December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Richard Brody, in “Goings On,” reviews Jim Jarmusch’s new movie Father Mother Sister Brother. I’m a fan of Jarmusch’s minimalist style. Brody calls this new film “an unusually plainspoken entry in the Jarmusch cinematic universe.” I think I’ll check it out.

2. Sheldon Pearce, in “Goings On,” praises Bill Charlap and Dee Dee Bridgewater’s new album Elemental. He says, “The music is charming and jaunty, its looseness and zest owed to an alchemical balance between these two performers.” Charlap is one of my heroes. Pearce calls him “an impressionist pianist,” but he’s much more than that. His invention and technique are phenomenal. He’s an amazing improviser. He’s a genius! On the other hand, my taste for Bridgewater’s singing is still developing. At times, I find her delivery halting and discordant. I credit Pearce for noting this album. Anything by Charlap is worth listening to.

3. Remember Babbo? I do. I’ve never eaten there, but as a result of reading Bill Buford’s two brilliant “Babbo” pieces – “The Secret of Excess” (August 19 & 26, 2002) and “The Pasta Station” (September 6, 2004) – I feel I know it intimately. That Babbo is gone. Its wild, ingenious co-owner and chef, Mario Batali, is gone, too. But, as Helen Rosner tells us in this week’s “Tables for Two,” there’s a new Babbo with a new chef – Mark Ladner. Rosner is not impressed. “Can you have Batali minus Batali?” she asks. Her answer is no. She says,

On my first visit to the original Babbo—God, it must have been twenty years ago—I remember being stunned at my first bite of the beef-cheek ravioli. (“Of all the pasta dishes—indeed, of all the dishes—on the menu, this is probably the one most associated with Babbo,” Batali writes of the recipe, in “The Babbo Cookbook” from 2002.) I froze. I think I stopped chewing. I was astounded that a mouthful of food could be so forceful and so silken at once. I wish I could say that I felt the same way about the version at the new Babbo. Some of the disappointment, I’m sure, had to do with the difficulty of measuring up to memory, but it was also right there on the plate. On one evening, the filling was oddly crumbly and dry, and on another the ravioli’s thick chicken-liver ragú—a striking departure from the light, buttery emulsion that dressed Batali’s original—was broken and greasy.

Rosner’s verdict may seem harsh. But that’s what I like about her. She doesn’t pull her punches. 

4. Bruce Handy’s “Talk” story “Shadow Boxing” tells about the re-creation of Joseph Cornell’s Utopia Parkway studio in a Gagosian gallery in Paris. Handy writes,

With the exhibit opening in just a few days, a team of eight workers was beavering away inside the gallery, moving stacks of old magazines, rearranging tchotchkes on shelves, applying a patina of grunge to new jars and boxes to make them look as if they’d been sitting in a cellar since the Eisenhower Administration. The gallery’s normally pristine white walls had been painted to resemble water-stained cinder blocks. A professional set decorator had added fake cobwebs to the corners. (Fine steel wool does the trick.) One could almost smell the mustiness.

Cornell is one of my favorite artists. I enjoyed this piece immensely.

5. A special shout-out to Lawrence Wright for his delightful “Takes” tribute to A. J. Liebling. Wright says, 

For my generation, Liebling still loomed as a model of incisive journalism with a personal voice. He was scholarly and highly literate while also at home with hat-check girls and the bookies at the racetrack. He barbecued the reactionary intellectuals of his era, but portrayed ordinary people with warmth.

I totally agree. Liebling is one of the New Yorker greats. 

Best of the Decade: #2 Luke Mogelson's "The Avengers of Mosul"

Photo by Victor J. Blue, from Luke Mogelson's "The Avengers of Mosul"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #2 pick – Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (February 6, 2017).

“The Avengers of Mosul” is a brilliant, brutal, immersive account of Mogelson’s experience traveling with an Iraqi police unit called the Nineveh Province SWAT team, made up almost entirely of native sons of Mosul, as they fight to liberate their city from ISIS occupation. The piece is divided into four sections: (1) “Up the Tigris”; (2) “Entering the City”; (3) “A Respite from Battle”; and (4) “Urban Combat.”

The first section, “Up the Tigris,” opens with the SWAT team located in the village of Kharbardan, anxiously awaiting orders to join the assault on ISIS-held Mosul. The orders come, and the SWAT team moves up the eastern bank of the Tigris River, helping the Ninety-first Brigade of the Iraqi Army’s 16th Division clear half a dozen villages of ISIS occupants. The Brigade halts outside the village of Salahiya. The SWAT team continues into town on its own. Mogelson writes,

We accelerated into the lead, hurtling down alleys and whipping around corners. I was impressed that the driver could steer at all. The bulletproof windshield, cracked by past rounds, looked like battered ice, and a large photograph of a recently killed SWAT-team member obstructed much of the view.

In the second section, “Entering the City,” the SWAT team is stationed in Shaymaa, a neighborhood on Mosul’s southeastern edge. Mogelson travels to an aid station set up outside Shaymaa by the 9th Division. He describes the arrival of injured soldiers:

A Humvee belonging to an infantry unit that was working with the 9th Division parked outside the aid station and unloaded a soldier whose left arm was open to the bone. His face was raw with burns; he was unconscious, and snorting loudly through his nose.

After several days at the aid station, Mogelson catches a ride to a SWAT-team position inside Shaymaa. He writes,

Upstairs, we found First Lieutenant Omar Ibrahim hunched below a shattered window. An oblong hole gaped in the cinder-block wall behind him, where a rocket-propelled grenade had exploded the day before. Omar was one of the only men in the unit whom I’d never heard raise his voice—he rarely spoke at all—and he recounted the grenade incident with sangfroid.

“They’re very close,” he said.

Peeking over the windowsill, we could glimpse dense blocks of identical-looking houses with water tanks on their roofs, the domes and minarets of mosques scattered here and there. One of the houses belonged to Dumbuk’s uncle and cousins; another held Hadi’s wife and daughter. ISIS and the men’s loved ones were in the same place, but ISIS was too close and their loved ones were too far away.

That night, gunmen attacking the SWAT team’s line approached so near that we could hear them crying “Allahu Akbar!” Bullets whistled overhead; red tracers arced and disappeared. In the morning, rounds smacked against the walls of the house occupied by Mezher [Major Mezher Sadoon, the SWAT team’s deputy commander], and a mortar rattled the windows. To the east, two enormous blasts preceded two enormous plumes.

The 9th Division asks the SWAT team to help it capture the adjoining neighborhood of Intisar, where ISIS resistance is fierce. The SWAT team enters Intisar and is nearly decimated. Mogelson reports,

Of the forty-odd men who’d been in Intisar, twenty-two had been seriously injured and two killed. Nearly everyone else was hurt to some degree. Four of the swat team’s seven Humvees had been destroyed and abandoned on the battlefield. Two others were out of commission. Later that night, I met Rayyan [Lieutenant Colonel Rayyan Abdelrazzak, commander of the SWAT team]] in the house where he was staying, by himself. His eyes downcast, his voice almost a whisper, he said, “They defeated us.”

In the third section, “A Respite From Battle,” the SWAT team is given a week off. Mogelson visits the father and siblings of a SWAT-team member named Souhel Najem in a camp for internally displaced people (I.D.P.s), “a vast grid of white tents enclosed by cyclone fencing,” in a village called Hassan Sham. The next day, he visits Corporal Bilal, a forty-year-old member of the SWAT team, at a private acute care hospital in Erbil. Bilal’s hand had been nearly severed by a suicide truck explosion in Intisar. Mogelson writes,

I found Bilal in an electrically reclining bed. The air in the room smelled mildly of rot. His left hand was splinted and bandaged; long metal pins protruded from it. His thumb, his ring finger, and his little finger were black. I asked the obvious question. When would the fingers be amputated?

“They were supposed to do it three days ago,” Bilal said. “The problem is, I don’t have the money because our salaries are late.”

The next afternoon, Bilal’s doctor agrees to perform the surgery, with the understanding that Bilal will pay at a future date. Mogelson says, “The black fingers were amputated successfully. By then, however, the necrosis had spread, and another operation was required to remove the entire hand.”

The last section, “Urban Combat,” chronicles Mogelson’s experience as he follows the SWAT team back into battle, this time in a part of Mosul known as Gogjali. Mogelson writes,

To reach the SWAT team’s new positions, my interpreter and I drove down Highway 2 until we reached a berm that had been heaped across the lanes, and then turned left onto an unpaved road with a decapitated corpse lying in the middle of it. Stray dogs picked at the body; children played nearby. The unpaved road paralleled the cemetery, which lay behind a row of houses. At the end of the row, a perpendicular alley offered a sight line to the brown field of tombstones and, beyond it, the buildings in Al Quds. The SWAT team was in a house on the other side of the alley.

ISIS snipers shoot at the house:

The snipers eventually quit for the night, but they resumed with gusto in the morning. The SWAT-team members who were not stationed on the roof went to the road behind the house. Bullets zinged up the alley leading to the cemetery. Every now and then, the men backed a Humvee into the alley and aimed a few bursts from the Dushka at Al Quds; they also launched grenades from a turret-mounted MK19. The moment the Humvee pulled back behind cover, more bullets hit the house and the houses around it. They kicked up dirt and slapped against walls. They pierced an empty fuel tanker. They shook the branches of a tree and cut down leaves. They ricocheted off power-line poles, ringing them like bells.

The SWAT team is deployed to Aden, a neighborhood west of Gogjali. One of its positions is a school. Mogelson writes,

The school was a large two-story building that jutted into the clearing—and therefore was exposed on three sides. We had to duck low while climbing an exterior staircase. A corridor ran the length of the second floor, ending at an open doorframe that gave onto a landing. A bedsheet had been hung from the frame, but you still had to hew to the corridor walls, because the snipers in Akha [a nearby neighborhood] sometimes shot through the sheet.

Mogelson crawls on his stomach under the bedsheet. He describes what he sees:

Outside, two machine guns were propped, on bipods, in front of small holes in a waist-high wall. The floor was covered with spent ammunition. Peering through a hole, I could see the houses across the clearing and, behind them, the yellow dome of a mosque. Souhel [a SWAT-team member] drew my attention to a house with a corrugated-tin roof and several square windows missing their panes.

“There are three ISIS in there,” he said.

While Mogelson is in the school, a mortar lands “so thunderously that we thought, mistakenly, that it had hit the building.” He reports,

People were screaming. I followed Basam downstairs and outside. A crater gaped in the street; a metal cistern raised on stilts was spewing water. The screams came from a house around the corner. We pushed through a gate and found a man in a tracksuit lying in the driveway. Before we could attend to him, a woman came out and yelled that more seriously wounded people were inside. She led us into the living room, where an older, shirtless man sat on a couch. Blood smeared his torso and was splattered all over his pants. People were holding sopping red cotton pads to both sides of his face. He was having trouble breathing. When he saw us, he pitched forward, as if to say something. Instead of words, blood spilled from his mouth.

A young boy lay at the man’s feet. He was also shirtless and bleeding heavily from wounds on his torso and his legs.

It was a challenge to focus. The living room was crowded with screaming relatives and neighbors. While we worked on the boy, a woman began shaking my shoulder and shouting in my ear. I had to push her away. My interpreter later told me what she’d been saying: “Don’t let my son die!”

Note that “we.” Mogelson is more than an observer; he’s a participant, helping dispense first aid.

Also in this section, Mogelson visits another I.D.P. camp, this one in Khazer. He goes there to see a SWAT-team member nicknamed Dumbuk (his real name is Mohammad Ahmed), who is recovering from a leg wound suffered in the fighting in Aden. Mogelson writes, “As we ate, Dumbuk told me that as soon as his leg and arm healed he planned to rejoin the swat team. He was happy to see his relatives, but he missed the front line.” This line reminded me of something A. J. Liebling said in the Foreword of his great Mollie & Other War Pieces (1964):

I know that it is socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their dead, but also for war.

“The Avengers of Mosul” is an extraordinary piece of writing, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. In summarizing it, I’ve cherry-picked a few incidents to convey its vividness. I relish the way it unfolds sequentially without flashbacks. I relish its factual style. I relish its focus on the SWAT-team members. Most of all, I relish its details, e.g., a Humvee’s interior (“I crammed into Mezher’s vehicle, sharing a seat with a corporal in a black balaclava. We were wedged in amid ammo boxes, ammo belts, and the feet of another policeman, who stood in the turret behind a Dushka, a Russian heavy machine gun”); a medic’s cigarette ash (“He spoke excellent English, and worked with calm efficiency, often while smoking a cigarette, the ash falling on his patients”); the SWAT team’s deputy commander sitting on the edge of a bed “casually flipping a hand grenade around his finger”; inside a new aid station (“The fake-gold pages of a Koran, draped with a garland of plastic roses, were mounted on the wall, above bags of saline hanging from protruding screws”); the way a soldier puts his foot on a prisoner’s head (“The soldier in the cap twisted his boot back and forth, as if putting out a cigarette”); the ringtone of the Swat-team commander’s phone (“His phone kept ringing: the tone was the theme song from the movie ‘Halloween’ ”); a woman suturing a boy’s face with needle and thread (“It looked as if she’d dipped her hands in a bucket of red paint. I cut the thread and tried to shoo her off. A minute later, while attending to the wounds on the man’s legs, I looked up and saw that she was stitching him again”).

Reviewing “The Avengers of Mosul” when it originally appeared in The New Yorker, I called it a “masterpiece of war reportage” (see here). It’s also one of the most memorable New Yorker pieces I’ve ever read. 

A. J. Liebling's Classic "Poet and Pedagogue"

Cassius Clay (Photo from The New Yorker}

As a result of seeing A. J. Liebling’s classic “Poet and Pedagogue” listed in Erin Overbey’s “Sunday Reading: First Encounters with Legendary Figures” (newyorker.com, May 24, 2020), I decided to revisit it. What a great piece! It’s an account of the Cassius Clay-Sonny Banks fight at Madison Square Garden, February 10, 1962. It originally appeared in the March 3, 1962, New Yorker and is included in Liebling’s posthumous 1990 collection A Neutral Corner.

Liebling begins with visits to both boxers’ training camps a week or so before the fight. His description of Clay reciting a poem while doing sit-ups is inspired:

At the gym that day, Cassius was on a mat doing situps when Mr. Angelo Dundee, his trainer, brought up the subject of the ballad. “He is smart,” Dundee said. “He made up a poem.” Clay had his hands locked behind his neck, elbows straight out, as he bobbed up and down. He is a golden-brown young man, big-chested and long-legged, whose limbs have the smooth, rounded look that Joe Louis’s used to have, and that frequently denotes fast muscles. He is twenty years old and six feet two inches tall, and he weighs a hundred and ninety-five pounds.

“I’ll say it for you,” the poet announced, without waiting to be wheedled or breaking cadence. He began on a rise:

“You may talk about Sweden [down and up again],
You may talk about Rome [down and up again],
But Rockville Centre is Floyd Patterson’s home [down].”

He is probably the only poet in America who can recite this way. I would like to see T. S. Eliot try.

Clay went on, continuing his ventriflexions:

“A lot of people say that Floyd couldn’t fight,
But you should have seen him on that comeback night.”

There were some lines that I fumbled; the tempo of situps and poetry grew concurrently faster as the bardic fury took hold. But I caught the climax as the poet’s voice rose:

“He cut up his eyes and mussed up his face
And that last left hook knocked his head out of place!”

Cassius smiled and said no more for several sit ups, as if waiting for Johansson to be carried to his corner. He resumed when the Swede’s seconds had had time to slosh water in his pants and bring him around. The fight was done; the press took over:

“A reporter asked: ‘Ingo, will a rematch be put on?’
Johansson said: ‘Don’t know. It might be postponed.’ ”

The poet did a few more silent strophes, and then said:

“If he would have stayed in Sweden,
He wouldn’t have took that beatin’.”

Here, overcome by admiration, he lay back and laughed. After a minute or two, he said, “That rhymes. I like it.”

That “He is probably the only poet in America who can recite this way. I would like to see T. S. Eliot try” made me laugh. That’s the thing about this piece; it’s still as fresh and vital as the day Liebling wrote it. It puts me squarely there with Clay (as he was then known), at the Department of Parks gymnasium, as he trained for his New York debut as a professional against Detroit heavyweight Sonny Banks.

It also puts me there at Harry Wiley’s Gymnasium, where Banks was training. Liebling writes,

By the time I got up the stairs, the three fellows who were going to spar were already in the locker room changing their clothes, and the only ones in sight were a big, solid man in a red jersey, who was laying out the gloves and bandages on a rubbing table, and a wispy little chap in an olive-green sweater, who was smoking a long rattail cigar. His thin black hair was carefully marcelled along the top of his narrow skull, a long gold watch chain dangled from his fob pocket, and he exuded an air of elegance, precision, and authority, like a withered but still peppery mahout in charge of a string of not quite bright elephants. 

Liebling has a jeweller’s eye for telltale boxing details. He says of Banks,

Banks, when he sparred with Jones, did not scuffle around but practiced purposefully a pattern of coming in low, feinting with head and body to draw a lead, and then hammering in hooks to body and head, following the combination with a right cross. His footwork was neat and geometrical but not flashy—he slid his soles along the mat, always set to hit hard.

Liebling’s description of the fight is excellent. This particular bout is historically significant as the first time in Clay’s professional career that he was knocked down. Here’s the moment:

When the bell rang, Banks dropped into the crouch I had seen him rehearse, and began the stalk after Clay that was to put the pressure on him. I felt a species of complicity. The poet, still wrapped in certitude, jabbed, moved, teased, looking the Konzertstück over before he banged the ivories. By nimble dodging, as in Rome, he rendered the hungry fighter’s attack quite harmless, but this time without keeping his hypnotic stare fixed steadily enough on the punch-hand. They circled around for a minute or so, and then Clay was hit, but not hard, by a left hand. He moved to his own left, across Banks’s field of vision, and Banks, turning with him, hit him again, but this time full, with the rising left hook he had worked on so faithfully. The poet went down, and the three men crouching below Banks’s corner must have felt, as they listened to the count, like a Reno tourist who hears the silver-dollar jackpot come rolling down. It had been a solid shot—and where one shot succeeds, there is no reason to think that another won’t.

It was not to be. Clay quickly recovers, and in the next round “jabbed the good boy until he had spread his already wide nose over his face.” Liebling says of Banks, “He kept throwing that left hook whenever he could get set, but he was like a man trying to fight off wasps with a shovel.”

The fight is stopped in the fourth round, with Banks staggered and helpless. The piece ends memorably. Instead of going to Clay’s dressing room for a post-fight interview with the winner, Liebling seeks out Banks. He writes,

When I arrived, Banks, sitting up on the edge of a rubbing table, was shaking his head, angry at himself, like a kid outfielder who has let the deciding run drop through his fingers. Summerlin was telling him what he had done wrong: “You can’t hit anybody throwing just one punch all the time. You had him, but you lost him. You forgot to keep crowding.” Then the unquenchable pedagogue said, “You’re a better fighter than he is, but you lost your head. If you can only get him again . . .” But poor Banks looked only half convinced. What he felt, I imagine, was that he had had Clay, and that it might be a long time before he caught him again. If he had followed through, he would have been in line for dazzling matches—the kind that bring you five figures even if you lose. I asked him what punch had started him on the downgrade, but he just shook his head. Wiley, the gym proprietor, said there hadn’t been any one turning point. “Things just went sour gradually all at once,” he declared. “You got to respect a boxer. He’ll pick you and peck you, peck you and pick you, until you don’t know where you are.”

I think this is one of the all-time great endings in sports writing. As Fred Warner says in the Afterword of A Neutral Corner,

Like the Russian general in For Whom the Bell Tolls, he [Liebling] can joke because he is so serious, as he is at the end of “Poet and Pedagogue,” where he describes the beaten and now forgotten fighter who had nearly beaten Cassius Clay and was faced with a lifetime of remembering what might have been. That sad tableau reveals a lot about what made Liebling such a good writer. None of the taints of the sports page are there – hyperbole, cynicism, or sentimentality. It is heartbreaking, emblematic, and just right.

Luke Mogelson's "The Avengers of Mosul": A Masterpiece of War Reportage

Photo by Victor J. Blue

Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017), is a brilliant, brutal, immersive account of his experience traveling with an Iraqi police unit called the Nineveh Province SWAT team, made up almost entirely of native sons of Mosul, as they fight to liberate their city from ISIS occupation. The piece is divided into four sections: (1) “Up the Tigris”; (2) “Entering the City”; (3) “A Respite from Battle”; and (4) “Urban Combat.”

The first section, “Up the Tigris,” opens with the SWAT team located in the village of Kharbardan, anxiously awaiting orders to join the assault on ISIS-held Mosul. The orders come, and the SWAT team moves up the eastern bank of the Tigris River, helping the Ninety-first Brigade of the Iraqi Army’s 16^th Division clear half a dozen villages of ISIS occupants. The Brigade halts outside the village of Salahiya. The SWAT team continues into town on its own. Mogelson writes,

We accelerated into the lead, hurtling down alleys and whipping around corners. I was impressed that the driver could steer at all. The bulletproof windshield, cracked by past rounds, looked like battered ice, and a large photograph of a recently killed SWAT-team member obstructed much of the view.

In the second section, “Entering the City,” the SWAT team is stationed in Shaymaa, a neighborhood on Mosul’s southeastern edge. Mogelson travels to an aid station set up outside Shaymaa by the 9^th Division. He describes the arrival of injured soldiers:

A Humvee belonging to an infantry unit that was working with the 9th Division parked outside the aid station and unloaded a soldier whose left arm was open to the bone. His face was raw with burns; he was unconscious, and snorting loudly through his nose.

After several days at the aid station, Mogelson catches a ride to a SWAT-team position inside Shaymaa. He writes,

Upstairs, we found First Lieutenant Omar Ibrahim hunched below a shattered window. An oblong hole gaped in the cinder-block wall behind him, where a rocket-propelled grenade had exploded the day before. Omar was one of the only men in the unit whom I’d never heard raise his voice—he rarely spoke at all—and he recounted the grenade incident with sangfroid.

“They’re very close,” he said.

Peeking over the windowsill, we could glimpse dense blocks of identical-looking houses with water tanks on their roofs, the domes and minarets of mosques scattered here and there. One of the houses belonged to Dumbuk’s uncle and cousins; another held Hadi’s wife and daughter. ISIS and the men’s loved ones were in the same place, but ISIS was too close and their loved ones were too far away.

That night, gunmen attacking the SWAT team’s line approached so near that we could hear them crying “Allahu Akbar!” Bullets whistled overhead; red tracers arced and disappeared. In the morning, rounds smacked against the walls of the house occupied by Mezher [Major Mezher Sadoon, the SWAT team’s deputy commander], and a mortar rattled the windows. To the east, two enormous blasts preceded two enormous plumes.

The 9^th Division asks the SWAT team to help it capture the adjoining neighborhood of Intisar, where ISIS resistance is fierce. The SWAT team enters Intisar and is nearly decimated. Mogelson reports,

Of the forty-odd men who’d been in Intisar, twenty-two had been seriously injured and two killed. Nearly everyone else was hurt to some degree. Four of the swat team’s seven Humvees had been destroyed and abandoned on the battlefield. Two others were out of commission. Later that night, I met Rayyan [Lieutenant Colonel Rayyan Abdelrazzak, commander of the SWAT team]] in the house where he was staying, by himself. His eyes downcast, his voice almost a whisper, he said, “They defeated us.”

In the third section, “A Respite From Battle,” the SWAT team is given a week off. Mogelson visits the father and siblings of a SWAT-team member named Souhel Najem in a camp for internally displaced people (I.D.P.s), “a vast grid of white tents enclosed by cyclone fencing,” in a village called Hassan Sham. The next day, he visits Corporal Bilal, a forty-year-old member of the SWAT team, at a private acute care hospital in Erbil. Bilal’s hand had been nearly severed by a suicide truck explosion in Intisar. Mogelson writes,

I found Bilal in an electrically reclining bed. The air in the room smelled mildly of rot. His left hand was splinted and bandaged; long metal pins protruded from it. His thumb, his ring finger, and his little finger were black. I asked the obvious question. When would the fingers be amputated?

“They were supposed to do it three days ago,” Bilal said. “The problem is, I don’t have the money because our salaries are late.”

The next afternoon, Bilal’s doctor agrees to perform the surgery, with the understanding that Bilal will pay at a future date. Mogelson says, “The black fingers were amputated successfully. By then, however, the necrosis had spread, and another operation was required to remove the entire hand.”

The last section, “Urban Combat,” chronicles Mogelson’s experience as he follows the SWAT team back into battle, this time in a part of Mosul known as Gogjali. Mogelson writes,

To reach the SWAT team’s new positions, my interpreter and I drove down Highway 2 until we reached a berm that had been heaped across the lanes, and then turned left onto an unpaved road with a decapitated corpse lying in the middle of it. Stray dogs picked at the body; children played nearby. The unpaved road paralleled the cemetery, which lay behind a row of houses. At the end of the row, a perpendicular alley offered a sight line to the brown field of tombstones and, beyond it, the buildings in Al Quds. The SWAT team was in a house on the other side of the alley.

ISIS snipers shoot at the house:

The snipers eventually quit for the night, but they resumed with gusto in the morning. The SWAT-team members who were not stationed on the roof went to the road behind the house. Bullets zinged up the alley leading to the cemetery. Every now and then, the men backed a Humvee into the alley and aimed a few bursts from the Dushka at Al Quds; they also launched grenades from a turret-mounted MK19. The moment the Humvee pulled back behind cover, more bullets hit the house and the houses around it. They kicked up dirt and slapped against walls. They pierced an empty fuel tanker. They shook the branches of a tree and cut down leaves. They ricocheted off power-line poles, ringing them like bells.

The SWAT team is deployed to Aden, a neighborhood west of Gogjali. One of its positions is a school. Mogelson writes,

The school was a large two-story building that jutted into the clearing—and therefore was exposed on three sides. We had to duck low while climbing an exterior staircase. A corridor ran the length of the second floor, ending at an open doorframe that gave onto a landing. A bedsheet had been hung from the frame, but you still had to hew to the corridor walls, because the snipers in Akha [a nearby neighborhood] sometimes shot through the sheet.

Mogelson crawls on his stomach under the bedsheet. He describes what he sees:

Outside, two machine guns were propped, on bipods, in front of small holes in a waist-high wall. The floor was covered with spent ammunition. Peering through a hole, I could see the houses across the clearing and, behind them, the yellow dome of a mosque. Souhel [a SWAT-team member] drew my attention to a house with a corrugated-tin roof and several square windows missing their panes.

“There are three ISIS in there,” he said.

While Mogelson is in the school, a mortar lands “so thunderously that we thought, mistakenly, that it had hit the building.” He reports,

People were screaming. I followed Basam downstairs and outside. A crater gaped in the street; a metal cistern raised on stilts was spewing water. The screams came from a house around the corner. We pushed through a gate and found a man in a tracksuit lying in the driveway. Before we could attend to him, a woman came out and yelled that more seriously wounded people were inside. She led us into the living room, where an older, shirtless man sat on a couch. Blood smeared his torso and was splattered all over his pants. People were holding sopping red cotton pads to both sides of his face. He was having trouble breathing. When he saw us, he pitched forward, as if to say something. Instead of words, blood spilled from his mouth.

A young boy lay at the man’s feet. He was also shirtless and bleeding heavily from wounds on his torso and his legs.

It was a challenge to focus. The living room was crowded with screaming relatives and neighbors. While we worked on the boy, a woman began shaking my shoulder and shouting in my ear. I had to push her away. My interpreter later told me what she’d been saying: “Don’t let my son die!”

Note that “we.” Mogelson is more than an observer; he’s a participant, helping dispense first aid.

Also in this section, Mogelson visits another I.D.P. camp, this one in Khazer. He goes there to see a SWAT-team member nicknamed Dumbuk (his real name is Mohammad Ahmed), who is recovering from a leg wound suffered in the fighting in Aden. Mogelson writes, “As we ate, Dumbuk told me that as soon as his leg and arm healed he planned to rejoin the swat team. He was happy to see his relatives, but he missed the front line.” This line reminded me of something A. J. Liebling said in the Foreword of his great Mollie & Other War Pieces (1964):

I know that it is socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their dead, but also for war.

“The Avengers of Mosul” is an extraordinary piece of writing, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. In summarizing it, I’ve cherry-picked a few incidents to convey its vividness. I relish the way it unfolds sequentially without flashbacks. I relish its factual style. I relish its focus on the SWAT-team members. Most of all, I relish its details, e.g., a Humvee’s interior (“I crammed into Mezher’s vehicle, sharing a seat with a corporal in a black balaclava. We were wedged in amid ammo boxes, ammo belts, and the feet of another policeman, who stood in the turret behind a Dushka, a Russian heavy machine gun”); a medic’s cigarette ash (“He spoke excellent English, and worked with calm efficiency, often while smoking a cigarette, the ash falling on his patients”); the SWAT team’s deputy commander sitting on the edge of a bed “casually flipping a hand grenade around his finger”; inside a new aid station (“The fake-gold pages of a Koran, draped with a garland of plastic roses, were mounted on the wall, above bags of saline hanging from protruding screws”); the way a soldier puts his foot on a prisoner’s head (“The soldier in the cap twisted his boot back and forth, as if putting out a cigarette”); the ringtone of the Swat-team commander’s phone (“His phone kept ringing: the tone was the theme song from the movie ‘Halloween’ ”); a woman suturing a boy’s face with needle and thread (“It looked as if she’d dipped her hands in a bucket of red paint. I cut the thread and tried to shoo her off. A minute later, while attending to the wounds on the man’s legs, I looked up and saw that she was stitching him again”).

Edward Hoagland, in his review of John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), said, “It is a reviewer’s greatest pleasure to ring the gong for a species of masterpiece.” Today, I’m pleased to ring that gong for Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul.” 

April 7, 2014 Issue

George Packer, in his absorbing "Home Fires," in this week’s issue, says, “Journalists and historians have to distort war: in order to find the plot – causation, sequence, meaning – they make war more intelligible than it really is.” He mentions several new works – two memoirs (Brian Turner’s My Life as a Foreign Country, Benjamin Busch’s Dust to Dust), three poetry collections (Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise, both by Busch, and Kevin Powers’s Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting), a novel (Powers’s The Yellow Birds), and a book of short stories (Phil Klay’s Redeployment) – and says, “Their work lacks context, but it gets closer to the lived experience of war than almost any journalism.” That “almost” is key; without it, Packer’s claim is too sweeping, disregarding, among other masterworks of war reportage, A. J. Liebling’s “Cross- Channel Trip” (The New Yorker, July 1 & 15, 1944), Jonathan Schell’s “The Village of Ben Suc” (The New Yorker, July 15, 1967), C. D. B. Bryan’s “Friendly Fire” (The New Yorker, March 1, 8 & 15, 1976), Neil Sheehan’s “An American Soldier in Vietnam II – A Set Piece Battle” (The New Yorker, June 27, 1988), Jon Lee Anderson’s “Sons of the Revolution” (The New Yorker, May 9, 2011), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (The New Yorker, August 8, 2011), Dexter Filkins’s “After America” (The New Yorker, July 9 & 16, 2012). These pieces put us squarely there – in the assault landings, tank battles, sniper fire, foxholes, night raids, and many other aspects of war reality. Contrary to Packer’s assertion, these powerful works of journalism aren’t “distortions.” The only “plots” they have follow the course of real events. Their factuality gives them an immense edge over fiction and poetry. Far from making war “more intelligible than it really is,” as Packer alleges, they show its chaos and horror. As Liebling says, in the final line of his great “Cross-Channel Trip,” “Anybody who thinks there was a theme song should have his head examined.”   

May 13, 2013 Issue

Raffi Khatchadourian’s “The Chaos of the Dice,” in this week’s issue, features the kind of opening line I devour: “In order to meet Falafel, the highest ranked backgammon player in the world, I took a Greyhound bus to Atlantic City, and then hopped a jitney to the Borgata Hotel.” I read it and immediately think Hey, this sounds cool. I’m with you. Let’s go! What makes it even more delectable is that it’s a significant departure from Khatchadourian’s essentially “objective” style, in which “I” rarely appears. There’ve been exceptions, most notably the wonderful “The Plume Hunter” section of his great “The Gulf War” (The New Yorker, March 14, 2011), which begins, “A hundred and fifty miles southwest of the wellhead, the Pisces, a NOAA research vessel, was searching for under-sea plumes of oil. It was late on a September night, and in the darkness I climbed up to the bridge.” I find it thrilling when the writer steps into the narrative frame like that. It authenticates the experience being described.

“The Chaos of the Dice,” a profile of a backgammon hustler named Falafel, contains several sharp descriptions (e.g., “He moved his checkers in abrupt jabs, then touched the pieces as if to confirm their solidity”). But, as a whole, it isn’t as satisfying as Khatchadourian’s intricate, woven, tapestry-like “Reporter At Large” pieces - “The Gulf War,” “No Secrets” (June 7, 2010), and the masterly “Transfiguration” (February 13, 2012). I find characters with names like Falafel, The Bone, Genius, Sweet Pea, Elementary, The Terminator, Russian Paul, and Fat Nick a bit too Runyonesque to be totally credible. I’m sure they exist - I’m not questioning the piece’s accuracy. But, like Liebling’s Jollity Building gang (in his 1942 The Telephone Booth Indian), their raffishness seems a tad too cute. I prefer the intense factuality of Khatchadourian's incomparable Reporter-At-Large style, with a few pinches of first-person observation thrown in for added piquancy.

Postscript: Debra Nystrom’s poem “Pronghorn,” in this week’s issue, is a vivid piece of nature description (“bleached grass bending east in wind, lifting up / sometimes then bending again like the fur / of bigger animals a hand might’ve just passed over”). I enjoyed it immensely.    

October 29 & November 5, 2012 Issue

There are two very different narrative methods on display in this week’s issue. Dexter Filkins’s brilliant “Atonement” uses first-person narration. George Packer’s equally brilliant “Washington Man” uses third-person narration. First-person narration strikes me as more reliable, and I generally prefer it. I am speaking here solely with respect to factual writing, not fiction. As Russell Baker observed in his essay on A. J. Liebling (“A Great Reporter at Large,” The New York Review of Books, November 18, 2004), “Liebling was almost always present in his reporting. It is a way of treating readers with respect. A glimpse of the party who is doing the reporting helps the reader judge how far he can be trusted.” Filkins’s remarkable piece is almost a form of memoir. It’s about an Iraq veteran named Lu Lobello and his quest for absolution from the Kachadoorian family, three of whom were killed by Lobello’s unit in a chaotic Baghdad firefight. Lobello contacted Nora Kachadoorian, whom he remembered from the battle, on Facebook. He also contacted Filkins who’d written about the Kachadoorians’ tragedy in the New York Times and asked him to arrange a meeting with the family. “Atonement” is Filkins’s firsthand account of that meeting. It’s a tremendously moving piece that cuts from the present (Lobello’s search for the Kachadoorians) to the past (Lobello and Filkins in Baghdad, 2003) and back to the present (Lobello and Filkins visiting Margaret and Nora Kachadoorian in La Jolla). One of its most interesting aspects is Filkins’s attempt to fathom what happened during “the firefight on Baladiyat Street.” He writes, “It is difficult to know exactly what happened on April 8, 2003. But, as I talked to the Kachadoorians and Lobello, and a half a dozen other members of Fox Company, it became clear that things were far worse than anyone had acknowledged at first.” “Atonement” contains and conveys not only Lobello’s story, but also Filkins’s pursuit of that story. As Richard Brody recently said of Jia Zhanghki’s 24 City, “it has its footnotes built into it” (“Ben Affleck’s Argo and Hollywood Nostalgia,” “The Front Row,” newyorker.com, October 12, 2012).

In contrast, George Packer’s “Washington Man” is a classic example of what Brody calls “external storytelling.” It’s written with superb authority, but the author doesn’t enter into it. Packer doesn’t use the first person pronoun even once. It’s a profile of Washington insider Jeff Connaughton. Except for the occasional “As Connaughton later wrote” and “As Connaughton recalled,” Packer rarely indicates his sources. Most of the story appears to have come directly from Connaughton. Packer’s identification with Connaughton’s point of view is extremely close. So close that Packer, at times, seems to be writing free indirect speech. For example, Packer writes,

One day in August, he was channel-flipping when Glenn Beck came on, telling an immense crowd on the Mall that change didn’t come from Washington; it came from real people in real places around the country. Beck was an asshole, but Arianna Huffington wrote the same thing in a column two days later. They were right.

Who owns these words – Packer or Connaughton? It’s Packer who’s writing them, but it sounds like Connaughton. The passage is an example of free indirect speech. It’s the first time I’ve seen it used in a New Yorker profile. I’m not sure its use should be encouraged. Packer’s words seem to have become inflected by his subject’s. Does he think Beck is an asshole? Does he think Beck and Huffington were right? Or is he simply reporting what Connaughton thinks? It’s unclear.

That said, I confess I found “Washington Man” irresistible. Even though it’s a long piece, I couldn’t stop reading until I finished it. It’s an exciting, vivid, inside story about how Washington has been captured by the “money power.” Packer’s/Connaughton’s view that “One fastball at Wall Street’s chin – a few top executives going to jail – could have had more effect than all the regulations combined” is my view. I silently cheered as I read it.

June 18, 2012 Issue

Reading The New Yorker, I navigate by the star of thisness. By thisness, I mean “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion” (James Wood, How Fiction Works). I regret to report that there’s precious little thisness in this week’s issue, which is mostly concerned with politics, a subject that rarely generates textured writing. There are exceptions, e.g., A. J. Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana (1961) and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Prophet of Love (2004), but not the pieces in this week's issue. Peter Hessler’s “Arab Summer,” which describes the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt, has a “puff of palpability” near the beginning (“Rifaat stashes his cans of shoe polish behind the statue of Horus”). But more typical of the piece’s wording is this line: “The Brotherhood is extremely hierarchical, and each member belongs to a five-person usra, or “family,” which meets regularly.” However, Hessler’s piece is positively inspired compared to Ryan Lizza’s “The Second Term.” The closest it gets to thisness is this insipid description of the Bachelor Farmer’s menu: “A hundred people who each gave five thousand dollars to the President’s campaign dined on a salad of house-smoked pork and a choice of roasted chicken or Copper River sockeye salmon (a vegetarian menu was also available).” As for Jane Mayer’s “Bully Pulpit,” I skimmed it and quickly moved on. Evangelist talk-show hosts  are far too easy targets for The New Yorker. They’re irrational; we know they’re irrational. Forget them. There are bigger and better fish to fry. The fourth political piece in this week’s issue is Jill Lepore’s “Benched.” It’s sort of a companion to Jeffrey Toobin’s recent “Money Unlimited” (The New Yorker, May 21, 2012), except that its focus is more historical. Both pieces lack thisness. But they’re frustrating for another reason, too. Their analysis is driven by the same tired old Left-Right, Conservative-Liberal dichotomy that political writers have been applying for decades. Is there not some other lens we can use to try to understand our politics? See, for example, David Runciman’s use of risk assessment in some of the pieces collected in his excellent The Politics of Good Intentions (2006).

Postscript: Amid the abrasive, obnoxious politicians, revolutionaries, evangelists, and rappers crowding the pages of this week's issue, Eamon Grennon's swooping sand martins stand out - delightful, vital presences, "fill[ing] salt air with their shrill chatter" ("Sand Martins").