The New Yorker & Me: January 7, 2019 Issue

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 Goldfield, 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.

Sunday, January 6, 2019

January 7, 2019 Issue

Here we go – the first New Yorker of 2019. And what better way to start than with a Talk story by the premier Talk writer of all time – Mark Singer. His piece, “Man vs. Mouse,” is about a “situational genius” named Craig Avedisian and his determination to catch an elusive apartment mouse (“A single intruder, all avenues of egress sealed, was now trapped in the apartment, an accidental pet. Avedisian named him Horace, an homage to the building’s architect, Horace Ginsbern”). Avedisian’s pursuit of Horace includes installation of an infrared night-vision security camera that could be monitored from a smartphone, the arranging of “a Maginot Line of glue traps,” and setting out “a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps.” Singer writes,

This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out. “We were pissed,” Avedisian said recently. “We’d left a feast for him. He somehow avoided the glue. He’s walking around like he owns the place.”

That “This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out” made me smile. Reading “Man vs. Mouse,” I found myself rooting for Horace. Brainy Avedisian, with all his technical gadgetry, finally catches him. But an editor’s note informs us that “Horace has gone upstate to live on a farm with a nice family.” I was pleased to read that. It humanizes Mr. Avedisian.