Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Galchen, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

May 16, 2011 Issue


This week’s New Yorker brims with inspired details, e.g., Laurent Cilluffo’s ingenious “On The Horizon” illustration for The New York Philharmonic concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, David Remnick’s Talk piece “Exit Bin Laden” that reprises the unforgettable “severe clear” opening line of his great “September 11, 2001” (The New Yorker, September 24, 2011), the closing sentence of Nick Paumgarten’s brilliant “The Names” (“A graphic representation of the computational armature, color-coded on a laptop screen, brings to mind Tetris, but the sight of the names themselves, inscribed in bronze, linked together by happenstance and blood, calculus and font, is a little like the faint silhouette of a cosmic plan, or else the total absence of one”), John Seabrook’s Proustian moment in his excellent “Snacks for a Fat Planet,” when the taste of a potato chip triggers a childhood memory (“For some reason, the taste reminded me of the chips my mother sometimes packed in my lunchbox when I was a little kid”), the erotic jolt of Judith Thurman’s “bare-breasted disheveled girls staggered down the runway in gorgeously ravaged lace, sooty tartan, and distressed leather” (“Dressed To Thrill”), the amazing final line of Joan Acocella’s Paula Fox book review “From Bad Beginnings” (“I think she needed to be, and that these repellent creatures – the warty snake, the tapeworm coiling to the very rim of the toilet bowl – may be images of how, after becoming the little gray ghost that she learned to be as a child, she finally extruded that, with horror, and moved forward, empty at first, into art”). The whole magazine is a feast for the eye and the mind. I devoured it. And when I finished, I thought, How incredibly lucky we are to have a magazine that contains such felicities! New Yorker without end, amen!

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