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, January 10, 2020

John McPhee's "Tabula Rasa"


Seb Agresti's illustration for John McPhee's "Tabula Rasa"























John McPhee has a new piece out called “Tabula Rasa.” It’s posted on newyorker.com and appears in the January 13, 2020, New Yorker. McPhee, age 88, is one of the magazine’s greats, ranking with Joseph Mitchell, A. J. Liebling, and Pauline Kael. His superb “The Encircled River,” an account of a canoe trip he and four others took down a wild Alaskan river, is my all-time favorite New Yorker piece. 

At first glance, “Tabula Rasa” appears to be another “block” assemblage, similar to McPhee’s “An Album Quilt” (included in his wonderful 2018 collection The Patch). So far, I’ve only skimmed it. I’ll wait for the print version to arrive, and then devour it. The publication of a new piece by McPhee is, for me, a major event. I wonder what kind of "quilt" he's stitched this time. 
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