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, August 9, 2019

August 5 & 12, 2019 Issue


Is there anything to savor in this week’s issue? Yes – the new Thai restaurant Wayla that Shauna Lyon beautifully describes in “Tables for Two”:

In the cramped grid of Manhattan, any bit of outdoor space, especially in the warmer months, holds a special place in the hearts of air-starved city dwellers. For these deprived people, any sort of “garden” will do, even if it’s lined in cement, painted black, and deep in a valley of tenement buildings. Throw in some twinkle lights and it’s a vacation. Wayla, a new Thai restaurant tucked into a basement on the Lower East Side, has one of the neighborhood’s lovelier gardens, with large palm plants and candles, and, even better, it’s practically secret—hidden past the bar, through a narrow room of tables, all the way in the back.

That “Throw in some twinkle lights and it’s a vacation” made me smile. 

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