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.

Thursday, January 23, 2025

January 20, 2025 Issue

Remember the caribou rack in John McPhee’s “The Encircled River”? I certainly do. It’s one of my favorite details in that great piece. McPhee finds the antlers while hiking the alpine tundra of northern Alaska. Here’s the scene:

Moving downhill and south across the tundra, we passed through groves of antlers. It was as if the long filing lines of the spring migration had for some reason paused here for shedding to occur. The antlers, like the bear, implied the country. Most were white, gaunt, chalky. I picked up a younger one, though, that was recently shed and was dark, like polished brown marble. It was about four feet along the beam and perfect in form. Hession found one like it. We set them on our shoulders and moved on down the hill, intent to take them home.

What happened to that caribou rack? Did it make it to McPhee’s home in Princeton? Yes! In his delightful “Tabula Rasa, Volume Five,” in this week’s issue, McPhee tells us that it “hangs from invisible fishing line against the brick chimney of our kitchen fireplace.” Reading that made me smile. Fifty years after it was plucked from the Alaskan tundra, the caribou rack endures. McPhee preserved it – in words and in life. 

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