About halfway through his review, Wood springs a surprise: The Hill is based on Clark’s real life. Wood writes, 

Harriet Clark, born in 1980, is the daughter of the Weather Underground activist Judy Clark, who took part in the robbery of a Brink’s truck in Nanuet, New York, in 1981, an incident that left three people dead. Judy was found guilty of murder in 1983, and served thirty-eight years, mostly in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Harriet was thirty-eight when her mother was released, in 2019.

And then he asks an excellent question: “Why fictionalize such remarkable facts?” His answer is interesting:

Clark’s wise remedy is to strip her fiction of most of those facts, reducing the local references so that the narrative shifts away from singular autobiography toward singular emblem. Not Harriet Clark but an isolated girl in the city; not Bedford Hills but a hilltop compound named only Hillcrest; not the notorious Brink’s robbery but a heist that went “too far.”

The effect of Clark’s reductions, Wood says, is twofold: (1) it “turns its stripped story into a kind of bitter allegory, in which those stages of development and fulfillment are ironized by an institution that deprives them of meaning: the prison”; and (2), it spares Clark from having to “revisit and adjudicate the ethics of her mother’s radicalism.” 

I like Wood’s question. But I’m not persuaded by his answers. Clark chose to transform her life story into allegory. That’s her right. And it appears she’s written a brilliant one. But, as for me, I prefer the facts. 

Wood’s review contains an inspired sentence – the last line of a passage in which he discusses Suzanna’s grandmother Sylvie, who, he says, is “at the heart of the book.” Here’s the passage:

One day, Sylvie takes Suzanna, age nine, to the bank that her mother robbed, forces her to go inside on her own, and then inexplicably drives away. Suzanna understands this particular lesson to be that “the arrangement of my family was neither destined to be nor destined to last.” Sylvie systematically deconstructs Suzanna’s world. You don’t have to visit your mother, she says. But I do have to, Suzanna replies. “According to who?” Sylvie asks. “You don’t even have to go to school.” Fed on moral scraps, the child must find her own meaning on which to subsist.

I love that last sentence. It makes me want to read the book, to see if Suzanna is somehow able to "find her own meaning on which to subsist." 

Helen Rosner's Review of #1 NYC Restaurant Kabawa

Photo by Yael Malka, from Helen Rosner's "The Caribbean Resturant Reinventing the Momofuku Empire"

I see that the Caribbean restaurant Kabawa tops The New York Times’ 2026 “The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City” list. New Yorker food writer Helen Rosner reviewed Kabawa last year, calling it “easygoing and joyous.” She wrote, 

Though there’s no shortage of high points at Kabawa—among them a rainbow-sprinkle-studded baton of flan so dense it verges on cheesecake—the restaurant’s success lies less in the strength of any individual dish than in the ebullient sum of its parts. 

She says, “an almost euphoric pleasure comes from simply being there, pumped full of life by the colors and the smells.” 

In a year-end piece called “The Best Things I Ate in 2025,” Rosner picked Kabawa’ curry goat as one of her favorite dishes. She says,

Tender shredded goat meat, luscious and gently gamy, is formed into a tidy rectangle, then seared to a crackly crispness. The fiery sauce Creole spooned over top is dark, thick, complex, and alive with spices and a bit of fishy funk from dried scallops. The dish is crowned with a pile of glossy fried curry leaves, whose woodsy, otherworldly aroma eddies around your face as the dish is placed before you, a promise of imminent pleasure.

I love critics who are guided by pleasure. It’s Rosner’s chief criterion. Kabawa passed the test spectacularly. 

T. J. Clark's Extraordinary "V is for Vagina"

Willem de Kooning, Suburb in Havana (1958)

I just want to spotlight an extraordinary art review in this month’s London Review of Books – T. J. Clark’s "V is for Vagina." It’s a consideration of Willem de Kooning’s 1958 Suburb in Havana. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a more granular description of a painting, even by Clark, than this one. Clark analyzes it stroke by stroke. Here’s a sample:

Physical description first. I warn you I shall probably try your patience for the next page or so; but I think that the only way to de Kooning’s intention, which is where I want to end up, is by way of process – by trying to reconstruct the sequence of marks in the case, so as to arrive at an intuition of what the sequence may have been aiming for. I believe Suburb in Havana originally had an off-white ground, maybe with a bit of yellow already worked into it. The big blank area going up from the bottom left corner looks to me like a survival from this first stage. The paint hereabouts is thin enough in places for the canvas grain to show through. Yellow seems to have been the first colour put over the off-white ground – certainly that’s true of the yellow in the picture’s lower reaches. There are several streaks and dollops of blue paint on top of the yellow, which seemingly landed when the yellow was half dry. Obviously de Kooning did not proceed from yellow to blue without looking back. If you focus on the areas where the two colours meet, particularly the painting’s horizon line and the broad yellow scrawl just underneath it, you see straightaway that the blue and yellow were applied alternately – the yellow scrawl has pulled up some blue within it and the horizon line of yellow is transparent to the blue underneath. It looks like the sliver of yellow at the picture’s top right corner was added on top of the blue, though it is hard to say what is going on in this area with any certainty. Clearly, to return to firmer ground, the great vertical stroke of yellow to the left was put down when the blue was already there. You can see spatters of yellow falling across the blue field from the first thick clot of colour at the stroke’s top right. The yellow turns green, quite dramatically, in among the rust brown at the top left corner, and once you notice this, you begin to register how much ‘yellow plus blue equals green’ is happening locally elsewhere, all around the yellow vertical and across the transverse yellow scrawling. This is painting in the wet – it is meant to look liquid, and the paint detail tells you that the look is true to the facts.

Clark continues in this vein for several more paragraphs. His review is a tour de force of descriptive analysis. He concludes that Suburb in Havana intends its viewer to focus on the dramatic difference between wet paint and dry: “The yellow scrawl is meant to look liquid: liquidity is bound up with fluency and therefore speed. The dirty brown slash, by contrast, is meant to look as dry as they come – obdurately dry, like old faecal matter.” Yes, you read that last part correctly. Clark is comparing the brown slash to something you might see in a lavatory: “A vagina put up on a dirty yellow wall with something that looks like faeces.” This does not appear to be a favorable view. Yet, Clark, ever the foxy dialectician, also describes de Kooning’s picture as “beautiful, colourful, internally coherent.” It’s an astonishing review. Highly recommended. 

Homage to Hoagland: "Fred King on the Allagash"

This is the first post in my series “Homage to Hoagland,” in which I consider seven of Edward Hoagland’s best essays – one per month – and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is “Fred King on the Allagash,” included in Hoagland’s excellent 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River. 

This great piece is an account of a six-day, ninety-two-mile canoe trip that Hoagland made through Maine’s Allagash Wilderness Waterway. The exact date of the trip is difficult to ascertain. We know it was July 17, because Hoagland says so in the piece. But the year is unspecified. The piece originally appeared in the January-February 1973 issue of Audience magazine. I’m guessing Hoagland made the trip the previous year, 1972. His purpose was pretty basic: “I wanted to see what it was like.” He says he hired a guide “so that I could use my paddle as a writing table part of the time and, being a novice, not bother with questions of navigation.” 

The guide’s name is Fred King. Hoagland describes him:

He’s fifty-eight, looks forty-five, has short hair which is bluish gray, round glasses, a boyish doggy grin, a face deeply cut by grinning and a mouth big enough to grin with. It’s a pleasing face; his body is straight and quick like a chipmunk’s and he has an immediate laugh, provocatively loud, and likes to stop still when on the move and sound off on the matter at hand, then impulsively move forward again, seeming never to walk if he can run. At home in Augusta he keeps a jug of Allagash water to mix with his drinks, and doesn’t much like December because of the short days: “I’d sell December awfully cheap.” 

Fred is as much the subject of Hoagland’s piece as the Allagash river. You can tell Hoagland admires him. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but it’s implicit in the many vivid lines of description that he devotes to him. This, for example:

He still likes to be by himself. His ideas sound as if they had been worked out in isolation in the woods and perhaps spoken first in a loud voice all alone. He has a tight shipshape cabin on Chemquassabamticook Lake where he goes in midwinter and works on improvements, hauling now with a snowmobile. He’s got to break trail for the snowmobile on snowshoes – it’s not like the ads – but he loves the rigor of the winter woods, cooks for himself and sleeps fitfully, listening to the radio and waiting for his mouse trap to snap. The mice he feeds to the gorbies – Canada jays – outside.

And this:

When we walked, Fred was quick, and with his small intelligent face looked like a professor afield, though his right arm is beginning to go bad on him – too much holding a chainsaw. In the black-fly season he sometimes sews his socks to his pants to protect his ankles, and leaves them on for four or five days, he said. 

The trip begins on Chamberlain Lake. There are two others in their party – a Long Island couple, Jim and Audrey, being towed in a second canoe. The foursome go up the lake toward Lock Dam, pass through the lock, and then head down the river to Eagle Lake, where they run into a storm:

We ran into waves tipped with whitecaps, the wind shifting into a headwind, and a navy-blue curtain lowered in front of us. The murky curtain turned purple, the water turned black and the wind hard and strong – the waves coming in gusts, the canoe shipping water – as we met the storm. It was a smothering front, and passing beyond it, we were soaked in a pellety rain, but found some protection in the lee of Farm Island, then in a narrows, where we tied up at Priest’s Camp. In the drumbeating rain as, laughing, we threw up our tents, Fred pretended we’d almost drowned to make it more dramatic for us. He said that when he first began guiding he’d been scared he might do something wrong and had gone to an old-timer for advice: “Just take lots of eggs and jam, Fred.” 

Next day, they explore the lake:

We circled the lake, slipping into each estuary and up Soper Brook, then up Snare Brook. Dozens of ducks: fish nests down through the water, scooped in the gravel. A great blue heron flew up. A dragonfly chased by a kingfisher got away by dodging close to our bow. The brooks were silty but the wetland grasses were a tender light-green. After a half-mile or so the alder growth would close in and beaver cuttings would block the brook, and where we had to stop we’d see moose tracks.

They stay at Priest’s Camp a second night. Next day, they head for Churchill Lake, where they encounter a moose:

On Churchill, with the sun a silvery band on the water, we caught up with a swimming cow moose midway across. Her body was invisible; her head was like a blunt boat, the ears the housing, and her hairy neck hump nearly underwater. It was a groping blind-looking head, sightless as a whale’s, a feeling and suffering-looking head, the nose so huge and vulnerable that other undiscovered senses might have been contained inside. Two terns were diving on her with creaky cries. Her ears lay back as her big pumping legs hurled her ashore, and she swerved to look at us, first over one shoulder, then over the other.

Hoagland and his group move on through Heron Lake and into the Chase Rips – “the one risky spot” on the route:

The river before us fell off, abrupt as the end of a table; all of a sudden it didn’t appear to be there. Then, curling up like a hairdo, it fluffed around us, high at the prow, as we slid down into the rapids themselves. The noisy water was popping in points, peaks and tufts, blotting out all other sights and sounds. We could have been surrounded by other canoes and not noticed them. This was the first pitch, full of rocks, several hundred yards long. The second was shorter but “downhilly,” the many rips sticking up as if to chum with us, as the water curled and crabbed around. Riffles, bumps, a wild backdrop of trees.

They stop at a place called Big Eddy to dry out and have lunch. Then they push on, “the Allagash partying along, popping with rocks but forty yards wide, leaving plenty of current, till it tipped down steeply again and we slid at the edge of a whole thievish mob of rocks that nattered away, feeling their tug, zipping by Harrow Brook.”

They enjoy peaceful minutes of drifting, too. Then “for three hundred yards the river would turn feisty, roaring, tergiversating, as busy as rush hour, each rock having its say.” Hoagland writes,

We twisted through new rips and rapids, eluding sweepers, seeing the trout jump, and dragonflies in a mating clinch; jays called in the trees. The clouds were lovely, if we took time to glance upward. There were still-water sloughs, and gulls on the mud-banks, and parakeet cries from the bear-jungle. Then a swift chute, dark choppy water, on into a wide, luxurious pool. Buzzing birds in the woods, occasional pines, more shaggy cedar, big pairs of spruce, a heron flying high with folded neck, a gangly flying loon, some green grassy islands. A winter wren sang. Then again the water crawled with ripples, with stream birds flying up, the water slanting alive with bubbles over a gravel bar.

They go through a bog and then out onto Umsaskis Lake. They camp for the night in the Thoroughfare leading from Umsaskis into Long Lake. Fred keeps a jeep at Umsaskis. Next day, he drives the group forty miles across International Paper Company roads to Chemquassabamticook Lake, where they boat to his cabin. Hoagland describes the place:

His curtain rods are old setting poles, his clothesline is tied between saplings skinned by beavers. He had a potato garden to tend, and we went out to see the stump of a virgin pine with the marks of a broad-ax that cut it still visible and a forty-year-old birch tree growing on top. We saw two barred owls calling each other, and a woodpecker drinking down ants on a stump, and moose and deer prints on the sandy beach, among the debris of mussel shells the gulls had dropped. 

In the morning, “the sun was golden through the thick trees. A soupy mist covered the lake, which smoked like a hot spring. Two connubial loons floated side by side, then dived together. The water was as dark as blueberry jelly.” They head back to the Allagash and get underway toward Long Lake again:

We passed bits of islands covered with driftpiles, saw a doe and a fawn, a sheldrake with seven ducklings, a squirrel swimming the river, its tail like a rudder. A heron flew up and stood for a minute atop a fir tree. The river curved gently in a stretch as sweet as honey, softening its water sounds so that we could hear the white-throated sparrows. After tilting again with a few rocks we entered a dead water which lasted for an hour’s paddling, birds warbling all around, the water smooth, black and waxed. Tying the canoes together, we drifted as a raft, eating Fig Newtons, and hearing chain saws. Sweeney Brook, Whittaker Brook and Jalbert Brook joined the current.

That “Tying the canoes together, we drifted as a raft, eating Fig Newtons, and hearing chain saws” makes me smile. It’s quintessential Hoagland – “raft,” “Fig Newtons” and “chain saws” bumping against each other surreally. No one but him could’ve written it.  

They camp at Round Pond for the night. Next morning, they’re on the river early: “We got started at 6 A.M., a sailing hawk peering down at us. A mist almost the color of snow lay between the lines of trees, so that although the weather was warm it was a wintry scene.” They go through the Round Pond Rips. Next, the Musquacook Rips. Fred’s loud voice in the quietness irritates Hoagland "exceedingly" because it’s scaring away moose and other animals. He writes, “I had to remember that this was real history he was reliving, that he was a link with the boisterous rivermen whose intent was to knock down the forests and let the light in.” 

And now comes one of my favorite passages of the piece – Hoagland’s vibrant description of the river from the Musquacook Rips to Allagash Falls. It’s worth quoting in full:

A buckskin-colored deer exploded with springy bounds. We saw a merganser family, a ridge scalped by a tornado. In a dead water we looked down and saw grasses growing on the bottom, while a whole populace of insects bounced in the air. The sun streamed through the morning vapors in warm yellow combinations on the west bank, but on the east the view was still snowy-looking. The black-growth forest humped into low hills. We floated past grassy islands, then sibilant stretches, the water combing through the rocks, turning the big ones yellow with reflected light and leaving a platter of calm downstream of each. There’s a disastrous-sounding crunch when a canoe hits a rock and the floor lifts under one’s feet, but the sound is worse than the results. We passed an old shack with a sod roof, now burgeoning with raspberries, and saw Savage Brook debouch through its delta, and Five Finger Brook. The water itself looked like running gravel, and we passed several old cabins that used to belong to characters like Sporty Jack (so called because of a birthmark he sported), and the Cunliffe Depot, the abandoned headquarters of a logging boss who rivaled Michaud. Michaud’s hay farm was two miles below, now devoid of buildings but spacious after so many miles of woods. Then beaches and finally a slough called Finlay Bogan, where we saw kingfishers, fish jumping, islands foliaged with willows and silver maples, ice-scarred. It became a still, rainy day with some occasional neighborly thunder. We ran by a few gentle rapids and shoals, seeing huge waterlogged stumps that were shaped like moose. The river here was a dream – rustling, windy, wild-looking and lush – chipper with birds, overhung with sweepers, dense with slow channels forking between the islands. It was beautiful and remote. 

“Platter of calm,” “neighborly thunder,” “stumps shaped like moose,” “chipper with birds” – who writes like that? No one. Only Hoagland. He’s incredibly specific. He's the king of specificity. He loves using place names: Savage Brook, Finger Brook, Cunliffe Depot, Finlay Bogan. His words call up pictures: “A buckskin-colored deer exploded with springy bounds”; the water combing through the rocks, turning the big ones yellow with reflected light”; “an old shack with a sod roof, now burgeoning with raspberries”; “The water itself looked like running gravel.” 

The trip is almost over. Hoagland swims below the falls, “in deep potholes where the water was warm.” Then they carry on down the river to its mouth where it empties into the St. John River, at which point the trip ends and the parties disperse. Hoagland writes: “Fred King departed like a boy let out of school: no more entertaining or catering to us, no more wincing at the bumps delivered to his canoe. He would drive south until he got tired and sleep by the side of the road.”

Accounts of canoe trips on wild rivers are catnip to me. I devour them. This is one of the best. Hoagland puts us right there on the Allagash. His writing is active, concrete, vivid. Great subject, delectable prose – the piece is double bliss. 

Ian Frazier's "The Maraschino Mogul"

Illustration by Janne Iivonen, from Ian Frazier's "The Maraschino Mogul"

Reading the section of John McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa 6” called “Maraschino,” in last week’s issue, I was reminded of another great “maraschino” piece – Ian Frazier’s “The Maraschino Mogul.” It first appeared eight years ago in the April 23, 2018, New Yorker, and is included in Frazier’s recently published collection The Snakes That Ate Florida. Last night, I re-read it. 

It’s quite a story, beginning with red bees and ending in tragedy. It centers on a man named Arthur Mondella – the “maraschino mogul” of the title. Mondella owned Dell’s Maraschino Cherries, a factory in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn that makes maraschino cherries. It was a successful business. But it contained a secret. Mondella was using the basement of his cherry factory to grow marijuana hydroponically. The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office became suspicious. On February 24, 2015, officers raided the factory. Frazier tells what happened next: 

While examining some shelves, they found what appeared to be a false wall. They told him they were going to send for a warrant to search behind it. As they waited for the warrant, Mondella excused himself to use the bathroom. Once inside, he locked the door and would not come out.

The police tried to persuade him to unlock the door. He refused, and asked them to bring his sister, Joanne. They did. Through the door, he said to her, “Take care of my kids.” Then he shot himself in the head with a .357 Magnum pistol he had been carrying in an ankle holster.

Frazier continues:

Behind the false wall the officers discovered a ladder leading down to a large basement, twenty-five hundred square feet, and space for about a hundred marijuana plants in a well-set-up system of hydroponic cultivation under L.E.D. grow lights. They also found about a hundred pounds of harvested marijuana, a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in cash, and a small office containing a desk with books on plant husbandry and a copy of “The World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime.” In a garage area they came upon a collection of vintage cars, a Bentley and a Rolls-Royce among them, which suggested that Mondella led a flashier life when not at the factory. Later reports mentioned his use of cocaine, his boat, his lavish spending in restaurants, and his fiancée, a former Penthouse model.

What’s this got to do with bees? Well, as Frazier shows, the unravelling of Mondella’s secret life began five years earlier, in 2010, when beekeepers in Red Hook noticed that bees returning to their hives were glowing an incandescent red. They noticed that their honey was turning red, too. The cause was eventually traced to Mondella’s cherry factory. Bees were observed flying in its direction and visiting puddles of red juice around it on the sidewalk. A beekeeper had his red honey analyzed. It tested positive for F.D.&C. Red No. 40, a food-safe dye, which is an ingredient of the maraschino syrup used by Mondella’s factory. 

The phenomenon of the red bees attracted considerable media attention and caught the eye of the authorities. As Frazier says, “The heightened attention caused by the bee episode had increased the factory’s visibility. In 2013, Brooklyn elected a new D.A., Kenneth Thompson, who set out to clean up pollution in the borough. His office decided to take a look at some stalled environmental cases.” 

My summary doesn’t do this great piece justice. Read it. It’s a fascinating story! Frazier tells it perfectly. 

May 4, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Lauren Collins’ “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it. Was I interested in what happens when someone throws a message into the sea? Not really. But scrolling through the piece (I was reading the newyorker.com version), I encountered a photo with this caption: “The champagne bottle Buffington found on the island of Mayaguana had a perfect little cigarette of a scroll inside, secured with a Band-Aid.” That’s an interesting sentence. So I went back to the beginning and began reading in earnest. The piece profiles a man named Cliff Buffington, “one of the world’s most prolific hunters of messages in bottles.” Collins says of him,

Buffington’s exploits are particularly impressive given that he’s the default parent of two young kids and lives in a landlocked state. He is forty-one and has a master’s degree in English literature; for some years, he did technical writing for a nuclear-waste-removal company. As his LinkedIn profile notes, he is also a musician, playing “guitar, harmonica, and mandolin across genres.” Basically, he’s an earnest and chipper guy, given to recording himself yearningly singing Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away,” and to crunching on apples while saying things like “Cool beans!” He is quick to make a friend, and maintains relationships with dozens of people whose bottles he’s retrieved. He once found a bottle with a note and an eight-year-old piece of wedding cake inside and traced it back to Ed and Carol Meyers, a Virginia couple who were celebrating their first anniversary. Buffington himself got married several years later and wrote on Instagram, “So, naturally, Ed & Carol came to our wedding & it felt like a blessing.”

She describes his office:

Buffington’s home office recalls a museum exhibition on Mesopotamian material culture crossed with a frat house the morning after a blowout party. There are empty bottles everywhere—crammed onto shelves, catching the light on a windowsill. A bar cart overflows with bottles that Buffington has yet to open, or “solve,” as he likes to say. “I would describe this place as a chaotic nightmare,” Buffington told me cheerfully. He keeps the tools of his trade in a garage workshop that he calls the Lab: a spray bottle (for hydrating flaking paper), a U.V. black light (for reading faded lettering), Channellock pliers (for wrenching off aluminum caps), a rotary tool with a diamond drill bit (for slicing into recalcitrant ones), laparoscopic needle drivers (for removing messages without the risk of shattering or breakage). Buffington’s wife, a surgeon, suggested the last tool after watching him struggle with bamboo skewers and bits of tape. A lone aluminum can among the bottles contained the dregs of a Bell’s Two Hearted I.P.A.

The piece really takes off when Buffington invites Collins to join him on a bottle-searching mission on the remote Bahamian island of Mayaguana. She says,

Buffington warned that Mayaguana would be no Margaritaville. “We are not talking about a ‘stroll’ here,” he wrote. “A typical day of hunting involves hiking maybe 8-15 miles on a beach: soft sand sucking energy from every footstep; relentless sun hammering you on exposed, shadeless shores.” He recommended that I come equipped with trekking poles, fingerless sun gloves, a multipurpose tool that included “pliers and a knife at minimum,” and “one 3-liter water reservoir with hose.” He also suggested packing provisions, including canned chicken, for “suitcase burritos,” and powdered Pedialyte.

Collins’ account of the bottle search is excellent. Here’s a sample:

After an hour of brain-joggling transit, we made it to the beach—something out of a shipwreck novel, devoid of any trace of human presence. Dropped onshore, Buffington and I walked and walked some more. There was no cell service, and Brown would be out of walkie-talkie range until we approached the pickup spot. For most of history, an island was a place of real isolation. Now a message could reach you practically anywhere—you had to find an island within an island to get off the grid. The experience of being totally incommunicado was liberating, but I also felt a sense of dread: What if I got heatstroke, or broke an ankle? Or, worse, what if Buffington did?

They find a number of bottles that appear to contain messages. But there’s nothing of any significance. Collins flies home. Buffington stays behind and continues his search. He finds a promising-looking bottle – the one described in the photo caption. Collins writes,

A couple of weeks later, Buffington held the bottle close to his computer camera, turning it slowly for me to admire. He pointed out that whoever had written it had sealed the scroll with a Band-Aid. “The really exciting thing is you can see writing in there,” Buffington said. He was right. Even at a distance, I could make out at least one full sentence, written in what looked like Sharpie: “Thanks for finding me.”

The piece moves into its final stage – tracking down the author of the bottle-message. Buffington succeeds in doing so. The author’s name is Joyce VanGilder. She’d written it six years ago, in 2020, during the pandemic, on the shore of North Carolina, not far from Frying Pan Lighthouse, which is mentioned in the message. Collins talks with her:

Confronted with her handiwork six years later, after a journey that likely took it into the Gulf Stream and around the entire clockwise circuit of the North Atlantic—a trip of several thousand punishing miles—VanGilder seemed more concerned about the bottle than about the message. “I feel like an international litterbug,” she admitted. Buffington had shown her a photograph of the site where the bottle was found. “When I saw all the stuff that was sitting around where he picked it up, I was, like, ‘Man, I guess I need to get down there and clean up some trash,’ ” she said.

The piece ends poignantly. Collins makes a personal connection:

VanGilder had sent the bottle with casual intentions, but I was oddly moved by receiving it. I grew up in Wilmington, not far from the Frying Pan, and, in 1988, my father had a bad accident on Bald Head, the nearest point of land. As I read about the tower, the names of local TV affiliates and the daily newspaper from my childhood kept cropping up. For almost a decade, I’d been writing a book about Wilmington. Physically, I was in France, but my head was in my home town. Somehow, it seemed, it had written me back.

Collins’ piece unfolds magnificently. Highly recommended.

Tables for Two Tango: Helen Rosner's "Misipasta"

Photo by Lanna Apisukh, from Helen Rosner's "Misipasta"

This is the seventh post in my series “Tables for Two Tango,” a celebration of Hannah Goldfield’s and Helen Rosner’s wonderful New Yorker restaurant reviews. Each month I select a favorite piece by one or the other of them and try to say why I like it. Today’s pick is Helen Rosner’s ambrosial “Tables for Two: Misipasta” (March 18, 2024). 

This is a review of one of Rosner’s favorite restaurants – Misipasta, in Williamsburg. Rosner doesn’t expressly say it’s one of her favorites, but I infer it when she says, 

You don’t have to be tired and hungry to eat at Misipasta, though I tend to be. It’s open late, by post-pandemic standards—diners are seated through around 10 p.m.—and I often find myself rolling in the door after giving up on a less-than-thrilling meal elsewhere, and not wanting the evening (the time, the stomach space, the babysitter, the sense of life as full of joy and promise) to be wasted. There are about twenty seats indoors, all of them counter stools, and one or two are nearly always empty. The lights are just dim enough to soothe, the tidy menu of cocktails and bitter Italian sodas ready to offer a bit of relief. The air smells like Parmigiano and butter, the sound system is playing the Pointer Sisters. There’s an enormous green salad—bitter mustard greens, frilly arugula, and hunks of sweet dates and almonds tossed in a sharp vinaigrette—served in a satisfyingly big, deep bowl. There’s mozzarella in carrozza, the Italian dish of cheese layered between two slices of bread and then deep-fried until golden—a kingly grilled cheese. You can get a plate of nutty-funky prosciutto served with enormous, fluffy gougères. I recommend eating both in the same bite, like biscuits and country ham gone zippy Italiano.

I love that “The air smells like Parmigiano and butter, the sound system is playing the Pointer Sisters.” 

The specialty at Misipasta is pasta. Rosner describes it ravishingly:

Despite the dozen or so shapes of pasta available in the to-go case, Misipasta offers only two pastas on the dine-in menu, but two is enough. The spaghetti, subtle and nourishing, is cooked just to the stern side of al dente, then tossed with garlicky butter emulsified with the starchy pasta cooking water, and sprinkled with shaved bottarga and crisp bread crumbs. Luscious cappelletti—filled, folded pasta that look sort of like overlarge tortellini—are filled with a heady mixture of parmesan, ricotta, mascarpone and prosciutto, dressed simply in butter and sage, and arranged tidily in a small, straight-sided terra-cotta bowl. It’s the sort of pasta dish you’re always craving without even realizing it, the sort of pasta you want to just shovel into your mouth—but their size and heft force you to slow down, to think not bowl by bowl but bite by bite. There’s often a third pasta available only for to-go orders, a scoop of tiny pastina (star-shaped micro-pasta) in a container of brodo, golden and intense, and so rich with collagen that it leaves your lips sticky. This is the sort of potent, soul-nourishing, complexly layered noodles-in-broth situation that Campbell’s chicken-and-stars soup always hopes to see when it looks in the mirror, before resigning itself to the disappointments of reality.

The piece concludes with five delectable suggestions:

I worry, a little bit, that the secret of Misipasta will get out, and that the friendly, neighborhoody feel of the place will tighten up like a corset, and that it’ll become yet another impossible-to-enter room behind the digital gates of the Resy app. But the shop and restaurant are open nearly all day—at 11 a.m. or 3 p.m. you can breeze through and have the place basically to yourself—and, when the weather gets just a smidge warmer, the big and beautifully appointed back yard will reopen, nearly doubling the seating capacity. Have an espresso, fruity and bitter. Have a slice of crispy farinata, a lacy-edge chickpea-flour pancake aromatic with rosemary. Have one of the city’s great secret sandwiches, an enormous mess of marinated and grilled artichoke hearts, spiked with hot chilis and barely held together by oozing provolone cheese. Buy a pint of Robbins’s satiny hazelnut gelato. Get a pound of pasta—frilly lumache, or long tubes of paccheri—and a jar of thirty-clove sauce, heady with garlic. You won’t make pasta nearly as good as Robbins’s at home—even with the same ingredients, even with the same tools, some things just have to get all the way into your bones—but it doesn’t hurt to try. 

Lepore Wins Pulitzer

Jill Lepore (Photo by Kayana Szymczak)

Congratulations to Jill Lepore! Her We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for history. She won for “a lively and engaging narrative that investigates why the Constitution is so difficult to amend, including a review of noteworthy failed amendments proposed by marginalized groups,” the committee said. See “Pulitzer Prizes: 2026 Winners List," The New York Times, May 4, 2026. 

I wonder what Lawrence H. Tribe thinks of Lepore’s win. He savaged her book in The New York Review of Books, February 12, 2026, saying, among other things, that she “lacked appreciation for the judicial decisions, congressional interpretations, ever-changing popular beliefs that can keep a written constitution alive over time regardless of the obstacles to formally altering its written text” ("Is the Constitution 'Dead, Dead, Dead'?").

I felt for Lepore – one of my favorite New Yorker writers – when I read Tribe’s piece. I wanted to defend her, but didn’t have the legal ammunition. I’m a total amateur when it comes to interpreting the American Constitution. Now the Pulitzer committee has done the job for me. Lepore triumphs! 

In Praise of the Unfiltered View

Edward Hoagland, in the Introduction to a 1993 re-issue of two of his essay collections – The Courage of Turtles and Walking the Dead Diamond River – talks about how he shifted in his late thirties from being a novelist to being an essay-writer. He says,

Now, however, I wrote the thirty-four essays in these two books breezily abruptly in just four years, with a new baby enlivening the house besides, and published many of them in the Village Voice, whose offices were located a few blocks down the street from where I lived. My stuff thus came out immediately, and instead of reaching three or four thousand people, might be placed in the hands of one hundred and fifty thousand. On Staten Island ferry or the Coney Island subway I could see it read, and was plumbing heartfelt material, not filtered through the artifices of fiction.

Not filtered through the artifices of fiction – that is exactly why I prefer factual writing to fiction. It strives to see life plain – no distortion, no embellishment, no fabrication. 

Vladimir Nabokov, among others, would disagree. In his view, “The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction” (“Good Readers and Good Writers,” in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, 1980). But seeing the world this way misses so much! It misses the beauty and strangeness of what actually happens. In support of the unfiltered view, I quote Philip Larkin: “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are” (“Big Victims,” Required Writing, 1983). 

April 27, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s brilliant “Tabula Rasa, Volume 6.” It appears that McPhee’s “old-man project” is working. It’s keeping him alive. But I’d argue it’s doing more than that. It’s refining his already incomparable style – making it even fresher, lighter, zingier. “Unhomogenized, this was udder-grade milk of the Champlain Valley.” I love that sentence. It’s from “A Legacy Taste of Cream” – the first piece in this new volume. Consider this one, from “Maraschino,” the number four piece in the volume: “I.G.A., of course, is the Independent Grocers Alliance, and this is your vox-pop cherry, your socialist cherry, but politics is not why you drown it in bourbon.” There’s something deliciously surreal about that line – the combination of “Independent Grocers Alliance,” “vox-pop cherry,” “socialist cherry,” “drown,” and “bourbon” – that makes me smile. Here’s one more – this from the seventh piece “For One Person”: “Over and over, I ran those films on our family projector, watching Pepper Constable (6'1", 191) go off-tackle, shucking Yalies, Harvards, on his way to the end zone.” The name “Pepper Constable” is itself a minor pleasure. Couple it with “go off-tackle” and “shucking Yalies, Harvards” and you have an inspired sentence. There are dozens of such felicities in this latest “Tabula Rasa.” I enjoyed it immensely.  

3 Great Thematic Travelogues: Action

This is the fifth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their action. 

Is there such a thing as a travel book that lacks action? Yes! Mary McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence (1959) comes immediately to mind. Full of dates and myths and history dry as dust, there’s nary a drop of action in it. McCarthy doesn’t go anywhere or do anything. It’s one of the most disappointing travel books I’ve ever read. The three books under consideration here are not like that. They brim with action. Robert Macfarlane, in his The Old Ways, walks, bikes, skis, sails, climbs, and explores some of the oldest pathways on earth. Here, for example, he’s on an expedition to Minya Konka, the highest mountain in Sichuan province, China:

So it was down, steeply down, across shale slopes, the stones of the path flowing in the sunlight, the horses skidding on their front hooves, braking with their back hooves, deerskin bags lurching forwards on their flanks, their bells tolling rapid alarm. We came on behind, tracing a stream-cut as it plunged off the pass, following it between saplings of pine and Himalayan oak and through bushes of rhododendron, stumbling in powder snow that reached knee-deep in places. The stream was part frozen: halted mid-leap in elaborate forms of yearning – chandeliers, ink-flicks and hat feathers. On the west side of the valley, the tops of distant oaks shone like brass in the sunlight. A small bright bird flew to a gnarled pine. We rested in a clearing at a shepherd’s hut. I sat with my back against the warm wall, facing the sun and the mountain, narrowing my eyes. 

And here, he and his friend, David Quentin, ski the Ridgeway, an ancient path crossing the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire, England:

And there on the slopes of Knapp Hill, suddenly and gladdeningly, were people again: scores of tobogganers in gaily colored coats and scarves. Even from a mile away we could see their reds and blues, bright against the snow, and we could hear the cries of the children and the crunch of the toboggans over old snow. We skied down to the low ground between the hills hushing through the snow, which lay so lightly that it plumed off the tips of our skis. When we reached the gateway, we climbed Walker’s Hill to the long barrow on its summit, whose contours were encased in crisp layers of ice. Twilight: the sky streaked purple and crimson. The tobogganers on the opposite hill yelled and slid and laughed. A boy in a duffel coat ran down the slope with arms outstretched. 

The central action of Roger Deakin’s Waterlog is swimming. Two prime examples:

1. I had crossed to the centre of the wide bay from the Coastguard’s Beach. A little group of surfers clustered waist deep, waiting for the big grey rollers that surged out of the open sea, breaking on a sandbar. I threw myself in with them and swam inland. I felt the incoming tide lock on to my legs and thrust me in towards the distant woods along the shore. Each time a frond of sea-lettuce lightly brushed me, or glued itself around my arms, I thought it was a jellyfish, and flinched. But I soon grew used to it; seaweed was all around me, sliding down each new wave to drape itself around me. I kept on swimming until I practically dissolved, jostled from behind by the swell. Then, as the tide rose higher, the sandy estuary beach came into focus. The woods reached right over the water, and began accelerating past me. I found I was moving at exhilarating speed, in big striding strokes, like a fell runner on the downhill lap. It was like dream swimming, going so effortlessly fast, and feeling locked in by the current, with no obvious means of escape. I was borne along faster and faster as the rising tide approached the funnel of the river’s mouth until it shot me into a muddy, steep-sided mooring channel by some old stone limekilns on the beach. I had to strike out with all my strength to escape the flood and reach the eddy in the shadows. I swam back up to the limekilns and crawled out on the beach like a turtle, but couldn’t resist dropping back into the muscular current for a second ride down the channel.

2. The fine gravel bed was shallow at first, then shelved deeper into the mill-pond. I plunged in and was soon out of my depth, swimming with the eddy up towards the mill-race where it spouted from the bridge. Then I launched myself into it and shot downriver into the weed-carpeted shallows. I swam on, in water that reached halfway up my thighs if I stood up, much as ice reaches halfway up a champagne bottle in a bucket. The river was embroidered with such vivid green braids of water buttercup that I half expected to meet Ophelia lying on the bottom, garlanded unseasonably in its white flowers. I was swimming down an ice-floe, but it was so clear, so sweet, so lush that I soon warmed to the cold and paddled and waded back up through the eddies, gathering watercress as I went. This was of the best crops of wild, untutored cress I had ever seen, let alone picked. It banked up along the dusky river like green cumulus clouds. I circled the pool twice more, shooting the rapids of the mill-race, crazed with the opiate cocktail the brain and body must have sluiced into my frozen veins. 

In The Wet and the Dry, Osborne spends a lot of time sitting alone in bars, drinking. That is a form of action, but there’s not much motion other than curling his hand around a glass and lifting it to his lips. Nevertheless, the narrative moves. That’s because Osborne is a roamer as well as a drinker. Here he's in Beirut:

One night I might favor Grey Goose in Ashrafieh, and another night the rooftop bar of the Albergo Hotel on Abdel Wahab El Inglizi, that French Mandate street of shutters and cloistered gardens and multimillion-dollar condos and long strolls after dinner. The Albergo, in fact, is one of the bars I’ve written down in my Black Book of Bars in case, in an inebriated fit, I forget its address. A tall hotel in Belle Epoque style, it has an ironwork elevator, a beautiful and secretive bar on the ground floor, and another one on the roof laid out under shades and with views over the city’s lights. One can even drink on the floor below, inside the restaurant, where gin and tonics are served at sofas so deep that the drinker disappears into them like stones sinking into quicksand. But there are so many bars in this febrile city; in Gemmayze you can spend entire nights wandering through them, unable to count them or hold them to account. I have not even mentioned the Couqley in its alleyway, where I came with Michael to eat oysters with Entre Deux Mers and steaks saignants with bottles of Hochar red, a restaurant where one can drink all afternoon and into the evening and then into the small hours in the same way that you would smoke a pipe all the way down over the course of a day.

And here he's in Cairo:

I go one night to the Greek Club and find that it has closed. I go to the finely named Bussy Cat or to Estoril – a barman in a neat white turban – and hang about inside them like a fly that cannot quite decide where to alight; then, with a sort of desperation born of indolence, I push on to other even grimmer holes: the Alf Leila wa Leila off El Gomhoreya, the excruciating Rivera, the Victoria Hotel, or the Hawaii on Mohammed Farid. A whole evening can be spent in this misanthropic pursuit, wandering from places like Stella Bar to Carol and on to the Bar Simon or the Gemaica. But as often as not, I will come back to the calm sanity of the Cap d’Or, a bar that is not signposted and that is entered through a side door, where one can sit unmolested for hours without music or harassment, doing what one does in a bar: contemplating death and the inconsequential things that come just before it. 

My next post in this series will be on how these three great books convey sense of place. 

Acts of Seeing: Galp

Photo by John MacDougall

I love gas station shots. Maybe because I used to work in one. There are some famous ones by Garry Winogrand, Stephen Shore, Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper. I took this one a couple of months ago in Belém, Portugal. In the background, on the left, you can see the Monument to the Discoveries (Padrão dos Descobrimentos). That was our destination that day, biking from Lisbon’s Parque das Nações along the waterfront. What a trail! One of the most stimulating I’ve ever traveled. Look at that sky! Pure Windex blue.    

On the Horizon: Homage to Hoagland

Edward Hoagland died February 17, 2026, age 93. He’s one of my heroes. As an act of homage, I want to consider some of his best essays. Over the next seven months, I’ll pick seven of them – one per month – and try to express why I like them. A new series then – “Homage to Hoagland” – starting May 10. 

April 20, 2026 Issue

Vermeer is one of my favorite painters. I love his ability to render light. I love his photo-like accuracy. I think his View of Delft is one of the loveliest pictures ever painted. When I saw that this week’s New Yorker contained a piece on Vermeer by Anthony Lane, I avidly turned to it. It’s a review of a new book – Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found. Lane likes it. He likes Graham-Dixon’s religious readings of Vermeer’s work, e.g., his interpretation of View of Delft:

He regards the radiance in “View of Delft” both as that of a familiar, peaceable town, glittering after the rains and tempests of a brutal epoch, and as a vision of the heavenly city, as vouchsafed in the Book of Revelation. To look at the painting, he writes, is to sense “a rainbow at our backs.”

Sorry, I don’t buy it – at least not the “Book of Revelations” part. But that’s just me, a deep skeptic when it comes to religion. Lane finds Graham-Dixon’s take refreshing. “Amen to that,” he says, “and, indeed, to the arguments that are sustained throughout ‘Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found.’ You may disagree with them, fiercely so, but they could not be more persuasively put, and they rescue Vermeer from the shelf, as it were, on which we have placed him for our convenience.”  

Okay, fair enough. View of Delft is a great work of art. It can bear more than one interpretation. As for me, I prefer the aesthetic approach. A few years ago, Rebecca Mead wrote a piece on Vermeer. She says of View of Delft, “Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream.” That is a beautiful sentence. You don’t need religion to appreciate Vermeer’s art, just an eye for exquisite light and color. 

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft (circa 1660)

On the Horizon: John McPhee's "Tabula Rasa: Volume 6"

Illustration by Seb Agresti, from John McPhee's "Tabula Rasa: Volume 6"

I see that the April 27 New Yorker contains another instalment of John McPhee’s great “Tabula Rasa” series. It’s tempting to read it now on newyorker.com. But I’ll wait for the print edition. I avidly look forward to it. McPhee is one of my favorite writers and one of this blog’s touchstones. Click on the label "John McPhee" and you’ll find 150 posts on his work. 

Acts of Seeing: Mayflowers

Photo by John MacDougall

A little bouquet of mayflowers – the first of the year. Lorna and I picked them yesterday. The scent is faint, but unmistakably mayflower, sweet and lovely, quintessence of spring. I love the splotched, rusty, nibbled leaves. Such a tough, hardy shrub, it thrives in that in-between season of wet ground, cold rain, and pale sunshine.  

April 13, 2026 Issue

Three pieces in this week’s issue caught my attention:

1. Rachel Syme’s “Spring in the Trenches,” a meditation on springtime and trenchcoats: 

We aren’t watching chicks hatch or witnessing the miracle of foaling or plucking clumps of wild ramps from the earth. Instead, we continue traipsing through concrete, burdened with utter confusion about what, exactly, to wear: spring is a time of meteorological fakeouts; one day it will be balmy, the next frigid. Or, mornings are crisp and call for bundling up, but dress in too many layers and you’ll overheat by noon. Rain, April’s rude house guest, visits erratically and unannounced.

2. Zachary Fine’s “Back to the Future,” a review of the New Museum’s exhibition “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” in which the museum’s new atrium steals the show:

The centerpiece of the expansion, which was led by the architects Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with the firm Cooper Robertson, is an atrium that snaps right onto the side of the flagship building. I can’t say it was worth the renovation’s eighty-two-million-dollar price tag, but the space is brilliantly subtle. It works like a snorkel for the museum, giving it a new column of air for the vertical flow of traffic to the galleries, which have basically doubled in size. Climbing the atrium’s stairs, you can look out the glass façade, onto the Bowery, or squint at the mesh panels that flank you, shimmering with green light and exposing the building’s internal supports. Architecture like this, which reveals its structure while producing its effects, can make a museum feel slightly more humane.

3. Justin Chang’s “Art of the Steal,” a review of Steven Soderbergh’s “The Christophers,” a movie about dueling painters. Chang praises it, calling it “a work of criticism that deftly distinguishes different approaches to criticism.” I want to see it. 

Photography Is Not Description

Eugène Atget, Café, Boulevard Montparnasse, 6th and 14th Arrondissement (1925)

John Szarkowski, in his brilliant Atget (2000), wrote, “Atget’s art was based on the identification and clear description of significant fact.” An excellent observation, except the word “description” muddies its meaning. Photography doesn’t describe; it transcribes. It records. 

John Berger, in his Understanding a Photograph (2013), said, “Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation, or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.”

Stanley Cavell, in his Cavell on Film (2005), put it this way:

A representation emphasizes the identity of its subject, hence it may be called a likeness; a photograph emphasizes the existence of its subject, recording it, hence it is that it may be called a transcription. 

Perhaps I’m too hung up on this distinction between description and transcription. But, too me, it seems crucial. It’s the difference between painting and photography. It’s the difference between writing and photography.

I’d amend Szarkowski’s sentence to “Atget’s art was based on the identification and clear transcription of significant fact.”