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.

Thursday, June 3, 2021

Gus Powell Is Back!

Gus Powell, Sculpture by E. V. Day (2010)









I see Gus Powell is this week’s “Tables For Two” photographer. Great to see him back in the magazine! He’s been absent for a while. Powell took one of my all-time favorite New Yorker photos – a shot of a sculpture by E. V. Day, created from the New York City Opera’s costume archive. It appeared in “Goings On About Town,” April 12, 2010. What draws me to it? I think it's the exquisite spun-sugar texture of the suspended rose-gold gown, white daylight streaming through it, against the ravishing railing-and-windows grid of brown, gray, pink, pearl, and charcoal lines. It’s a most original and striking image.   

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