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.

Friday, October 25, 2019

October 21, 2019 Issue


My favorite sentences in this week’s issue:

1. And just because the cauliflower looks fantastic on Instagram—its cruciferous treetop fried until it appears to have been spray-painted gold, placed upon a pool of tahini dyed electric fuchsia with beet juice, and finished with forest-green chermoula and jewels of dried apricot—doesn’t mean it’s not absolutely delicious. - Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Miss Ada / Golda”

2. Masterpieces dulled by overfamiliarity in an account that had become as rote as a college textbook spring to second lives by being repositioned. - Peter Schjeldahl, “Rehab”
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