The New Yorker & Me: October 28, 2019 Issue

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.

Saturday, November 2, 2019

October 28, 2019 Issue

I enjoyed Rachel Felder’s Talk story “Avocado Al Dente,” in this week’s issue. It’s about an avocado vendor named Miguel Gonzalez who hand-delivers perfectly ripe avocados to restaurants and private citizens. I especially like the passages that show him making his deliveries. For example:

At 7:30 A.M., he made his first drop-off, at a nearby deli, then headed into Manhattan. He stopped at a white brick building in midtown and handed a brown bag, labelled in Sharpie, to a doorman. He headed to the Upper West Side for another doorman handoff, then took the West Side Highway down to the restaurant Perry St. Inside the gleaming kitchen—in lunch-prep mode, the smell of roasting garlic in the air—Gonzalez put down a heavy case and chatted with Cédric Vongerichten, the chef, who told him about a new mushroom dish and the nuanced avocado texture that it demanded.

Felder’s piece reminded me of another great Talk story – Nick Paumgarten’s “Home at Carnegie Hall” (August 13, 2007), containing this wonderful avocado detail:

Astor led the way up some stairs to the fourteenth floor, then across the building and down some more stairs to the eleventh, to a studio occupied by the writer and radio host Jonathan Schwartz, who was eating an avocado, under a framed print that read “AVOCADO.”