January 26, 2026, Issue

Ian Frazier, in his “The Ice Curtain,” in this week’s issue, revisits the Alaskan city of Nome, a place that figures memorably in his masterpiece Travels in Siberia (2010). Nome is less than a hundred and fifty miles from Russia. Back in 1999, when Frazier first visited Nome, travel between the U.S. and Russia was much more open. Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 changed all that. An “ice curtain” descended. 

Frazier, in his new piece, pokes around Nome, talks to some folks, including Jim Stimpfle, whom he first wrote about in Travels in Siberia, and notes some of the changes that have occurred since he was last there. For example:

Fat Freddie’s has closed, and Stimpfle now patronizes the Polar Cub Café, where he sits with friends at the same table almost every morning. Just beyond the café’s broad windows, the waves of the Bering Sea batter the granite riprap frontage. One morning, Stimpfle joined me at a corner table. I’d last seen him twenty-four years ago, an interval that has slowed us both. He wore a brown knit cap with a bill, a zippered jacket, loose knee-length blue shorts over gray sweatpants, and black running shoes. He is tall and strong-looking, and his blue eyes, which used to spark behind his spectacles and sharp nose, have grown mellow.

Not much happens in “The Ice Curtain,” but that’s okay with me. I enjoyed being in Frazier’s company as he nosed around his old haunt. The piece brought back great memories of reading Travels in Siberia – one of my favorite books.