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.

Friday, July 5, 2019

July 1, 2019 Issue


Pick of the Issue this week is Paige Williams’s delightful “Boxes,” a Talk story about photographer Susan Schiffman, who takes pictures of apartments “that a regular person can afford.” Williams writes, “In apartment after apartment, she captured the small ways in which tenants arranged their material lives—the positioning of houseplants, the clever storage of clothing.” My favorite sentence in “Boxes” is this beauty: “Schiffman plucked a Nikon from her backpack and started shooting—moody light at the bedroom windows, a bouquet of bodega roses.”

Postscript: Here’s another inspired line from this week’s issue:

The “Display only” sign, scrawled in what looks like purple lipstick, doesn’t apply to the chefs, who carve off octopus tentacles and grab resting racks of ribs within sneezing distance to serve throughout the night. [Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: HaSalon”]

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