The New Yorker & Me: Dan Kois' "How I Learned to Cycle Like a Dutchman"

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.

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Dan Kois' "How I Learned to Cycle Like a Dutchman"

Photo by Martin Parr (from Dan Kois' "How I Learned to Cycle Like a Dutchman"

On September 13, 2019, two days before Lorna and I departed for a three-week cycling holiday in the Netherlands, Dan Kois’ “How I Learned to Cycle Like a Dutchman” appeared on newyorker.com. Perfect timing! Needless to say, I read it avidly. It’s an account of Kois and his family’s three-month stay in Delft in 2017. He writes,

While our family was in Holland, Alia and I decided, we would take a break from driving cars. Cycling was the norm in the Netherlands, and fulfilled the dream of every American rider who wished she could rule the road. It was a country with more bikes than people, and we were eager to slip into the two-wheeled flow.

Slipping into the dense “two-wheeled flow” of Dutch cycle traffic was Lorna’s and my goal, too. But we were apprehensive about the risk of accident. We weren’t used to crowded bike lanes. As it turned out, our concerns were groundless. Holland is immensely bike-friendly. And the Dutch are natural cyclists. As long as you keep alert to what’s happening around you, obey traffic lights, signal turns, and don’t make sudden stops in the lanes, you’ll be fine. Kois quotes an official in the Dutch cyclist’s union: “Cyclists move like a swarm of sparrows,” he said. “There are thousands of them moving in chaos, but there are no collisions. They turn a little bit; they change their speed. You must do the same.”