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.” 

Stacey Kent's Superb "You're Looking at Me"

Recently, cycling the back roads of Tavira, Portugal, I found myself humming a fragment of melody that I couldn’t quite identify. Then it came to me – Diana Krall’s rendition of “You’re Looking at Me.” There was a time back in the nineties when I collected Krall albums. I adored her singing. “You’re Looking at Me” is on her 1996 album All for You: A Dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio. 

When I returned home, I delved into my jazz collection. I listened to Krall’s “You’re Looking at Me.” It’s very good. But I found an even better version on Stacey Kent’s 2001 Dreamsville. Kent sings it slightly faster. Her exquisite crystalline voice intoxicates.   

A quick Google search discloses that “You’re Looking at Me” was composed by jazz pianist Bobby Troup in 1953. It’s been recorded by Nat “King” Cole, Carmen McRae, Cleo Laine, and John Pizzarelli, among others. It’s a superb melodic song – a wry, self-mocking meditation on romantic disillusion. I love its opening line: “Who had the boys turning hand springs?” And the clear, precise way Kent enunciates “ridiculous” in the line “Believed every word of this ridiculous tale” is pure poetry. I can’t get this song out of my head. It’s indelible. 

Inspired Sentence 10

The childhood of the boys he drew, like the snowman, had now dissolved into adulthood: most of all, Bewick was suggesting that art, even a simple woodcut, was the only true magic that could hold lives from melting into time.

This sentence, from Jenny Uglow’s Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (2006), beautifully expresses my own view of art’s purpose – “the only true magic that can hold lives from melting into time.” It’s a wonderful variation on James Wood’s idea that art is rescue: “Literature, like art, pushes against time’s fancy ... offers to rescue the life of things from the dead” (Serious Noticing, 2019). Both lines are inspired – two of my touchstones. 

April 6, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Henry Alford’s “Talk” story “Special Deliveries.” It’s about a New York City distribution program called Blue Highways aimed at decreasing truck emissions and road congestion. Instead of trucks, the program uses boats and cargo bikes to deliver up to eight hundred parcels a day. In his piece, Alford follows a parcel – “a featherweight, toaster-size box from Sephora, addressed to 235 West Forty-eighth Street” – and charts its progress:

At 2 a.m., the package was on a truck from Sephora’s distribution center in Aberdeen, Maryland. At about 3 a.m., it arrived on the Red Hook waterfront at a vast terminal owned by a company called Dutch X, a next-day-delivery service committed to lowering carbon-dioxide emissions. By 10 a.m., the package, along with some two hundred others, had been placed in one of nine Kevlar totes and nestled onto four steel-cage dollies. A Dutch X employee wheeled these onto a small blue-and-white passenger ferry at the Red Hook Ferry Terminal. 

The parcel goes on a twenty-three-minute ride to Pier 79, on Manhattan’s West Side. Alford continues:

At 10:44 a.m., after docking near West Thirty-ninth Street, a thousand and fifty-six feet above trucks stuck in traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, the package was assigned to a Dutch X biker named C Jay Jaime, a Brooklyn-born, thirty-four-year-old father of three, who would be riding around town on a special pedal-assist e-bike that came equipped with a windshield, a roof, and an attached trailer. Jaime, who had on a yellow reflective vest and a helmet, held up his phone near his supervisor’s and, courtesy of the FarEye app, instantly received the coördinates for the packages—a total of forty-five—he’d be delivering. “This should take about six hours,” he said. The Sephora box would be his nineteenth of the day. He removed the parcel from its Kevlar tote and placed it on a shelf in the trailer. The D.O.T. estimates that two cargo bikes can do the work of a van or a box truck. Moreover, the trim little contraption cut a wholesome figure reminiscent of a Richard Scarry book—as if a courtesy tram birthed a tiny Zamboni.

Alford follows Jaime on his route: 

At 1:24 p.m., Jaime parked his bike on Eighth Avenue at Forty-ninth Street. Clutching package No. 19, destined for a block away, he said, “Sometimes it takes longer to drive around the corner than to walk there.”

The piece concludes:

On arriving at 235 West Forty-eighth Street, a tall building called the Ritz Plaza, Jaime’s eyes widened; the reception desk was already covered with boxes from Amazon, stacked three high.

“This is every day, every day,” a middle-aged man behind the desk said, in a tone midway between exasperation and resignation. Jaime cleared a space and deposited No. 19. The eagle—a lipstick? a loofah?—had landed.

“Special Deliveries” shows a great new transportation program in action. I enjoyed it immensely.