August 17, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. My eyes devour the thick luscious texture of Wayne Thiebaud’s “Two Scoops” – certainly my choice for best cover of the year (so far).

2. My favorite part of Peter Hessler’s absorbing “How China Controlled the Virus” is the first section in which he describes trailing a robot on his bicycle. Here’s a sample:

Now I waited with the robot, looking around at the silent dormitories. Finally, three students approached from different directions, masked and holding cell phones. Each of them entered a code on a touch screen at the back of the robot, and a compartment popped open, revealing a package inside.

3. Pick of the Issue is Jon Lee Anderson’s “Wanderlust,” an account of his 1978 trip to Nunivak, Alaska, to collect musk-ox wool (qiviut). Here’s his description of his arrival on the island:

The only other passengers were residents returning from a wedding on the mainland. When we landed, they offered me a lift into Mekoryuk, so I climbed into the back of their pickup truck and rode on a dirt track into town.

Anderson hikes across Nunivak’s interior (tundra, muskeg, lakes) to a place called Musk Ox Hill; shoots salmon (“A minute later, a big pink salmon—a humpy,’ they called it—poked its bulging back and head from the water, and I pulled the trigger. The fish thrashed and then turned dead on its side. When I pulled it from the water, I saw that my lucky shot had hit it cleanly in the head”); encounters musk oxen:

As I made my way toward them, one of the musk oxen, a hulking bull, appeared in my path. He was clearly scouting for trouble, and though he couldn’t see me or smell me, he’d heard me, and he was taking off fast back toward the others. I moved cautiously, hopping from tussock to tussock, keeping myself downwind of the bull. By the time I was sixty feet from the group, I was close enough to see their sunstruck hair, the qiviut sweeping off their massive shoulders and into the wind. I waited, hoping that they’d move, so that I could check their resting spot. To rouse them, I attempted some birdcalls: one that I hoped would sound like a kookaburra, and one like an owl. The oxen lay there, oblivious. A stork on a nearby slope strutted about scornfully.

The piece reminded me of my own Arctic travels. I enjoyed it immensely.