September 23, 2024 Issue

Three excellent pieces in this week’s New Yorker (“The Fall Style & Design Issue”):

1. Anna Wiener’s “Joy Ride,” a profile of bicycle designer Grant Petersen. Wiener visits Petersen at his company’s headquarters in Walnut Creek, California. She goes for a trail ride with him at Fernandez Ranch, in Martinez. And, riding a bike that Petersen loans her (“an A. Homer Hilsen the color of celestine, with upright bars and a metal basket”), she joins a group of cyclists for a day ride from the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin. She says of Petersen, “He is an advocate of pleasurable, unhurried riding—alone, or with family and friends—and is obsessive about comfort.” I can relate to that. I do a lot of cycling, and that’s my approach, too. I enjoyed Wiener’s piece immensely.

2. Rachel Syme’s “Sniff Test,” a profile of Parisian perfumer Francis Kurkdjian. This piece brims with wonderful descriptions of scent. This one, for example: “The resulting perfume did not smell edible or organic; it evoked something air-gapped and untouched by human sweat, like a new Porsche that happens to be filled with cotton candy.” And this: “At the end of the meeting, he pulled out a vial of a Privée scent he’d been working on, dipped a mouillette, and handed it to me. It smelled of honey and bonfire, cut through with a bright note of snap-pea green.” I enjoyed this sensuous piece enormously.

3. Jackson Arn’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” a review of Jackie Wullschläger’s Monet: The Restless Vision. Arn says of it, “Some important events are done in smudged glimpses, but the over-all shape of his eighty-six years is clear. Every few chapters, a sudden nub of detail robs you of your breath.” Arn also considers some of Monet’s paintings. Of Branch of the Seine Near Giverny (1897), he writes, “The scene is only a few firm details away from abstraction, a Rorschach test tilted sideways—not a thing plus its echo but an unbroken flat-deep surface. If it is still an impression of a lost moment, there is something newly sturdy mixed in; each brushstroke declares, I’m still here.” I love this line: “Diving into his lonely, flickering subjectivity, shushing his doubts, he discovered a kind of beauty beloved by so many that it became universal."