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.

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

June 21, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Elizabeth Kolbert’s absorbing “The Deep,” an essay on deep-sea mining and the threat it poses to fragile deep-sea ecosystems. Reading it, I learned about extraordinary “bioluminescent creatures” that live in the vast darkness at the bottom of the sea, creatures such as the stoplight loose jaw (“a fish with photon-emitting organs under each eye”), the humpback blackdevil (“sports a shiny lure that dangles off its forehead like a crystal from a chandelier”), and the giant red mysid (“a hamster-size crustacean” that “spews streams of blue sparkles from nozzles near its mouth”). I also learned about hydrothermal vents. Kolbert writes,

Some of the seas’ most extraordinary animals live around hydrothermal vents—the oceanic equivalents of hot springs. Through cracks in the seafloor, water comes in contact with the earth’s magma; the process leaves it superheated and loaded with dissolved minerals. (At some vents, the water reaches a temperature of more than seven hundred degrees.) As the water rises and cools, the minerals precipitate out to form crenellated, castlelike structures.

Kolbert is a superb nature-describer. She says of the scaly-foot snail: “It’s the only animal known to build its shell with iron, and around its foot it sports a fringe of iron plates that looks a bit like a flamenco skirt.”

Kolbert’s piece flags a serious concern that deep-sea mining will wreck the ocean floor “before many of the most marvellous creatures living there are even identified.”  

No comments:

Post a Comment