March 9, 2026, Issue

I love photography writing. There’s an interesting piece by Hilton Als in this week’s New Yorker. It’s a review of “Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation” at the International Center of Photography. Als likes the show. He says he’s “grateful for any opportunity to investigate this essentially mysterious work, which pushes you away even as it pulls you in.”

I’m not sure what Als means when he says Atget’s photos “push you away.” Maybe he’s referring to their silence. He writes,

When I was younger and didn’t “get” Atget, I thought of his images as silent, with no action, no story. But now I can see that they are full of story—the story of time and its passage. My visits to the I.C.P. convinced me that Atget knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to make an epic record of time and place.

I like that passage, although I’d alter it slightly. Instead of “full of story,” I’d say “full of time and place.” Atget’s photos are an epic record of time and place. 

Postscript: Another excellent New Yorker piece on Atget’s photography is Anthony Lane’s “A Balzac of the Camera” (April 25, 1994). Lane says, “Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice.” Right there, I think, is the essence of Atget’s brilliant art. 

Eugène Atget, Bourg-la-Reine, ferme Camille Desmoulins (1901)

March 2, 2026, Issue

Ben McGrath’s wonderful “Talk” story “Ice Capades,” in this week’s issue, tells about his recent visit to Red Bank, New Jersey, to see a legendary iceboat race called the Van Nostrand Challenge. McGrath talks with some of the iceboaters and observes the scene on the frozen Navesink River:

The fourth running of the Van Nostrand, when it finally transpired, after two days of postponement, featured three boats from the Shrewsbury club and three from New York. All, per the rules, were so-called “A” boats: restored antiques, wooden, with gaffed rigs. From a squinting distance, they resembled Hudson River sloops. Up close, they were more like giant crosses atop machetes. The wind was a fluky northwesterly, gusty at the starting gun, such that a couple of blades levitated briefly, as if launching into flight. Then came the lulls, and a reminder that sailing, even on sherbert, can be a “hurry up and wait” kind of sport. Dan Lawrence’s son, Luke, piloting Ariel, which once belonged to the Roosevelts’ neighbor Archie Rogers, took the first heat, and then the second, obviating the need for a third. No team scores needed this time. The New Yorkers had won, and the cup was going home to Newburgh after a hundred and thirty-five years.

Iceboating is a great subject. McGrath captures it marvelously in just 794 well-chosen words. 

Postscript: Edward Hoagland 1932-2026

Edward Hoagland (Photo by Michael Cummo)

I see in the Times that Edward Hoagland has died, age 93. He’s one of my literary heroes. His Notes from the Century Before (1969) is one of my favorite books. His “Of Cows and Cambodia” (included in his wonderful 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River) is one of my favorite essays. John Updike called him “the best essayist of my generation.” I think this is true. 

Hoagland’s writing style was unmistakably his own – an associational way of linking thought and observation in fresh, surprising, delightful combinations. Consider this beauty – the opening paragraph of “Of Cows and Cambodia”:

During the invasion of Cambodia, an event which may rate little space when recent American initiatives are summarized but which for many of us seemed the last straw at the time, I made an escape to the woods. The old saw we’ve tried to live by for an egalitarian half-century that “nothing human is alien” has become so pervasive a truth that I was worn to a frazzle. I was the massacre victim, the massacring soldier, and all the gaudy queens and freaked-out hipsters on the street.

Hoagland had total faith in the validity of his own experience, his own way of seeing. He was subjective to the bone. His masterpiece, Notes from the Century Before, chronicles his 1966 trip up British Columbia’s Stikine River, “left as it was in the nineteenth century by a fluke of geography.” The geography is breathtaking – eighty thousand square miles ("like two Ohios") of wild rivers, snow-topped mountains, and thick forests, containing tiny villages that are “unimaginably isolated.” Hoagland traveled by boat, plane, and truck. He did a lot of walking, roaming the settlements, talking to old-timers, seeing what there was to see, noting it all down – detail after amazing detail. Here, for example, is his description of the village of Eddontenajon:

The mountains stood close and steep, with silver runnels and pockets of snow and passes going off in every direction, as if the country were still full of sourdoughs and mystery trips. Plank bridges have been laid across a creek that bisects the village beside the church, which is another log cabin. On the low hill backing the whole, a cemetery is already getting its start, picket fences around the few graves. I walked up and down, pretending to have business to do at the opposite end from wherever I was, practically sifting the place through my hands like a miser. The cabin foundations sit edgily on the ground, as though on an unbroken horse. Initials are cut on some of the doors to tell who lives where, and fuzzy fat puppies play in front, next to the birch dog sleds which are seven or eight feet long and the width of a man’s shoulders, weathered to a chinchilla gray. The grown dogs sleep in the fog of hunger. Swaying and weak, they get up and come to the end of their chains, like atrocity victims, hardly able to see. Snowshoes hang in the trees, along with clusters of traps. 

And here’s his portrait of Willie Campbell, one of the oldest residents of Telegraph Creek:

At last Willie turned up, a stooped twisted man on a cane with a young tenor voice and another of those immense Tahltan faces, except that his was pulled out as long as a pickaxe and then bent at the chin. A chin like a goiter, a distorted cone of a forehead. He looked like a movie monster; he was stupendous. He was wearing hide mittens and shoes, and he pointed across the Stkine to where he had seen a grizzly the day before.

And here’s his depiction of a young man in Eddontenajon roasting a moose head over a fire:

On the scaffold overhead a batch of pink trout was drying. Pieces of meat hung down, a hole punched in each and a rope strung through. Some rib cuts were drying too, but mainly the fire was roasting the head of a moose, kept in its skin so the meat wouldn’t burn. It rotated steadily at the end of a wire which he wound by twisting from time to time. The eyes were closed, the hair was blackened and sometimes afire, the antlers were gone, the ears had been cut off to feed the dogs, yet it was as recognizable as a moose as in life – as at peace as a comic strip, humorous moose. He said the head would feed his family for a meal or two and that the body would keep them provisioned for the whole summer while he was away on a job.

Hoagland was incapable of writing vaguely. He dealt in particulars. He was a brilliant crafter of metaphor and simile. In Notes from the Century Before, he says of a band of wild horses, “They have the corrupt, gangster faces of mercenaries.” He describes a mountain range as “a thicket of peaks, like a class holding up their hands.” A wolf’s mouth is “like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors.” A man stands in his garden, “bent in the wind like an oyster shell as he looked at his beans.” A woman has “eyelids like poplar leaves.” Old-timers “pull the human language like a sticky taffy out of their mouths.” Of thousands of salmon trapped in a river canyon, he says, “I thought of shark fins, except that there was a capitulation to it, a stockade stillness, as if they were prisoners of war waiting in huddled silence under the river’s bombarding roar.” A fence “squanders the cleared trees in a zigzag course end to end and atop one another like clasped fingers.” The rib cage of a butchered cow “looked like a red accordion.” The smell inside a tent “curled, as violent as a fire, lifting my hair, quite panicking me, and seemed to be not so much that they didn’t bathe as it was the smell of digestion failing, of organs askew and going wrong.” How about this one, a description of the interior of a smokehouse: “The smoke comes from small piles of fireweed burning under two washtubs with holes punched in them, but the red fish make the whole barn seem on fire – salmon from floor to ceiling, as thick as red leaves.” And this: “His lips are so swollen from the sun that he can’t adjust them into an expression. They’re baked into testimonial form, or a sort of art form, like the curve of a fishbone on a beach.” One more: “The dog shambles off like a huge bottled genie with a bland, soapstone face.”

I could go on and on quoting Hoagland. He was the consummate writer. He’s gone now, but his splendid work lives on. I cherish it immensely. 

February 16 & 23, 2026 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Helen Rosner, in “Tables for Two,” manages (with help from “a very fancy friend”) to snag a reservation at the “mega-swank” steak house The Eighty-Six in the West Village. She has a blast. First, she has an apple-wood-smoked Martini, “theatrically poured tableside atop a stalagmite of ice grown, science-fair-style, from hyper-chilled water.” She says it was “excellent, and potent as hell.” I mentally sipped it right along with her. Then she has a steak dinner, which she delectably describes as follows:

The exterior, salted and peppered, crackled from a hard sear; the inside was tender pink from edge to edge. The sauces I’d ordered alongside were hardly necessary: an eggy, vinegar-tart béarnaise, and a wiggly, wobbly gelée-adjacent steak sauce made with veal demi-glace. I dipped my fries into them, at least, and enjoyed a whole phalanx of steak-house sides: garlicky spinach; butter-laden mashed potatoes; a strikingly photogenic creamed-corn potpie with a swirly croissant top; snappy green and yellow long beans, dressed in a sharp lemon vinaigrette that sliced through the density of the rest of the food.

That “I dipped my fries into them” made me smile (and salivate). It’s exactly what I’d do.

2. Rebecca Mead’s “The Landscape Artist,” a profile of British artist Andy Goldsworthy, is excellent. See my post yesterday.

3. One of the best New Yorker book reviews I’ve read recently is Hannah Goldfield’s “Daily Bread.” It’s a survey of food diaries – a genre or subgenre I’ve not paid any attention to. But I will now, as a result of reading Goldfield’s illuminating piece. She mentions three books I think I’ll check out: Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries; Ruth Reichl’s My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life; and Tamar Adler’s Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day. 

4. I enjoyed Zachary Fine’s “Monster Mash” – a review of Pierre Huyghe’s “Liminals,” showing in Berlin, at Halle am Berghain. Fine calls “Liminals” “an absolutely terrifying work of art.” But he doesn’t stop there. He asks why: “Why is this so terrifying?” That question is a sign of a true critic. He’s not content with just stating his response. He digs into the underlying reasons for it. Fine’s answer made me smile. “Well, first of all,” he says, “there’s the missing face.” I also like Fine’s mindfulness of beauty. In the concluding lines of his piece, he writes, “But the film persuades with its frightening beauty: the shimmering flesh-colored rocks, the throbbing soundtrack, the smoothness of the creature’s skin. It’s all too human, but not.” 

Rebecca Mead's "The Landscape Artist"

Photo by Nicholas J.R. White, from Rebecca Mead's "The Landscape Artist"

Rebecca Mead’s “The Landscape Artist,” in the February 16 & 23 New Yorker, profiles British landscape sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. Mead visits him at his home in Penpont, Scotland. She hikes with him and a party of visitors to the site of his 1989 stone wall called “Give and Take Wall.” She goes on an outing with him to view the site where he intends to install a project called “Gravestones.” And she tours some graveyards with him. 

It’s an absorbing, beautifully written piece. But as I read it, I found myself resisting its charms. One thing that put me off was Mead’s mention that Goldsworthy used ten thousand cattails to create one of the works in his “Fifty Years” exhibition at Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy. Maybe I’m overreacting, but the removal of ten thousand cattails from their fragile natural habitat (marshes, bogs, wetlands) strikes me as appallingly destructive. What’s the point of it? This question touches on the other aspect of Mead’s piece that bugs me – the lack of any clear rationale for what Goldsworthy is doing. Mead mentions “the sheer beauty of some of Goldsworthy’s work.” Okay, but what if your idea of beauty is a landscape unblemished by any manmade objects? What if you prefer, as I do, natural beauty?

Mead’s piece is illustrated by a wonderful photo of Goldsworthy sitting on a green-gold grassy hillside (see above). The photo is by Nicholas J.R. White. Under the photo, there’s a caption that says, “Goldsworthy, near hilltop where his work ‘Gravestones’ will be installed.” I look at the photo and think what a pity, because here’s what Goldsworthy has in mind for that hill: “four stone walls, each about four feet tall and eighty feet wide, surrounding a space filled with displaced stones from cemeteries throughout the county of Dumfries and Galloway.” This is Goldsworthy’s idea of beauty. Is it valid? I’m not sure. 

I thought about Goldsworthy’s stone walls as Lorna and I cycled the back roads of Tavira, Portugal. The roads are lined with ancient stone walls. Many of them are cased in white plaster. Here and there, the plaster has cracked open. You can see the old ochre stones inside. These walls are phenomenal to look at – their form, composition, color, and texture. My eyes devour them. I constantly stopped to take pictures of them. Each one is different. To me, they are found works of art. The impulse to photograph them and describe them in words is, to me, understandable. If I were a painter, I’d want to paint them. And if I were a sculptor like Goldsworthy, I’d want to try my hand at building my own stone walls. 

There was a day when these Portuguese stone walls were new. In the centuries since they were first built, they’ve crumbled and eroded. Time and weather have worn them down. They’ve melded with their natural surroundings. The landscape has absorbed them. I recall the phrase “part of nature, part of us” from my readings of Helen Vendler’s book of the same name. It refers, if I remember correctly, to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It’s an excellent description of those old Portuguese walls. It applies to Goldsworthy’s art, too. Mead, in her piece, mentions how Goldsworthy’s “Give and Take Wall” had a “dense covering of moss.” Nature is taking it back. Time and weather are doing their work. Transience is all.  

Taking a Break

Portugal, 2024 (Photo by Lorna MacDougall)

Tomorrow Lorna and I head back to our old haunt Tavira, on the south coast of Portugal, to do some cycling. We’ll be gone three weeks. I’ll take the February 16 & 23 New Yorker with me, and post my review when I return. It appears to be a particularly rich issue. I'm especially interested in the piece by Rebecca Mead on the landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about March 14. 

Ian Frazier's New Book "The Snakes That Ate Florida"

This is just a quick note to report the publication of a new book by Ian Frazier – The Snakes That Ate Florida. It’s a collection of his reporting, essays, and criticism. I avidly look forward to reading it. The New Yorker’s “The Best Books of 2026 So Far” provides this excellent capsule review of it:

In this collection of essays, reported pieces, and criticism dating back to the nineteen-seventies, Frazier’s sharp eye for finding the complex in the quotidian is on full display. From tales about monster trucks and the Maraschino-cherry empire to musings about lantern flies and Lolita, the collection—much of which was published in this magazine—spotlights the vibrancy of topics often under-noticed. In the playful and diligent hands of the seasoned staff writer, these ordinary things feel extraordinary.

Inspired Sentence 8

There is an odd rakishness, a mettlesome spirit, running through the cubism of the rocks of this natural esplanade, which must be the combined effect of its undulant surface, the general twist the nearby fault has given to the vicinity, and the carefree poise of a square-faced block – I am sure it must measure forty feet each way – that has detached itself from the cliff against which it leans one elbow, and stands on two fat little legs looking as if it were about to skip into the sea with the ponderous charm of one of Picasso’s surreal beach girls.

That’s from Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1985) – one of the great landscape books. Robinson is describing a section of the north-western coast of Aran. I love that “the cubism of the rocks” and the way the metaphor is picked up again at the end in the description of the square-faced block that “leans one elbow” against the cliff. When was the last time you saw a giant chunk of coastal stone compared to “one of Picasso’s surreal beach girls”? Probably never. It’s a surprising, imaginative, original image – one of dozens in this extraordinary book.  

4 Ways of Looking at Andrew Wyeth's "Wind from the Sea"

Andrew Wyeth, Wind from the Sea (1947)

Nancy K. Anderson, in her absorbing essay “Wind from the Sea: Painting Truth beneath the Facts” (in Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In by Nancy K. Anderson and Charles Brock, 2014), writes,

Wind from the Sea is first, a superbly constructed image rendered with great technical skill. Far from a replication of a bedroom window, the painting is a disciplined distillation of object and experience with an expansive subtext of personal symbolism. For Wyeth, the painting became a reflection of Maine in all its weathered toughness, and also a metaphorical portrait of Christina – stoic, strong, yet feminine. Wind from the Sea, like many of Wyeth’s paintings, is also an image haunted by death. Interior elements record the passage of time and the onset of decay. Outside the window, parallel tracks lead to an undefined shore, the river flows to the sea, and at the forested horizon is a cemetery.

This passage suggests at least four ways of looking at Wyeth’s great picture:

1. As “a superbly constructed image rendered with great technical skill”;

2. As “a reflection of Maine in all its weathered toughness”;

3. As “a metaphorical portrait of Christina”;

4. As “an image haunted by death.”

These four perspectives intrigue me. I want to consider each them in more detail. 

1. A Superbly Constructed Image

I like this perspective. It admires Wind from the Sea for the artful way it’s painted. You don’t have to know the picture’s backstory to appreciate the technical virtuosity of its brushwork – the way Wyeth conveys the delicate lace curtains billowing in the wind, the way he renders their bird-and-flower pattern, the way he captures their disintegrating texture. It’s all right there on the surface. All you have to do is look. It’s a mimetic triumph. 

2.  A Reflection of Maine

Well, maybe. What is it about the picture that tells you it’s Maine and not, say, Connecticut, or New Hampshire, or New Brunswick? I don’t see any clues that connect this painting specifically to Maine. In order to make that connection, you have to know something about its background. At a minimum, you have to know that Wyeth painted it in Maine and that it depicts a Maine landscape as seen by Wyeth out the third-floor bedroom window of an old Maine farmhouse. 

3. A Metaphorical Portrait of Christina

Now we’re really delving into this painting’s backstory. Anderson, in her essay, tells us that Christina is Christina Olson. She and her brother Alvaro lived in a three-story, eighteenth-century, saltwater farmhouse on Hathorn Point, Cushing, Maine. The house was built by their maternal ancestors, the Hathorns. Christina, crippled by a degenerative muscle condition, couldn’t walk, climb stairs, or groom herself. Alvaro looked after her. The house was in poor condition. Rags were stuffed in broken windows. The clapboard exterior, originally painted white, had been stripped bare by sun and wind. Inside, the wallpaper was curling away from the walls. The curtains hung in tatters. Christina and Alvaro lived mostly on the ground floor. Rooms on the upper floors were rarely used. 

Wyeth first met Christina in the summer of 1939. Betsy James, soon to become Wyeth’s wife, introduced him to her at the Olson house. While he was there, Wyeth made a watercolor of the place. Following that first visit, Wyeth returned to the house every summer. As his friendship with the Olsons deepened, he was given free run of the place. Over time he studied it from every angle, inside and out. 

On a hot August day, 1947, Wyeth was at the Olson house, in an abandoned third-floor bedroom, intending to make a watercolor study of a dormer window. Anderson, in her essay, tells what happened next:

When noonday sun sent the temperature soaring, he crossed to the other side of the room and opened a window with a view to the sea. A soft ocean breeze lifted curtains that had lain undisturbed for decades. Birds delicately crocheted on the decaying lace appeared to fly. Wyeth made a quick sketch and later told a friend that the chance event had made his “hair stand on end.” By early fall, he had translated that momentary experience into one of his most remarkable paintings, Wind from the Sea.

Once you’ve read that, you see the painting in a completely different way. You see it as a live image, a record of a real event. But do you see it as a metaphorical portrait of Christina? That seems more of a stretch. Anderson writes,

Knowing Wyeth’s predilection for investing images with symbolic references, it is easy to see how the solid straight window frame that anchors Wind from the Sea came to serve him as a metaphor for Christina’s strength of character and how the delicate birds on the disintegrating lace reflected her feminine grace.

Okay, fair enough. But not everyone who views Wind from the Sea will know about its connection with Christina. That connection is not apparent on the face of the painting.

4. An Image Haunted by Death

Anderson writes,

Wind from the Sea, like many of Wyeth’s paintings, is also an image haunted by death. Interior elements record the passage of time and the onset of decay. Outside the window, parallel tracks lead to an undefined shore, the river flows to the sea, and at the forested horizon is a cemetery.

This is interesting. Anderson tells me something I would not have realized on my own – that those tiny specks of white on the far shore are grave markers. Is the presence of those grave markers sufficient evidence to support Anderson’s “haunted by death” reading? Maybe, especially if you read it in conjunction with her observation that the “interior elements record the passage of time and the onset of decay.” 

Unquestionably, Wyeth is interested in subjects that show “the passage of time and the onset of decay.” I share this interest. It’s one of the reasons I love his work. His paintings exude a delicious melancholy. But to say Wind from the Sea is death-haunted seems to me to conflict with the way the breeze has stirred those old curtains to life. Isn’t that the real point of the picture? “A soft ocean breeze lifted curtains that had lain undisturbed for decades. Birds delicately crocheted on the decaying lace appeared to fly.” Wind from the Sea has the breath of life. 

Hilton Als' "William Eggleston's Lonely South"

William Eggleston, Untitled (1972)

I like the way Hilton Als interprets the above photo by William Eggleston. In his absorbing “Photo Booth: William Eggleston’s Lonely South” (The New Yorker, February 9, 2026), he writes,

The real stunner when it comes to showing us community is Eggleston’s 1972 image of a young Black woman, sitting in a church pew with other women of color, turning to look over her shoulder at the camera. The woman’s hair is straightened—“correct”—and she is thin; she wears a sleeveless, wine-colored dress, and the long fingers of her left hand rest on her left shoulder, partly hiding her mouth. It’s a powerful evocation of the psychology of beauty in the American South. Is she covering her mouth because she’s been made to see her lips as too big? Does she straighten her hair because the “natural” look has caught on only in big cities, where women have more freedom to express themselves, or is she simply trying to align herself with the older women she is sitting with, to be one with them? By looking at the white man behind the camera, is she doing something forbidden? We’ll never know. And it’s those many mysteries, rooted in the real and the possible, that continue to make photography in general, and Eggleston’s in particular, so fascinating.

Rather than read speculative narrative into Eggleston’s image, Als asks questions. He proceeds interrogatively. To me, this is the preferable way to go when dealing with an art as enigmatic as photography.  

February 9, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Michael Schulman’s “Deepfaking Orson Welles.” It’s about a fascinating attempt by a startup studio to use artificial intelligence to restore Welles’s mangled 1942 masterpiece “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Schulman talks with the key people involved in the project – Edward Saatchi and Brian Rose. He chronicles the making of “The Magnificent Ambersons.” He visits the Los Angeles set where the new A.I. scenes are being shot. And he explains the challenge of the project: 

Simply prompting the computer to suck up the existing movie and spit out new scenes would create a cold, uncanny-valley effect. A.I. tends to flatten lighting, and that would clash with Welles’s rich chiaroscuro. Then, there was what Saatchi called the “happiness” problem: left to its own guided intuition, the A.I. technology often makes characters look cheerier, especially women. Saatchi played an A.I. clip of sullen Aunt Fanny, in the grim final scene, inappropriately smirking in her rocking chair. “In terms of subtle despair, it has absolutely no idea what to do,” he said. “That’s part of why having the actor is really important.”

Schulman even participates in the process. He writes,

Saatchi gave me a preview of how it would all work. Between takes, the crew subbed me in for Pressley, putting me in a period coat and a clip-on tie, and had me blunder through one of Eugene’s lines. Two hours later, the A.I. team sent back a rough clip of Cotten doing the line—turning his head as I’d turned mine, speaking in his voice but with my delivery, even breaking into a laugh, as I had done after tripping over the words. “Usually, we’d spend a lot more time on it, but this is just to give you a feel,” Saatchi said. Still, it was pretty impressive—and disorienting.

“Deepfaking Orson Welles” is a glimpse of the future – the use of A.I. to riff on old movies. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Three inspired lines in this week’s New Yorker:

1. Scott Shepherd plays multiple roles, but is particularly droll as Blazes Boylan, jitterbugging hornily through Dublin. – Emily Nussbaum, “Goings On: Off Broadway”

2. Several pages of beverage options include ninety varieties of whiskey, plus wine, beer, cider, and custom cocktails like the mezcal-forward P.Y.T., which, well—imagine a drinkable cigarette. – Dan Stahl, “Bar Tab: Haswell Green’s”

3. I slept with a Yale guy one block over who, with his five Yale roommates, sold semen to a sperm bank, and they pooled the profits to buy an espresso maker for six hundred dollars. – Jill Lepore, “The Chapman House”

Acts of Seeing: Sanirajak

Photo by John MacDougall

May 9, 2008, I was in the Inuit hamlet of Sanirajak, on the shore of Foxe Basin in Nunavut. I took a lot of pictures. I like this one for its content. There’s a lot going on here: three kids, three snowmobiles, a husky pup tied to a hockey stick stuck in the snow, the long runners of a wooden sled, a polar bear skin stretched on a wooden frame, leaning against the house. I love the red jacket of the kid running in the foreground, and the metallic red, green, and blue of the snow machines, and the yellow boots of the little kid looking down at the pup. But what makes the picture, for me, at least, is that magnificent polar bear skin drying in the arctic air, a reminder that this is wild country where the polar bear still roams.