April 14, 2025 Issue

This week’s issue is particularly rich in content. It contains at least five pieces I want to read: Elif Batuman’s “Alien Eye”; D. T. Max’s “Life after Death”; Jon Lee Anderson’s “Strongmen”; Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Going Nuclear”; and James Wood’s “Let It Lie.” I’m going to save this New Yorker for a trip to Italy that Lorna and I are taking next month. I’ll read it on the plane. I’ll post my review when I return. 

January 30, 2023 Issue

What to make of Elif Batuman’s “Novels of Empire,” in this week's issue? It’s an argument against PEN Ukraine and other Ukrainian literary groups who want Russian literature banned. It’s an argument against Ukrainians who want statues of Pushkin torn down. It’s an argument for rereading Russian classics “in the shadow of the Ukraine war,” to quote the tagline of the piece. What shapes her argument is her “need to find new ‘contrapuntal’ ways of reading." That means seeing the Russian classics as a body of literature with two geographies: one in Russia, richly elaborated; the other, Ukraine, strongly resisted. She says, “Literature looks different depending on where you read it.” 

Batuman’s argument seems reasonable enough. Why do I resist it? I think it’s because she doesn’t show a strong enough awareness of the brutal reality in Ukraine. She tries. She says, “Of course—I saw, in Kyiv—you couldn’t expect people in a war not to read from a national perspective.” But is PEN Ukraine’s call for a ban on Russian literature a matter of nationalism? Isn’t it a matter of deep revulsion at what Russia is doing? Isn’t it a form of protest? Batuman calls Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “sickening.” Yet ... she doesn’t seem to be sickened all that much. 

Best of the Decade: Second Thoughts

Photo by George Steinmetz, from Lauren Collins's "Angle of Vision"

Well, I’m midway in my “Best of the Decade” series and I’m having second thoughts about it. I now think it was folly to attempt it. There are just too many great pieces to choose from. Boiling the selection down to twelve has been agony. I’ve had to be absolutely ruthless. Many wonderful pieces have been excluded.

I’m going to continue with the series. But when I’m finished, I intend to provide an alternate list of twelve more pieces – all of which are deserving of “Best of Decade” status. That won’t do justice to all the New Yorker pieces I cherish, but at least it will help mitigate the severity of the selection process.

As for the list I’m currently working on, here are the six picks I’ve made so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

7. Lauren Collins’s “Angle of Vision” (“In dreams—mine, at least—flying is like swimming. But the air was crisp and thin, not viscous, as I’d imagined it. I didn’t have to make my way through it; it made its way through me. Being upright in the air feels like being upside down on the ground. My spine stretched. I felt like I’d be an inch taller when I touched down. In twenty seconds, my feet thudded into the valley floor”);

8.  Joseph Mitchell’s “Street Life” (“Another thing I like to do is to get on a subway train picked at random and stay on it for a while and go upstairs to the street and get on the first bus that shows up going in any direction and sit on the cross seat in back beside a window and ride along and look out the window at the people and at the flowing backdrop of buildings. There is no better vantage point from which to look at the common, ordinary city—not the lofty, noble silvery vertical city but the vast, spread-out, sooty-gray and sooty-brown and sooty-red and sooty-pink horizontal city, the snarled-up and smoldering city, the old, polluted, betrayed, and sure-to-be-torn-down-any-time-now city”); 

9. Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (“During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered”);

10. Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition” (“Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted—in a ‘voice I had never heard him ever use,’ Lady Bird recalled—‘Get down! Get down!’ and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leaped over the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice-President, shouting again, ‘Get down! Get down!’ ”);

11. Elif Batuman’s “The Memory Kitchen” (“Near the beekeeper’s table, a farmer was selling live turkeys. There were seven or eight of them sitting on a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury”);

12. Tad Friend’s “Thicker Than Water” (“The wave caught them from behind and lifted them until they were surfing its face. They hung there for five seconds—their port gunwale tilting overhead, the Yamaha outboard whirring in the air—as if time were taking a breath. Jason still believed that they’d shoot the barrel and make it out. Then the starboard gunwale hit sand, and with fantastic power the wave lifted the boat and hurled it onto the sandbar upside down. All that was visible of Jabb from above was a strip of maroon-painted hull”).

Best of the Decade: #11 Elif Batuman's "The Memory Kitchen"

Photo by Carolyn Drake, from Elif Batuman's "The Memory Kitchen"

“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 #11 pick – Elif Batuman’s wonderful “The Memory Kitchen” (April 19, 2010). It’s about a chef, Musa Dağdeviren, “who has masterminded an ambitious project to document, restore, and reinvent Turkish food culture.” 

The piece begins with a visit to Dağdeviren’s restaurant, Çiya Sofrasi. Batuman writes,

To get to the restaurant Çiya Sofrasi from the old city of Istanbul, you take a twenty-minute ferry ride to the Asian side of the Bosporus. On a cold Monday night last November, a friend persuaded me to make the trip with him. 

Those are the first lines of the piece, and they totally grab me. I love their exoticism (“Çiya Sofrasi,” “old city of Istanbul,” “Asian side of the Bosporus”). And I love that “me”; it tells me that Batuman is writing from personal experience – my favourite form of journalism.

The piece unfolds in five exquisite scenes: a meal at Çiya Sofrasi; an excursion to Kandira; lunch at a Kandira fish shop; a visit to a Bozburun turkey farm; and a tour of Dağdeviren’s country mansion. The theme running throughout is Dağdeviren’s constant search for Turkish authenticity.

Çiya Sofrasi

At Çiya Sofrasi, Batuman and her friend sample a number of dishes:

The first sign of anything unusual was the kisir, a Turkish version of tabouli, which had an indescribable freshness and suddenly reminded you that wheat is a plant. The bitter edge of sumac and pomegranate extract, the tang of tomato paste, and the warmth of cumin, which people from the south of Turkey put in everything, recalled to me, with preternatural vividness, the kisir that my aunt used to make. Likewise, the stewed eggplant dolmas resembled my grandmother’s version even more intensely, somehow, than those dolmas resembled themselves.

As the meal progresses, Batuman notices that the tastes grow stronger and more varied:

One inscrutable salad contained no recognizable ingredient except jewel-like pomegranate kernels, nestled among seaweed-colored, twig-shaped objects and mysterious chopped herbs, nutty and slightly bitter. A stew uniting beef, roasted chestnuts, quince, and dried apricots in an enigmatic greenish broth tugged at some multilayered memory involving my mother’s quince compote. 

Batuman is a superb describer. Here, for example, is her depiction of “an array of marvellous, doll-like desserts” in Çiya Sofrasi’s window:

Candied tomatoes, dull-red translucent disks, resembled ancient talismans. Miniature candied eggplants had a troublingly sentient appearance, inky and squidlike. Kerebiç—round cakes with pistachio filling—were served with a gooey sauce. My friend thought it might be whipped cream; I thought it was some kind of high-end marshmallow. Finally, I asked a waiter. He said it was made from “the pulverized root of a local tree from Antakya.”

Kandira Market

Batuman joins Dağdeviren for an excursion to Kandira, “two hours east of Istanbul, on the Black Sea coast.” They visit the town’s market. Batuman writes, 

After a second circuit, during which he bought a total of thirty kilos each of borage and mallow, seven kilos of corn poppy, six kilos of curly dock, and twenty bunches of watercress, Musa seemed to relax. He made some sundry purchases: buffalo-milk yogurt and two kinds of honey, one made with chestnut and linden flower, the other with chestnut and rhododendron. Near the beekeeper’s table, a farmer was selling live turkeys. There were seven or eight of them sitting on a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury. In Turkey, the turkey is called hindi (“Indian”) and is often roasted on New Year’s Eve, which was two days away.

That turkey description (“sitting on a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury”) is excellent.

Fish Shop Lunch

When Batuman and Dağdeviren finish shopping in the market, they look for a place to have lunch. Batuman writes,

For lunch, we walked to the town center, which Musa described as “authentic,” his highest term of praise. There were three busy commercial streets, whose businesses were all local. “There aren’t any streets like this left in Istanbul. Look, they have a simit oven, and no Simit Sarayi.” A simit is a pretzel-like ring of bread covered in sesame seeds. Simit Sarayi (saray means “palace”) is a ubiquitous Turkish chain whose owners have plans to expand into Europe. “They sell what I call pastane simit”—a pastane is a French-style pastry shop—“and now that’s what people are used to,” Musa said. “In the old days, every region had its own way of making simit. There’s an incredible variety of simit, and it’s all being lost.”

That last sentence is a variation on the piece’s main theme: Dağdeviren’s determination to recover the foods that Turkey is forgetting. 

Dağdeviren suggests lunch at a fish shop. While they eat, Dağdeviren talks about, among other things, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Turkey known as the “Safranbolu Houses”:

“Nobody lives there anymore—it’s all pensions and hotels,” he said. “You might go to a place like that once, just to see it, but you won’t go back a second time.” The moral of his story was that “the moment you say, ‘Hey, let’s revive this’—no matter what it is—it’s finished.” This is exactly the paradox that Çiya has avoided. “The people’s” lost food is rescued not only from disappearance or mechanization but also from foodie fetishism. The restaurant is an ark in which every tiny species is salvaged, represented, preserved—but still alive, changing, and growing.

Turkey Farm

After lunch, they drive to a turkey farm in a village called Bozburun. Dağdeviren buys four female turkeys. Batuman vividly describes the killing of the first turkey:

The farmer’s wife handed the first one to her husband, who bent down and swiftly cut off its head with a sharp knife. A loud wheezing came from the stump of the neck, which emitted irregular spurts of blood. The dog stood up slowly and ambled over.

“Hoşt!” the farmer shouted. This is a Turkish word used exclusively for the purpose of chasing away dogs—there are different words for chasing away cats and poultry—but this dog did not respond. Finally, the farmer tossed the turkey’s tiny head some distance away, and the dog went off to look for it. The farmer’s wife handed him the next turkey.

The other turkeys seemed to view these developments with mild concern. Those which had been walking in the direction of the creek casually changed course and walked elsewhere, with one exception: a stately male, with a red wattle and an enormous fan of back feathers, marched pompously, deliberately, almost sinisterly before the scene of carnage. “What could he be thinking?” Musa asked.

What an amazing scene! The wheezing from the neck stump, the farmer shouting “Host!” at the dog, the pompously marching male turkey – Chekhov couldn’t have rendered it better. 

Country Mansion

On the drive back to Istanbul, Batuman and Dağdeviren visit a property that Dağdeviren recently bought “in order to realize his long-cherished dream of a Turkish culinary institute. The idea was to provide a center for Turkish food culture: a school, a library, a research institute, and a publishing house.” The scene unfolds like a Chekhov short story:

By the time we reached the property, night had fallen. We came to a pair of imposing metal gates and Musa rang a bell, several times, to no effect. Banging on the gates with his fist, he began shouting to someone called Ismail. Then he picked up a rock and started beating it against the metal. After five minutes of this, the groundskeeper, who is hard of hearing, appeared, bowing and apologizing. “I must have fallen asleep,” he said, unlocking the gate.

They drive in. Batuman says,

A mansion loomed before us, and Musa stopped the car, leaving the headlights on. As we walked toward the mansion, I became aware of the presence all around us of enormous, shadowy formations, which proved to be topiary animals. A monstrous dolphin reared on its tail in the middle of the circular drive, and, in the murk, I thought I could make out a stag and a bear on the lawn.

The piece brilliantly ends in a blaze of light, a glimpse of yet another one of those surreal topiary animals, and then a final dissolve to darkness:

Entering the mansion, he switched on the electric lights and, one by one, rooms materialized around us. Musa told me his plans for a library, a reading room, a kitchen with stations for students, conference rooms, lecture halls, editorial offices. There would be guest rooms for visiting scholars and writers. He and his family would live on the top floor. He showed me a spot he was considering for his desk, in a window overlooking a giant topiary alligator. Back downstairs, he lingered a moment in the front hall before turning off the lights. Everything dissolved again into darkness, and we got back in the car to return to Istanbul.

Nothing dramatic happens in “The Memory Kitchen,” unless you count the killing of that female turkey. Yet it delights from beginning to end. Part of that delight is sourced in its arresting material – Musa Dağdeviren, Çiya Sofrasi, the Kandira market, the Bozburun turkey farm, etc. And part of it is in its marvellous writing – attentive, specific, vital, perceptive. The piece is double bliss. 

The Relation of Fact to Thought in Elif Batuman's "The Memory Kitchen" (Contra Daniel Soar)

Photo by Carolyn Drake (from Elif Batuman's "The Memory Kitchen")

Daniel Soar, in his “The paper is white” (London Review of Books, December 14, 2017), a review of Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot, is critical of Batuman’s New Yorker writings. He says,

As a staff writer for the New Yorker, living for a time in Turkey, she has in recent years reported on football fandom in Istanbul, archeology in south-eastern Anatolia, transcranial direct-current stimulation in Albuquerque and an unusual kidney disease found only in the Balkans. These pieces are witty, personal, comprehensively reported (“But when I tried to get in touch with him I was told that he was unavailable, having recently been shot”), but they are also dutiful and information-heavy, with the occasional Wikipedia-like bit of background that anyone could have filled in (“In 1908, the sultan’s absolute rule was curbed by the Young Turks, who went on to encourage soccer as a means of Westernising and nationalising Turkish youth”). She has traded thoughts for facts. She doesn’t always have the room to reflect on how selective and partial those facts can be – or on whether, for example, working-class Beşiktaş fans may have a politics beyond the facts of their violence.

She has traded thoughts for facts – is this true? I don’t think so. It fails to credit the complex mental process underpinning Batuman’s factual writing. Take her wonderful “The Memory Kitchen” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010), for example, profiling the extraordinary Turkish chef Musa Dağdeviren, whose Istanbul restaurant Çiya Sofrasi has “tapped into a powerful vein of collective food memory,” “producing the kind of Turkish cuisine that Turkey itself, racing toward the West and the future, seemed to have abandoned.”

“The Memory Kitchen” is an artfully shaped narrative comprehending, among other things, the taste of Çiya Sofrasi’s kisir (“The bitter edge of sumac and pomegranate extract, the tang of tomato paste, and the warmth of cumin, which people from the south of Turkey put in everything, recalled to me, with preternatural vividness, the kisir that my aunt used to make”); the story of Dağdeviren’s rise “from errand boy to dishwasher, from apprentice to chef, and on to head chef and master chef”; an excursion to Kandira, on the Black Sea coast, to shop for foraged herbs (“We made one round of the wild-greens sellers. Most were women, wearing bright flowered head scarves, oversized wool cardigans, and long skirts or baggy pantaloons”); lunch at a fish shop (“The shop owner brought the fish, which had been fried in cornmeal. Musa ate in moderation, but with quick, restless, almost peremptory movements”); and, most memorably, a visit to a turkey farm (“Turkeys were wandering everywhere, producing their strange ambient gurgle, under the lugubrious eye of a large German shepherd”).

Writing is selection, John McPhee says in his Draft No. 4. In Batuman’s great “The Memory Kitchen,” the selection of facts and words is brilliant. The presence of a thinking, creating mind is palpable.

November 14, 2016, Issue

Who knew that when Alex Ross wasn't covering the musical landscape, he was nosing around Death Valley, communing with lizards, wildflowers, and sculptural rock formations? His “Desert Bloom,” an account of his Death Valley explorations, in this week’s issue, is a delight. He describes Death Valley as “not so much a desert as a surreally varied mountain region with a desert at its heart.” He says, “I have gone back to Death Valley every so often, and this year I have made a series of visits, trying to better understand its allure.”

“Desert Bloom” brims with the kind of sentence – active, specific, first-person – that I devour. For example:

In early March, when the bloom was at its height, I drove from Los Angeles to Beatty, Nevada, northeast of the park, and checked in at a Motel 6.

I went through Daylight Pass, and the entire expanse of Death Valley sprang into view: the dark mountains, the white floor, the perpetual mirage of an ancient lake.

One weekend in April, I rented a Jeep Wrangler and toured the park with Darrel Cowan, a professor of geology at the University of Washington.

In March, I spent a few hours looking at wildflowers with Dianne Milliard, a ranger who had been dividing her time between Death Valley, in the winter, and McCarthy, Alaska, in the summer.

Last summer, I went to see Pauline Esteves, the elder of the Timbisha Shoshone.

I drove to Mahogany Flat, a campground just above eight thousand feet, where I spent the night in a tent.

I read these sentences and immediately sign on for the adventure, happy to be in Ross’s company. There’s no dramatic arc; the “action” is simply “I go here, I see this,” which I love. The piece abounds in thisness: “The dominant presence was desert gold, a sunflower that blossoms on a long, spindly stem”; “Vast slabs of rock descend into the earth at severe angles, like the Titanic making its fatal dive”; “Farther up the slope are bristlecone pines, with sinewy, almost humanoid trunks.”

I also relished the place names – Daylight Pass, Hells Gate, Badwater Basin, Grapevine Mountains, Furnace Creek, Mahogany Flat, Telescope Peak. There’s poetry in those names!

I love pieces that take me places, pieces like Elif Batuman’s “The Memory Kitchen” (Turkey), Geoff Dyer’s “Poles Apart” (New Mexico, Utah), D. T. Max’s “A Cave with a View” (Matera, Italy), Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues” (Iceland), Laura Miller’s “Romancing the Stones” (Stonehenge), Keith Gessen’s “Nowheresville” (Kazakhstan). They’re almost pure travelogue – no agenda other than the deep experience of a particular place. Such a piece is Alex Ross’s wonderful “Desert Bloom.” I enjoyed it immensely.

Culinary Quests

In conjunction with The New Yorker’s launch of its new Food & Travel Issue this week, the magazine’s online Archive spotlights eight classic New Yorker “culinary journey” pieces: Susan Orlean’s "The Homesick Restaurant" (January 15, 1996); Calvin Trillin’s "Where's Chang?" (March 1, 2010); Adam Gopnik’s "Sweet Revolution" (January 3, 2011); Elif Batuman’s "The Memory Kitchen" (April 9, 2010); Bill Buford’s "Extreme Chocolate" (October 29, 2007); Kelefa Sanneh’s "Sacred Grounds" (November 21, 2011); Jane Kramer’s "Spice Routes" (September 3, 2007); and Dana Goodyear’s "The Missionary" (January 30, 2012).

I relish “culinary journey” writing, particularly a subcategory I call “culinary quests,” in which the writer searches for, say, the perfect pumpernickel bagel (Calvin Trillin’s "The Magic Bagel," March 20, 2000), or a golden-brown Baumkuchen baked the traditional way (Mimi Sheraton’s "Spit Cake," November 23, 2009). My favorite New Yorker “culinary quest” piece is Molly O’Neill’s wonderful "Home For Dinner" (July 23, 2001), a “Letter From Cambodia,” in which O’Neill superbly describes Le Cirque chef Sottha Khunn’s return to his hometown, Siem Reap, to learn how to make the one quintessential Cambodian dish – “sea bass steamed over a broth of lemongrass and galangal (a gingerlike root), thickened with butter and enlivened with chopped tomatoes, chives, and basil” – that has always frustrated him (“He worked and reworked the dish, and it earned him critical praise, but he felt that some minute calibration between sweet and sour continued to elude him. ‘Not yet the perfect balance, the sensation that lets the customer taste the world as I taste it,’ he said”).

“Home For Dinner” ’s tagline (“A leading chef tries to reconcile himself to the past with one perfect meal”) neatly captures the story’s essence. If you enjoy culinary quests, as I do, you’ll likely devour Molly O’Neill’s great “Home For Dinner.”

Credit: The above photo by Hans Gissinger is from Mimi Sheraton’s "Spit Cake" (The New Yorker, November 23, 2009).

Best of 2015: Reporting

Here are my favorite fact pieces of 2015 (with a choice quote from each selection in brackets):

1. Ben McGrath, "The Wayfarer," December 14, 2015. (“A few of the bridges over the canal were so low that he had to lean back and retract his chin, sliding underneath, as though into an MRI scanner, while cars rolled overhead.”)

2. Nick Paumgarten, "Life Is Rescues," November 9, 2015. (“I wandered out into the rain and then into the kitchen tent. On a row of plastic hangers someone had hung the team’s bananas. Each hanger held two bunches. I stood looking at this, in admiration and wonder. Iceland.”)

3. Ian Frazier, "Bronx Dreams," December 7, 2015. (“Fifty kids in zombie makeup zombied to ‘Thriller,’ two middle-school actors did the scene in which Othello strangles Desdemona, a girl named Massire Camara recited a poem about the death of her uncle that is now on YouTube, and a stage full of elementary-age students in a step-dance group called the Bengal Tigers, from P.S. 55, did a routine with stomping, clapping, and chanting that bounced the audience out of its seats.”)

4. William Finnegan, "Off Diamond Head," June 1, 2015. (“Hands folded under my chin, I drifted. A bruise-colored cloud hung over Koko Head. A transistor radio twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed shallow water had a strange boiled-vegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I tried to fix each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even in passing, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it chose.”)

5. Rebecca Mead, "Sole Cycle," March 23, 2015. (“Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped.”)

6. David Owen, "Where the River Runs Dry," May 25, 2015. (“Our pilot, David Kunkel, asked me to retrieve his oxygen bottle from under my seat, and when I handed it to him he gripped the plastic breathing tube with his teeth and opened the valve.”)

7. Dana Goodyear, "A New Leaf," November 2, 2015. (“We waded into the water and put our flippers and masks on. I ducked my head under and gazed. Two years ago, it was rocks and urchins. Now kelp was everywhere, ochre-colored, thirty feet tall, flailing like tube dancers outside a car wash.”)

8. Ian Parker, "The Shape of Things to Come," February 23 & March 2, 2015. (“Ive’s aesthetic is not austere: one could think of the work done here as a reticent man’s idea of exuberance, with rapture expressed in the magnetic click of a power adapter.”)

9. Jill Lepore, "Joe Gould's Teeth," July 27, 2015. (“ ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’ is a defense of invention. Mitchell took something that wasn’t beautiful, the sorry fate of a broken man, and made it beautiful—a fable about art. ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’ is the best story many people have ever read. Its truth is, in a Keatsian sense, its beauty; its beauty, truth.”)

10. Elif Batuman, "The Big Dig," August 31, 2015. (“In a shed nearby, a noisy filtration machine was chugging its way through approximately two thousand sacks of Byzantine and Neolithic dirt.”)

Credit: The above photo, by Victor Schrager, is from Ben McGrath’s "The Wayfarer," The New Yorker, December 14, 2015.

August 31, 2015 Issue

If you relish “visit” pieces, as I do, you’ll devour Elif Batuman’s "The Big Dig," in this week’s issue. It’s a vivid, absorbing report on the Byzantine shipwrecks and other archeological marvels that came to light during the construction of the first-ever tunnel under the Bosporus. In it, Batuman visits the Yenikapı excavation site (“To one side stood an armada of long objects, wrapped in white plastic, resembling monstrously elongated pianos. They turned out to be escalators awaiting installation. The shipwrecks were likewise hidden from view, in long white plastic tents, where sprinklers kept them damp twenty-four hours a day”), a specially-constructed laboratory (“In several black rectangular pools, up to thirty metres long, dismembered ship pieces glimmered like eels”), the makeshift labs where all the artifacts are processed (“In a shed nearby, a noisy filtration machine was chugging its way through approximately two thousand sacks of Byzantine and Neolithic dirt”), a research center devoted to animal remains (“We entered through a padlocked iron gate, passed the word ‘osteoarcheology’ spelled out in bones, and eventually came to a narrow hallway lined, from floor to ceiling, with three hundred Byzantine horse skulls”), and the offices of Yüksel Construction, where she talks with Esat Tansev, a project director responsible for the Yenikapı-Taksim metro-line extension, the site where the largest number of ships were found. Two years after she saw the ships being excavated, she returns to the University of Istanbul lab to see their preservation (“I looked through the round window of the lab’s freeze-drying machine. In the gloom inside, distributed among six shelves, pieces of Byzantine ship were entering a new phase of existence”). Most memorably, in the final section of her piece, Batuman goes to the now completed Marmaray station and rides the train through the tunnel:

Few find a seat on Marmaray: each carriage accommodates five standing passengers for every seated passenger. Like Neolithic man, I crossed the Bosporus upright, “on foot on the highway.” I went to Asia and back again. I got off at the first European stop: Sirkeci Station, the old terminus of the Orient Express, where the Marmaray platform is connected to the surface of the earth by a twenty-story escalator—the longest in Turkey. Strange questions may pass through your mind as you travel on this escalator. If fifteen houses are built on top of one another, which one is the most important? Whose voices should be heard—those of the living or those of the dead? How can we all fit in this world, and how do we get where we’re going? 

It’s a great, epiphanic ending to a brilliant piece. Bravo, Ms. Batuman!  

Postscript: Other pleasures in this week’s issue include Richard Brody’s capsule review of Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (Hitchcock “draws a crucial line between love and lust and, in brilliant scene of mirrors and darkness, evokes the perilous loss of self that sexual passion entails”), Dan Chiasson’s analysis of Linda Gregerson’s poetry (“Gregerson’s syntax acts as a strong forward current, carving a jagged path through the stony resistance of her lines and stanzas”), and Peter Schjeldahl’s description of Whistler’s Mother (“The paint looks soft, almost fuzzy – as if it were exhaled onto the surface”).

5th Anniversary

The New Yorker & Me is five years old today. To celebrate, I want to single out a few highlights. My first post, dated February 20, 2010, was a review of the February 8, 2010, New Yorker. That’s the one with the great Ana Juan cover – nine pampered pooches swaddled in winter garb - called “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The issue contains, among other notable items, John McPhee’s brilliant "The Patch," a personal history piece that ingeniously and movingly blends pickerel fishing with McPhee’s hospital visit with his dying father.

My most popular post – the one that’s received the most page views – is a review of the April 19, 2010, “Journeys” issue, perhaps the best New Yorker to appear in the past five years. In my post, I compare reading it to “gobbling up (say) five bowls of Haagen Dazs dulce de leche ice cream, one right after the other.” The issue features three superb pieces: Elif Batuman’s "The Memory Kitchen"; Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision"; and Burkhard Bilger’s "Towheads." Looking at my review, I see that I focused mainly on Batuman’s and Collins’s articles. Bilger’s “Towheads,” a “Reporter At Large” piece about the far-flung adventures of a tugboating family, deserves greater consideration. Someday I’ll get to it, maybe as part of a broader “Burkhard Bilger Retrospective.”

Speaking of Bilger, his great "The Egg Men" (The New Yorker, September 5, 2005) is the subject of an appreciation I posted on January 30, 2011 (see here). Of all my posts, I found it to be the most satisfying to write. It concludes, “Reading ‘The Egg Men,’ I experience double bliss: the subject is tremendously interesting and the writing is intensely pleasurable.”

I think my most negative post was my response to Richard Brody’s " 'Shoah' at Twenty Five" (newyorker.com, December 7, 2010), in which he came perilously close to calling Pauline Kael’s "Shoah" review anti-Semitic. Brody said, “Pauline Kael’s misunderstandings of Shoah are so grotesque as to seem willful.” In my post, I noted that Kael faced this type of criticism back in 1985 when she wrote the piece. Borrowing a line from Craig Seligman’s defense of Kael, in his Sontag & Kael (2004), I called Brody’s charge “an accusation of astonishing coarseness.” But Brody is such a thrillingly passionate, stylish writer, I couldn’t stay cross at him for long. And he’s helped his own case by occasionally including one or more of Kael’s classic capsule reviews in his “Goings On About Town” movie column.

Kael’s writing is, for me, a touchstone. In the “Author’s Note” of her wonderful Deeper Into Movies (1973), she says that she writes “because I love trying to figure out what I think about what I feel and why.” Right there is the rationale for why I write this blog – to get at the many ways The New Yorker affords me such supreme pleasure.

And now to conclude, I’m going to pretend for a moment that I live in New York City. I’m imagining myself dropping into Nitecap for one of those Key Lime Fizzes with a candle suspended in its froth that Jiayang Fan wrote about so vividly in "Bar Tab" a few weeks ago. I want to propose a toast: Here’s to the greatest magazine in the world, a constant source of pleasure in my life – New Yorker without end, Amen!

August 12 & 19, 2013 Issue

Is it wrong to read a piece about a fatal kidney disease for pleasure? No, not when the piece is by Elif Batuman, whose art is in her marvelous gift for description. Remember the turkeys “nodding their heads and gurgling like members of a jury,” in her superb “The Memory Kitchen” (The New Yorker, April 10, 2010), and the corn bunting’s distinctive cry (“which resembles jangling keys”), in her wonderful “Natural Histories” (The New Yorker, October 24, 2011)? Her “Poisoned Land,” in this week’s issue, contains a number of pleasurable details, e.g., her depiction of researcher Calin Tatu (“Tatu, who is in his forties, and has a buzz cut and a close-trimmed beard holds a medical degree in immunology but prefers working in the lab to seeing patients. He was wearing tinted glasses and a cargo vest, and had spent the previous week climbing Mont Blanc. At lunch, over double espressos and two Coke Zeros, he told us about his research”), her description of aristolochia (“In the golden afternoon light, I saw the famous plant for the first time, recognizing its heart-shaped leaves, narrow yellow tubular flowers, and the round brown pods that have given rise to one of its local names: priest’s balls. Tatu broke open a pod. Inside, hundreds of seeds were lined up in two rows, like pupils in a schoolhouse”), and this glorious evocation of a Bosnian cornfield:

The cornstalks seemed to be standing around chaotically, like skinny, crazy people, their arms flung in all directions. As we drove past, there was one magical moment when they arranged themselves into rows and it was possible to see clearly all the way to the end, before they dissolved back into disorder.

What a delightful, irresistible passage!

December 24 & 31, 2012 Issue

I was already agonizing over the selection of my “Top Ten of 2012” pieces when this week’s “World Changers” issue, with its sleek, gleaming blue-black-cream Frank Viva cover, arrived containing three more candidates for consideration - Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Recall of the Wild,” Elif Batuman’s “Stage Mothers,” and Keith Gessen’s “Polar Express” – providing me with hours of readerly bliss and further complicating my “Top Ten” decision-making. All three are “participant observation” pieces – my favorite form of journalism. In “Recall of the Wild,” Kolbert visits the Oostvaardersplassen, a fifteen thousand acre park in the Netherlands that “mimics a Paleolithic ecosystem.” It brims with delicious lines such as “Vera picked me up one day at my hotel in Lelystad, and we drove over to the reserve’s administrative offices, where we had a cup of coffee in a room decorated with the mounted head of a very large Heck bull.” Kolbert is always up for an excursion, and so am I – vicariously through her, of course. When she hears about an auroch-breeding project in Nijmegan, she says, “So while I was in the Netherlands I decided to go for a visit.” I find her personal approach thrilling. Batuman writes in a similar mode, but with this difference: she has a marvelous gift for what I call surreal realism, which she generates organically from her material e.g., her description, in “Stage Mothers,” of the shooting of the movie “Wool Doll” (“Every night, the crew members slept in dead people’s blankets, and every morning they got up to confront a frozen auto transmission”). I notice that “Stage Mothers” is illustrated with a beautiful Carolyn Drake color photo. Batuman and Drake have teamed up at least a couple of times before to excellent effect: see “Natural Histories” (The New Yorker, October 28, 2011) and “The Memory Kitchen” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010) – both “Top Ten” finishers in their respective years. Of the three writers under consideration this week, Keith Gessen is the minimalist. He’s not afraid to write short, plain lines, stripped to their essentials, e.g., “The next morning, we finally saw it: ice,” “Off we went into the ice,” “I put on a winter coat and hat and walked to the bow.” But his style isn’t starved – far from it. He’s an acute, subtle noticer:

A few times, the ice was so thick, and the icebreaker broke it so cleanly, that it came up again on its side, looking like a giant slice of cake, with green and blue layers separated by thin lines of white. Sometimes a smashed ice floe would be submerged beneath the surface and then come up, the water rolling off its back as off a slowly rising whale.

That “as off a slowly rising whale” is terrific. Gessen is an amazing imagist. Observing the unloading of coal trains in Murmansk, he writes, “It was as if Russia were coughing up her insides.” And this is followed by the evocative, “The cranes’ grabs could barely squeeze into the rail cars. The deep, rumbling sounds of steel on steel echoed in the quiet of the fjord.” I loved everything about “Polar Express” – Gessen’s writing, foremost, but also Davide Monteleone’s photos, and the map by “AJ Frackattack.” There’s such a richesse of great writing in this “World Changers.” I enjoyed it immensely.