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 Galchen, 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.

Monday, December 23, 2024

Acts of Seeing: Bombardier Snow Bus

Bombardier Snow Bus, Rankin Inlet, 2006 (Photo by John MacDougall)










I’m partial to ruins and wrecks. September 10, 2006, I was nosing around the town of Rankin Inlet on the west coast of Hudson Bay, when I encountered this rusted hulk of an old Bombardier snow bus. I love its curved shape and four round windows, golden Arctic wheat growing up around it. Most of all, I love the texture of its flayed steel skin. Flecks of yellow paint. Was that its original color? Once upon a time, it was a functioning snow bus, carrying kids to school, miners to work, researchers to field projects – who knows what it was used for? No doubt, it has a story. But I will never know it. I wonder if it’s still there.   

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