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.”