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 11, 2019

September 23, 2019 Issue


It’s interesting to compare Janet Malcolm’s “The Unholy Practice,” in this week’s issue, with Melissa Anderson’s “For Interpretation,” in the current Bookforum. Both are reviews of Benjamin Moser’s recently published Sontag: Her Life and Work. Malcolm says Moser’s feelings for Sontag are mixed – “he always seems a little awed as well as irked by her.” She writes,

Midway through the biography, he drops the mask of neutral observer and reveals himself to be—you could almost say comes out as—an intellectual adversary of his subject.

Compare this with Anderson’s view: 

With Sontag, Moser intelligently brings together both public and private, onstage and off-. His scrutiny of her essays, fiction, films, and political activism is clear-eyed, his analysis of her tumultuous affective life sympathetic (if at times slightly less astute). 

Which is it – sympathetic or adversarial? I guess I’ll have to read Moser’s book to find out.

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