September 29, 2025, Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Another sensational “Tables for Two” by Helen Rosner in this week’s issue. It’s a review of Bong, a new Cambodian restaurant in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. Rosner calls it “absolutely electrifying.” She says,

For the three evenings a week that it’s open, the whole operation, in a modest storefront on a residential corner, is shimmeringly alive. The cooks are half dancing in the open kitchen as they slice and stir-fry. The customers all seem wildly in love with one another. Inside, the light bouncing off the acid-green walls makes everyone’s faces appear traced with neon. The thumping bass of the hip-hop playlist reverberates through the dining room and rolls out through the open door to reach the diners seated at bistro tables out front. Even a half block away, the air smells sweet and bright, like seared shellfish, sharp vinegar, and the blistery green of sizzling herbs.

That “blistery green of sizzling herbs” is inspired! Rosner is a brilliant describer. Dig her description of Bong’s lobster dish:

Mama Kim’s namesake lobster (listed with the minimal description “IYKYK”) is a magnificent mountain of crustacean legs and claws, the pieces stir-fried with oodles of slivered ginger and a sweet-spicy herbaceous paste, made by Mama Kim, that clings, slurpably, to the meat and drips juicily onto a pile of rice below. (Lanna Apisukh’s photo of this dish is equally succulent.)

Photo by Lanna Apisukh, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Bong"

Here's another succulent sample:

Almost everything on the menu is thrilling. Even what fails to be thrilling, such as a fairly floppy green salad that I tried on one visit, manages to be at least interesting. (The dressing on that salad was afire with Kampot peppercorns, a hard-to-find Cambodian variety that has a tealike flowery astringence.) Another salad of chewy-crisp pork jowl and sliced melon is zingy with garlic and pickle-tart. The round sweetness of squid, fried in a light-as-air batter, is magnified by intensely floral curry leaves and a salty snowfall of shaved cured egg yolk. A bone-in pork chop, thick as a dictionary, tender as can be, and drowning in a luscious mess of charred tomatoes marinated in a sugar-lime-fish-sauce concoction, features every shade of sour and sweet.

Wow! What a feast! I devour it. 

2. Zadie Smith, in her “On the Impersonal Essay,” describes the tone of her essays as “impersonal” (“But my tone? Controlled. Impersonal”). Is she right? I don’t think so. I haven’t read all her essays, but I’ve read quite a few. “Dead Man Laughing,” “Generation Why?,” “Northwest London Blues,” “Man vs. Corpse,” “Love in the Gardens,” “Find Your Beach,” “Through the Portal” – I love them. What I love about them is their personal nature. They’re subjective to the bone. Later, in her “On the Impersonal Essay,” she says, “Aside from the fact that I never meant to be an essayist in the first place, one detail that has surprised me most during the past twenty years is that I have, in fact, written more personally in the essay form than I ever expected or intended.” That seems to contradict her earlier statement. To me, Smith is a personal essayist par excellence. Her pieces brim with the ardent energy of her own exquisite sensibility.

3. Dana Goodyear’s “Fire Season” is a vivid account of the loss of her home in the devastating Palisades Fire that killed twelve people and burned down six thousand eight hundred and thirty-one structures, including schools, churches, grocery stores, shops, banks, restaurants, and more than fifty-five hundred homes. She writes, 

Every house on my block burned to the ground. It got so hot that the water boiled in our small swimming pool, turning the concrete pink. The birds-eye view, captured by news helicopters, looked like the aftermath of an aerial bombardment, all gray.

In the course of the piece, Goodyear draws a parallel between Los Angeles and Pompeii. At one point she asks “Were we witnessing the beginning of an irreversible decline?” To me, the answer seems obvious: Yes. Just ask Elizabeth Kolbert (Field Notes from a Catastrophe) and Bill McKibben (The End of Nature).

4. Anthony Lane triumphs again. This time with his wonderful “Cinema Paradiso.” It’s an account of Lane’s recent attendance at a film festival in Bologna called Il Cinema Ritrovato. This is no ordinary film festival. As Lane explains, “it specializes in the shock of the old: films that have been forgotten, overlooked, undervalued, truncated by studios, or damaged by time, and that are asking to be brought back into the light.” For example, one of the festival’s films that Lane views is a recently restored version of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925). Lane writes, “Such was the lustre of the results, at the evening showing, that there was no sense of our being in the presence of the antique; for all practical purposes, we were watching a new release.” This piece is pure pleasure – the pleasure of old movies, the pleasure of watching them at night in the warm open air of the Piazza Maggiore, the main square of Bologna’s historic center. Lane describes the scene:

There, beside the shiplike hulk of the Basilica of San Petronio—which is a work in progress, the foundation stone having been laid in 1390, and which somebody really should get around to finishing one of these days—was a vast white screen. Rows of ticketed seating were ranged before it, like pews in a nave. Alternatively, you could lounge, for free, on the marble steps of the basilica, or grab a table outside at one of the restaurants on the opposite side of the piazza. The best ice-cream parlor, around the corner, stayed open till midnight, allowing you to cool your throat with an almond-milk granita. (It comes with a spoon and a straw, so that you can slurp it up as it softens. Pleasure, in these parts, is a serious business.) In short, here was a halcyon arena for a thoroughly normal experience: going out to the movies.

Perfetto. I wish I was there. 

Photo by Matteo de Mayda, from Anthony Lane's "Cinema Paradiso"

June 30, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Vince Aletti, in his mini-review of “Constellation,” a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, describes Arbus’s work as “tough, provocative, and brilliantly dark.” I agree. He also says that Arbus “isn’t easy to love.” This is also true. Aletti’s note reminded me of Susan Sontag’s great essay on Arbus – “Freak Show” [The New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973; included in her brilliant On Photography (1977) under the title “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly”]. It contains one of my favorite Sontag sentences: “Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.”

2. Hilton Als’ “Goings On” review of Gagosian Gallery’s “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” is illustrated with a reproduction of de Kooning’s “Suburb in Havana” (1958). It’s one of my favorite de Koonings. I first saw it in a piece by T. J. Clark called “Frank Auerbach’s London” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2015). Clark writes, 

If I’d been able to glimpse a de Kooning landscape from ten years earlier – say, Suburb in Havana from 1958 – lurking under Autumn Morning, I might have been a little less at sea. But the problem would only have shifted ground. I would still have had to sort out why and how de Kooning’s elegant, lavatorial graffiti – his Cuban-blue depth, the lavish decisiveness of his foreground ‘V’ – were turned in the Auerbach into a kind of waterlogged storm-streaked slipperiness. 

"Elegant lavatorial graffiti"? Ouch. Clark has thrown a barb. Is he right? 

3. A shout-out to photographer Heami Lee for her delectable pizza shot in Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Cactus Wren.”

4. And let’s give a huzzah for Alena Skarina’s wonderful, eye-catching illustration for Elizabeth Kolbert’s disconcerting “Seeds of Doubt.”

 

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. 

April 7, 2025 Issue

In this week’s issue, Elizabeth Kolbert revisits John McPhee’s classic “Encounters with the Archdruid” (The New Yorker, March 20, 27 & April 3, 1971). McPhee’s piece pits an environmentalist (Brock Brower) against three developers (Charles Park, a mining geologist; Charles Fraser, a resort developer; and Floyd Dominy, a dam-builder). The piece is divided into three parts – one for each developer. Kolbert, in her piece, focuses on Part I – Brower vs. Park. She writes,

The trail to Miners Ridge wound through some of America’s most spectacular scenery—snow-covered peaks, riffled streams, meadows spangled with wildflowers. Trudging along, Brower and Park admired the view and exchanged shots.

“Geologists go into the field because of love of the earth and of the out-of-doors,” Park says at one point.

“The irony is that they go into wilderness and change it,” Brower retorts. He declares the proposed mine an abomination: “If we’re down to where we have to take copper from places this beautiful, we’re down pretty far.”

“Minerals are where you find them,” Park counters. “It’s criminal to waste minerals when the standard of living of your people depends upon them.”

Who wins this back-and-forth? It’s hard to say. Though the piece is nominally about Brower—the Archdruid of the title, who returns in subsequent installments in the three-part series—Park is an equally compelling character and, quite possibly, a better debater. Brower is a crusader, Park a pragmatist.

Kolbert praises McPhee for his “evenhandedness.” She says, “He never reveals whose side he’s on.” I think this is true to a degree. He doesn’t reveal it explicitly. But at the end of Part I, he seems to contrast Brower’s generosity with Park’s materialism. The three men are resting on Miner’s Ridge. Park is eating blueberries straight from the bush. Brower is gathering his in a cup. McPhee writes, 

Brower’s cup was up to its brim, and before he ate any himself he passed them among the rest of us. It was a curious and surpassingly generous gesture, since we were surrounded by bushes that were loaded with berries. We all accepted.

“I just feel sorry for all you people who don’t know what these mountains are good for,” Brower said.

“What are they good for?” I said.

“Berries,” said Brower.

And Park said, “Copper.”

Park may have the last word, and he may be an attractive person, but it is Brower who has a sense of the possibilities of our companionship with the earth rather than our control of nature. Near the end of the piece, McPhee describes Brower as a man whose “love of beauty is so powerful it leaps ... [and] lands in unexpected places.” 

October 14, 2024 issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent “When the Ice Melts.” It’s about the melting of the massive Greenland ice sheet. Kolbert writes,

Since the nineteen-seventies, it has shed some six trillion tons of ice, and the rate of loss has been accelerating. Crevasses are appearing at higher elevations, glaciers are moving at non-glacial speeds, and large parts of the ice sheet appear to be twisting, like a writhing beast.

She visits the ice sheet, staying at the National Science Foundation’s research station, called Summit (“The view from Summit in all directions is pretty much the same: white”). She launches the stations daily weather balloon (“The balloon, filled with helium, flew out of my hands. I tried to follow it as it sailed over the ice, but I soon lost sight of it”). She talks with various scientists (e.g., Felix Schlüter, a German astrophysicist, and Zoe Courville, a snow scientist). She visits the village of Kangerlussuaq, where she meets climate scientist Marco Tedesco. She and Tedesco travel a dirt road to the edge of the Russell Glacier. In one of the piece’s most memorable passages, Kolbert writes,

When Tedesco first travelled the VW road, Russell ended in a dramatic wall of ice. Now the wall is gone, and the glacier looks deflated—more like an ice doormat. Tedesco compared visiting Russell to calling on a friend with a terminal illness. “You have to have the strength to say goodbye,” he said. “You see this and you say, ‘Oh, man, it’s happening really fast.’ ”

In my favorite part of Kolbert’s Greenland excursion, she flies to the town of Ilulissat, “which is sometimes called the ‘iceberg capital of the world.’ ” Ilulissat sits on Disko Bay, at the mouth of a very long fjord. Kolbert says, “Icebergs break off into the fjord and float along until they hit an underwater sill just south of town. The bigger icebergs get stuck on the sill, and other icebergs pile up behind them, in a great glacial traffic jam.” She walks along a boardwalk over a stretch of tundra that leads up to a rocky ridge. Kolbert writes,

From the ridgetop, there was a view directly onto the ice jam: a floating mountain range with slopes of pure white. The reflections of the icebergs quavered in the water, which was blue to the edge of purple. The smaller bergs were the size of a house; the bigger ones, I figured, were the size of Grand Central Terminal. 

This vivid passage reminded me of another “Greenland” piece by Kolbert – her brilliant “A Song of Ice” (October 24, 2016). That piece also contains a wonderful description of the ice jam in the fjord near Ilulissat:

Towers of ice leaned against arches of ice, which pressed into palaces of ice. Some of the icebergs had smaller icebergs perched on top of them, like minarets. There were ice pyramids and what looked to me like an ice cathedral. The city of ice stretched on for miles. It was all a dazzling white except for pools of meltwater—that fantastic shade of Popsicle blue. Nothing moved, and, apart from the droning of the mosquitoes, the only sound was the patter of water running off the bergs.

Kolbert is fascinated by Greenland ice – by its beauty and by its disappearance. In her conclusion to “When the Ice Melts,” she writes,

Once the world’s remaining mountain glaciers disappear, they won’t be coming back. Nor will the coral reefs or the Amazon rain forest. If we cross the tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet, we may not even notice. And yet the world as we know it will be gone. 

February 5, 2024 Issue

This week’s issue contains a disturbing, depressing report by Elizabeth Kolbert. Titled “Burn Notice,” it’s a survey of recent books on the wildfire crisis. Kolbert asks what’s fuelling it. Her answer is climate change. She writes,

Another recent report, from the Federation of American Scientists, observed that the world is warming so fast that the models firefighters rely on to predict how blazes will behave have become obsolete. “Climate change is drying fuels and making forests more flammable,” the report said. “As a result, no matter how much money we spend on wildfire suppression, we will not be able to stop increasingly extreme wildfires.”

And, as Kolbert explains, these megafires are increasingly extreme because of the "CO2 feedback loop”:

When trees burn, they release the carbon they took up while growing. This carbon contributes to warming, which increases the likelihood of wildfires, which release more carbon, and so on. 

This cycle seems impossible to reverse. We’re fated to a flame-filled future. What happened in Canada last year (loss of nearly forty-six million acres to wildfire) is just a taste of what's coming. It's hard to avoid the feeling that we're doomed. 

Postscript: It's still winter here in Canada, but already there are over fifty wildfires burning in Alberta. The 2024 wildfire season is off to an early start.  

2023 Year in Review

Photo by David Guttenfelder, from Luke Mogelson's "Trapped in the Trenches")

I always like to start these things with a drink. What’ll it be this year? Hannah Goldfield, in her wonderful “Tables For Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023), mentions “stealing sips of a friend’s orange-blossom Negroni, a cold and viscous concoction that lingered on my tongue and in my memory (I can taste it now!), the intoxicating, floral perfume of the orange-blossom water achieving thrilling alchemy with the herbal gin, bitter Aperol, and sweet vermouth.” Yes, I’ll have one of those, please. Okay, let’s roll. 

Highlight #1: Two pieces by Luke Mogelson – “Trapped in the Trenches” (January 2 & 9, 2023) and “Underworld” (May 29, 2023) – evoke the Ukraine War with a specificity that puts us squarely there: 

In the grainy, green world of the phosphor screen, the stars gleamed like bioluminescent plankton. Herring and Rambo moved deliberately between the black silhouettes of trees, many of which had been splintered and contorted by artillery. I was looking at a tilled field to our left when a shimmering tail arced overhead, collided with another streaking light, and radiantly detonated. Herring said that it was a Russian missile intercepted by an anti-aircraft weapon. [“Trapped in the Trenches]

Highlight #2: Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Talk to Me” (September 11, 2023), an account of her visit with a team of scientists attempting to use artificial intelligence to speak with sperm whales. In an unforgettable scene, she witnesses the birth of a baby sperm whale:

Suddenly, someone yelled out, “Red!” A burst of scarlet spread through the water, like a great banner unfurling. No one knew what was going on. Had the pilot whales stealthily attacked? Was one of the whales in the group injured? The crowding increased until the whales were practically on top of one another.

Then a new head appeared among them. “Holy fucking shit!” Gruber exclaimed.

“Oh, my God!” Gero cried. He ran to the front of the boat, clutching his hair in amazement. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The head belonged to a newborn calf, which was about twelve feet long and weighed maybe a ton. In all his years of studying sperm whales, Gero had never watched one being born. He wasn’t sure anyone ever had.

Highlight #3: Burkhard Bilger’s “Crossover Artist” (April 3, 2023), a profile of neuroscientist/musician David Sulzer that brims with inspired passages, including this beauty: 

A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. In West Africa, musicians attach gourds to their xylophones and harps to rattle along as they play. Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure.

Highlight #4: Hannah Goldfield’s new “On and Off the Menu” column in the magazine’s “Critics” section. Goldfield is one of my favorite writers. It’s great to see her get more space for her delectable food writing. Here’s a sample from her “Upper Crust” (October 27, 2023):

For anything else, you’ll find me at Modern. Not long ago, my husband and I and our two small children met my parents there for lunch. It was the first visit for my kids, and cramming together into a familiar, dimly lit booth felt like passing down a primal ritual. New Haven is not a slice town; you get a whole pie and savor it sitting down. My father pointed out a server who he guessed had been working there almost as long as he’d been a regular, at least thirty years. I burned the roof of my mouth on my first bite, then tried to soothe it with gulps from an icy pitcher of Foxon Park white birch beer, a sweet, slightly earthy local soda you’ll find at any New Haven pizzeria. After a few slices, my hands were covered in soot.

Highlight #5: Helen Rosner’s “Tables For Two” columns. Rosner is a ravishing describer. Her “Tables For Two: Sailor” (December 4, 2023) is one of my favorite pieces of the year. Here’s a taste:

Slicing into the sphere of wrapped radicchio leaves, I discovered an interior of fragrant rice studded with firm, creamy borlotti beans. Taking a bite of this mixture, bathed in a wine sauce—which was rich and emulsified and, I learned later, vegan—was like sinking into a quicksand of warmth and flavor. The leaves of the radicchio imparted a lingering hint of bitterness, a scalpel through the savory roundness of everything else. This is the dish, I thought to myself—the dish of the restaurant, perhaps the dish of the year.

Other top picks of the year:

Rebecca Mead, “Dutch Treat,” February 27, 2023 (“Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream”);

Jill Lepore, “Pay Dirt,” March 20, 2023 (“There are more than two hundred mail-order seed companies in the United States, and, if you’ve ever ordered from any of them, chances are that your mail has been swollen with catalogues, their covers of radicchio red, marigold yellow, and zinnia pink peeking out from beneath the annual drab-gray crop of tax documents and the daily, dreary drizzle of bills, solicitations, and credit-card offers”).

Lauren Collins, “Pins and Needles,” March 27, 2023 (“You could hear his ski-parka opera coats rustling through the narrow corridors. There were murmurs of appreciation for a trapezoidal satin T-shirt that Demna said took three months to make, and for a clementine-colored day suit with edges that looked like they could draw blood, shown with a slick black fruit-bowl hat”);

Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Thomas Wågström’s Pictures of the Living and the Lifeless,” April 26, 2023 (“All photographs are about transience. This lies in the very nature of photography, since everything in the world is continually changing, and what a photo depicts vanishes the next instant, or becomes something else. One could say that all photography is about loss. But one could also say the opposite: photographs salvage something from time, as from a burning house”);

Jackson Arn, “Early Bloomer,” May 8, 2023 (“With O’Keeffe’s works on paper, however, scrutiny is like oxygen. These are images so dense with detail that the poster treatment would ruin them. ‘No. 12 Special’ (1916) is like a glossary of the footprints that charcoal can leave on paper: thin, slashing lines; plump, leisurely ones; smears pressed into the grain of the page with a rag or a fingertip. No matter how carefully you study these grace notes, you never forget the melodious whole: a bouquet of spirals dragging their tails behind them, refusing to be decoded”);

Adam Gopnik, “Postscript: Bruce McCall,” May 15, 2023 (“In what used to be called a ‘biting’ vein, he blended a wild surrealist sensibility—founded on an impeccable illustrator’s technique, always manifesting visions, dreams, impossibilities in scrupulous hyper-realism—with a sharp, sometimes caustic tone, beautifully underlit by melancholia”); 

Burkhard Bilger, “Soul Survivors,” June 5, 2023 (“His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter”);

Ed Caesar, “Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom,” June 14, 2023 (“I wonder why, then, on hearing the news of his death last night, I found myself momentarily overcome. Perhaps because I met McCarthy first in a peculiarly receptive period, and perhaps because the provenance of my relationship with his writing leads me back through the decades of my own life. And perhaps because, looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of his voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished”);

Robert Sullivan, “Not a Shark,” July 31, 2023 (“A waft of trash came up from under the pier, and a gaggle of high schoolers walked out onto the pier to take pictures of the orange sky. ‘It’s the end of the world,’ one of them shouted—then he spotted WasteShark. ‘Wait, are you guys monitoring something?’ ”);

Sam Knight, “Hive Mind,” August 28, 2023 (“I touched the glass. The hive thrummed. The smell of honey rolled across the pasture”);

Rachel Syme, “The Suitor,” September 25, 2023 (“She glided down the center aisle, wearing a beaded, sheer white garment that looked like a tuxedo jacket whose hem was melting to the floor. Two men in swim caps carried the train of the dress. From far away, the piece shimmered as if made of shaved ice”);

Nick Rudick, “Watching the Southern Tip of Manhattan Change, for Forty Years,” September 30, 2023 (“Mensch includes a vista of the cheese grater, here cutting a lonely path into the sky far above more modest buildings, jutting upward from the city like the handle of a sledgehammer”); 

Ben McGrath, “Dystopian Slime,” October 9, 2023 (“A stray horn, a searchlight upwind, a marine radio hissing intermittently about bridge traffic: sometimes, amid this dystopian sublime, it was difficult to distinguish the choreography from the merely urban”);

John McPhee, “Under the Carpet Bag” (October 16, 2023 (“And now, in 1964, at Camp Don Bosco, in Missouri, I was walking up a dirt road with Bill Bradley and Ed Macauley. The road consisted of deep parallel ruts with a grassy hump in the middle. Bradley was in one rut, Macauley in the other, and I was up on the hump between them. I am smaller than most people—about as small as Andrew Carnegie, James Madison, Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Actually, I was five feet seven at my zenith and have lately condensed. The hump was a good foot higher than the ruts. Nonetheless, the three of us in outline formed the letter M”);

Amanda Petrusich, “Horny on Main,” October 23, 2003 (“My favorite track on the new album is 'How to Stay with You.' It’s got a wiggly, nineteen-seventies feel, with a skronky keyboard line and unexpected bits of saxophone. Sivan’s voice is a little deeper here, with a hint of night-after grit”);

Zachary Fine, “The Man Who Changed Portraiture,” November 3, 2023 (“The linen cuff on van der Mersch’s right hand is done in four touches, max. Even when you’re standing ten feet back from the canvas, you can peel off individual brushstrokes with your eyes. They’re just floating there, like little spears of light”);

James Wood, “Trysts Tropiques,” November 13, 2023 (“Eng can write with lyrical generosity and beautiful tact: moths are seen at night ‘flaking around the lamps’; elsewhere, also at nighttime, ‘a weak spill of light drew me to the sitting room.’ Shadowy emotions are delicately figured: ‘His eyes, so blue and penetrating, were dusked by some emotion I could not decipher.’ Lesley’s account of her affair with Arthur has a lovely, drifting, dreamlike quality—the adulterers almost afloat on their new passion, watched over by the hanging painted doors of Arthur’s house on Armenian Street”);

Rachel Aviv, “Personal Statement,” November 27, 2023 (“She seemed uniquely incurious when I read her lines from her journal”);

Ed Caesar, "Speed," December 25, 2023 ("We did a warmup lap in Sports Mode—or Baby Mode, as Roys called it—hitting 155 m.p.h. Then he switched to something called F5 Mode. Before the final, short straightaway, he asked me if I was ready. When he hit the accelerator, it was like being strapped to a surface-to-air missile. Each gear change provoked the car to ever more noise and aggression. We hit 170 m.p.h., then braked to make the final turn. I stifled the urge to scream, but not to curse").

And now, with my last few drops of that superb Negroni, I want to propose a toast: Here’s to the greatest magazine in the world! New Yorker without end, amen! 

Credits: (1) Illustration by Sophy Hollington, from Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Talk to Me”; (2) Photo by Cole Wilson, from Hannah Goldfield’s “Upper Crust”; (3) Illustration by Nolan Pelletier, from Jill Lepore’s “Pay Dirt”; (4) Georgia O’Keeffe, “Untitled (Abstraction/Portrait of Paul Strand” (1917); (5) Photo by Alice Zoo, from Sam Knight’s “Hive Mind”; (6) Illustration by Roche Cruchon, from Amanda Petrusich’s “Horny on Main.”

Elizabeth Kolbert's Enthralling "Talk to Me"

Illustration by Sophy Hollington, from Elizabeth Kolbert's "Talk to Me"

In my note on the September 11, 2023 New Yorker, I neglected to comment on Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent “Talk to Me.” I want to rectify that right now. To me, it’s one of the year’s best fact pieces. It’s about a team of scientists attempting to use artificial intelligence to speak with sperm whales. Kolbert visits the team's base on Dominica, a volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles: “In July, I went down to Dominica to watch the CETI team go sperm-whale bugging.” That’s the kind of sentence that hooks me every time. She sails on a catamaran, observing members of the team use an experimental drone to attach a recording device to a sperm whale (“The drone took off and zipped toward the whale. It hovered for a few seconds, then dropped vertiginously. For the suction cups to adhere, the drone had to strike the whale at just the right angle, with just the right amount of force”). Most memorably, she witnesses the birth of a baby sperm whale:

Suddenly, someone yelled out, “Red!” A burst of scarlet spread through the water, like a great banner unfurling. No one knew what was going on. Had the pilot whales stealthily attacked? Was one of the whales in the group injured? The crowding increased until the whales were practically on top of one another.

Then a new head appeared among them. “Holy fucking shit!” Gruber exclaimed.

“Oh, my God!” Gero cried. He ran to the front of the boat, clutching his hair in amazement. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The head belonged to a newborn calf, which was about twelve feet long and weighed maybe a ton. In all his years of studying sperm whales, Gero had never watched one being born. He wasn’t sure anyone ever had.

As one, the whales made a turn toward the catamaran. They were so close I got a view of their huge, eerily faceless heads and pink lower jaws. They seemed oblivious of the boat, which was now in their way. One knocked into the hull, and the foredeck shuddered.

Then she watches as a school of pilot whales arrive:

To everyone’s relief, the baby began to swim on its own. Then the pilot whales showed up—dozens of them.

“I don’t like the way they’re moving,” Gruber said.

“They’re going to attack for sure,” Gero said. The pilot whales’ distinctive, wave-shaped fins slipped in and out of the water.

What followed was something out of a marine-mammal “Lord of the Rings.” Several of the pilot whales stole in among the sperm whales. All that could be seen from the boat was a great deal of thrashing around. Out of nowhere, more than forty Fraser’s dolphins arrived on the scene. Had they come to participate in the melee or just to rubberneck? It was impossible to tell. They were smaller and thinner than the pilot whales (which, their name notwithstanding, are also technically dolphins).

Kolbert’s description of the skirmish is masterful. The whole piece is masterful – a thrilling blend of travel, adventure, and science. I devoured it.

Echoes and Reverberations

Photo by Thomas Prior, from Eric Klinenberg's "Manufacturing Nature"

One of the pleasures of being a long-time New Yorker reader is noticing the connections. Five recent examples:

1. Eric Klinenberg, in his excellent “Manufacturing Nature” (August 9, 2021), mentions Brooklyn’s Plum Beach: “On a cold day this spring, Orff met me at Plumb Beach, a short, narrow stretch of shoreline at the southern edge of Brooklyn, and a nesting-and-breeding ground for horseshoe crabs.” I read that and immediately thought of Ian Frazier’s “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014), a brilliant piece on horseshoe crabs set, among other places, on Plum Beach (“Farther along the beach, Russian fishermen stood beside their belled fishing poles, impassive and unimpressed as only Russians can be. They had lit fires of damp straw to keep the bugs away; the sharp-smelling smoke coiled around”). 

2. In his piece, Klinenberg visits the wetlands that jut out from the mouth of the Mississippi River. This is a landscape that Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about in her memorable “Under Water” (April 1, 2019): “So thick with simulated sediment were the channels of the Bird’s Foot that they looked as if they were filled with ink.”

3. Also in his piece, Klinenberg mentions the federal levees that line the Mississippi. This triggered a remembrance of John McPhee’s great “Atchafalaya” (February 23, 1987), a piece on the construction of the levees by the Corps of Engineers: "Three hundred miles up the Mississippi River from its mouth—many parishes above New Orleans and well north of Baton Rouge—a navigation lock in the Mississippi’s right bank allows ships to drop out of the river."

4. Elizabeth Kolbert, in her absorbing “The Lost Canyon” (August 16, 2021), refers to the Colorado River Compact, a subject covered in David Owen’s superb “Where the River Runs Dry” (May 25, 2015). Owen, in his piece, travels the length of the Colorado, noting the many signs of water crisis ("Hinojosa Huerta explained that the embankment was a levee, built to protect locals from the river—a function almost impossible to imagine, because the channel of the Colorado was a mile to our east, and there was nothing between it and us but desert"). Kolbert focuses on the alarming depletion of Lake Powell, a giant man-made reservoir on the Colorado. Her piece could be considered a companion to Owen’s report.

5. Also in her piece, Kolbert mentions Floyd Dominy, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation in the nineteen sixties and Glen Canyon Dam’s biggest booster. Dominy is one of four men profiled in John McPhee’s masterful “Encounters with the Archdruid” (March 20, 27 & April 3, 1971): "Dominy begins to talk dams. To him, the world is a tessellation of watersheds. When he looks at a globe, he does not see nations so much as he sees rivers, and his imagination runs down the rivers building dams."

So lots of echoes and reverberations! They add an extra layer of meaning to my New Yorker reading experience. 

June 21, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Elizabeth Kolbert’s absorbing “The Deep,” an essay on deep-sea mining and the threat it poses to fragile deep-sea ecosystems. Reading it, I learned about extraordinary “bioluminescent creatures” that live in the vast darkness at the bottom of the sea, creatures such as the stoplight loose jaw (“a fish with photon-emitting organs under each eye”), the humpback blackdevil (“sports a shiny lure that dangles off its forehead like a crystal from a chandelier”), and the giant red mysid (“a hamster-size crustacean” that “spews streams of blue sparkles from nozzles near its mouth”). I also learned about hydrothermal vents. Kolbert writes,

Some of the seas’ most extraordinary animals live around hydrothermal vents—the oceanic equivalents of hot springs. Through cracks in the seafloor, water comes in contact with the earth’s magma; the process leaves it superheated and loaded with dissolved minerals. (At some vents, the water reaches a temperature of more than seven hundred degrees.) As the water rises and cools, the minerals precipitate out to form crenellated, castlelike structures.

Kolbert is a superb nature-describer. She says of the scaly-foot snail: “It’s the only animal known to build its shell with iron, and around its foot it sports a fringe of iron plates that looks a bit like a flamenco skirt.”

Kolbert’s piece flags a serious concern that deep-sea mining will wreck the ocean floor “before many of the most marvellous creatures living there are even identified.”  

Best of 2020: Reporting Pieces

Photo by Paolo Pellegrin, from Ben Taub's "Five Oceans, Five Deeps"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ben Taub’s “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” May 18, 2020 (“Most submarines go down several hundred metres, then across; this one was designed to sink like a stone. It was the shape of a bulging briefcase, with a protruding bulb at the bottom. This was the pressure hull—a titanium sphere, five feet in diameter, which was sealed off from the rest of the submersible and housed the pilot and all his controls. Under the passenger seat was a tuna-fish sandwich, the pilot’s lunch. He gazed out of one of the viewports, into the blue. It would take nearly four hours to reach the bottom”).

2. “April 15, 2020,” May 4, 2020 (“As the sun came up, dully brightening the morning, it revealed that the day was ordinary and out of the ordinary at the same time. Figures appeared far apart on the boardwalk, each one alone, each making a different exercise motion. One was using a jump rope, another had two small dumbbells, and another a piece of pipe. Many wore masks. On the horizon to the left lay the narrow sand spit of the Rockaways, a stratum of pale-brown beach below a gray-green line of bushes and trees. To the right loomed the grayish point of Sandy Hook, in New Jersey. In between, a small boat motored slowly by, its wake as white as a bridal train. The ordinary-extraordinary day settled in and locked itself into place. The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere. The whole city had become a waiting room”).

3. Alex Ross’s “The Bristlecones Speak,” January 20, 2020 (“Spears of dead wood jut into the air. The trunk is a marbled hulk stripped of bark, like driftwood thrown from a vanished ocean. A ribbon of live bark runs up one side, funnelling water and nutrients to clumps of green needles high above”).

4. Bill Buford’s “Good Bread," April 13, 2020 (“By nine, a line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people and from music being played at high volume. Everyone shouted to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes arriving in baskets, money changing hands”).

5. Burkhard Bilger’s “Building the Impossible,” November 30, 2020 (“Unlike the slide, which bullies through the apartment like a giant intestine, the staircase seems to crystallize the spaces it’s in. Built of white nanoglass—an opaque and extremely hard synthetic stone—it twists up through the building in precisely organized shards, offering sudden glimpses through the rooms unfolding around it”).

6. Vinson Cunningham’s “Eightyish,” April 13, 2020 (“Outside, I imagine that each stranger’s head is crowned by a saint’s halo of fatal droplets, waiting to surf on one of my breaths into my body and cut through my lungs like a spray of glass”).

7. Jonathan Blitzer’s “Juan Sanabria,” April 20, 2020 (“He’d been among the first fatalities. ‘Was he the eleventh person who died? I was trying to figure out if he was the tenth or the eleventh,’ Comerford told me. ‘That made this whole thing very real. Before, the deaths were just statistics. Knowing that one of them was Juan, it gave the thing a face’”).

8. Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Independent People,” June 8 & 15, 2020 (“That evening, the weather was clear and cool—by New York standards, too cool to eat outside, by Reykjavík standards balmy. The outdoor cafés were crowded. Restaurants had been asked to arrange their tables to keep groups two metres apart, but some diners, I noticed, had pushed the tables closer together. Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly. The scene was completely ordinary, which is to say now exotic—just people meeting up with friends for dinner. For a traveller these days, this might be an even better draw, I thought, than glaciers or whale-watching”).

9. Luke Mogelson’s “The Uprising,” June 22, 2020 (“Barricades around the four surrounding blocks impeded traffic and law enforcement. The sidewalk outside the Cup Foods grocery store—where an employee had called the police after suspecting George Floyd of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill—was buried under bouquets, mementos, and homemade cards. Activists delivered speeches between the gas pumps at a filling station; messages in chalk—“fight back,” “stay woke”—covered the street”).

10. Dana Goodyear’s “From the Ground Up,” October 12, 2020 (“The walls are made from elongated quartzite bricks, with gray-scale variations reminiscent of the larchwood slats of his atelier. Open seams in the ceiling allow sunlight to enter in ghostly lines—some defining an alternative volume within the space, others fanning out like an annunciation. A brass spout funnels water from the source, St. Petersquelle, into a brass basin with cups attached by chains. In one secluded pool, swimming around a corner reveals a chamber where the human voice harmonizes with the room so that humming creates a glorious Gregorian echo”). 

Three Superb "New Yorker" Pieces on Iceland

Photo by Valdimar Thorlacius, from Elizabeth Kolbert's "Independent People"

In my post last week regarding the June 8 & 15 New Yorker, I focused on Peter Schjeldahl’s wonderful critical essay “Apart.” But there’s another excellent piece in that issue – Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Independent People.” It’s about Iceland’s response to COVID-19 – how it managed to beat the curve. But it’s also a rarity – a coronavirus travelogue. Kolbert says, “Despite the generalized gloom, it was thrilling to be going somewhere; for the previous eight weeks, the farthest I’d travelled was to the liquor store.” It was thrilling for me, too, just to be able to vicariously tag along with her as she nosed around Reykjavík,  struggling to abide by the rules of her modified quarantine. My favourite part of the piece is the last paragraph, in which Kolbert describes a Reykjavík evening:

That evening, the weather was clear and cool—by New York standards, too cool to eat outside, by Reykjavík standards balmy. The outdoor cafés were crowded. Restaurants had been asked to arrange their tables to keep groups two metres apart, but some diners, I noticed, had pushed the tables closer together. Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly. The scene was completely ordinary, which is to say now exotic—just people meeting up with friends for dinner. For a traveller these days, this might be an even better draw, I thought, than glaciers or whale-watching.

That “Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly” is inspired!

Reading “Independent People,” I recalled two other New Yorker pieces on Iceland that I enjoyed immensely: Adam Gopnik’s “Cool Running” (July 11 & 18, 2016) and Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues” (November 9, 2015).

“Cool Running” is Gopnik’s first-person account of his experience hanging out with historian Guðni Jóhannesson as he campaigned to become Iceland’s President. I like the last paragraph of this piece, too – a description of election-night at the Reykjavík Grand Hotel ballroom when it became clear that Jóhannesson won:

I have always wanted to be the first to say to someone “Congratulations, Mr. President.” And so I waited for Guðni to come to the ballroom. He arrived at last, buffeted by cameras, and made a speech, with Eliza, in a blue First Lady’s dress, by his side. He was obviously promising to be the President of all Icelanders, the last step in the choreography of candidacy. A birthday cake appeared, and then—a hallucinatory moment—another Icelandic actress sang “Happy Birthday,” in a perfect impression of Marilyn singing it to J.F.K., sexy sibilant by erotic syllable: “Happy biiirthday, Misstah Prez-uh-dent . . . ” The crowd cheered in pleasure and recognition. We live on one planet, indivisible.

Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues” tells about his experience riding with a search-and-rescue team on patrol in Iceland’s southern plain. The team is part of Iceland’s renowned Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg – an extensive system of emergency-response volunteers. The piece contains one of my favourite details in all New Yorker writing – bananas hanging on a row of plastic hangers in a kitchen tent:

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.

“Admiration and wonder” pretty well sums up the viewpoint of all three of these great New Yorker pieces. I highly recommend them.

Best of 2019: Reporting

Ilya Milstein's illustration for Alexandra Schwartz's "Bounty Hunters"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Alexandra Schwartz’s “Bounty Hunters,” November 25, 2019 (“You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart”).

2. Ian Frazier’s “Pumper’s Corner,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (As Rachael walked me through each well, I appreciated the Rube Goldberg-ness of it all. No two were the same. ‘The guys out here like to say that a well is like a woman, because each one needs to be handled differently,’ Rachael said. She had been to these wells often, and sort of whispered each one, the way she would a horse. She put her hands on pipes, felt for hot spots, peered into gauges, cocked an ear for wrong sounds. She had me listen at a pipe where rising gas from a mile down hissed and echoed—all O.K. there”).

3. Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man,” April 29, 2019 (“I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour”).

4. Burkhard Bilger’s “Extreme Range,” February 11, 2019 (“The voices were growing louder, circling the silo one by one with the choir close behind. Wells lifted his head to the cloud of voices rising and swirling toward the ceiling, then stretched out his arms as they joined in a great, ragged chord. When they fell silent, I could hear the tapping of rain on the roof outside. Then a last voice sang out—Shaw’s quiet mezzo, wafting up like a fleck of ash above a flame”).

5. Nicola Twilley, “Trailblazers,” August 26, 2019 (“The lit cannister of fuel I was holding, known as a drip torch, had a long, looped neck that emitted a jaunty quiff of flame”).

6. James Lasdun’s “Glow,” April 29, 2019 (“A crack appeared in the clouds directly above us. It widened, showing a sprinkling of stars and then the entire Big Dipper. There was a stirring among the photographers: their cameras had started detecting things. After a moment, an oblique greenish bar like the one I’d seen the night before became visible. It grew brighter and denser, then contracted into an oval of emerald light. People chattered excitedly. I was about to warn them not to get too carried away when a streak of brilliant green shot out of the oval, at high speed, and zoomed over our tipped-back heads, corkscrewing across the sky. I almost toppled over while following its trajectory. The green light formed several tentacles, which twisted and writhed together and looped in circles. Astonishment was proclaimed in a half-dozen languages. The circles dropped needles of piercing brightness that travelled, in tandem, around the sky, as if tracing the undulations of a celestial shower curtain”).

7. Rivka Galchen, “The Eighth Continent,” May 6, 2019 (When a Masten rocket takes off, it has a delicate appearance. One of the newer ones, the Xodiac, looks like two golden balloons mounted on a metal skeleton. A kite tail of fire shoots out as the Xodiac launches straight up; at its apex, it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf”).

8. Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Under Water,” April 1, 2019 (“On the model, the spillway gates were represented by small strips of brass attached to copper wires. Because they hadn’t worked properly in previous trials, an engineer was watching over them from a folding chair. He looked like a latter-day Gulliver, bent over a drowning Lilliput. He, too, I noticed, had wet socks”).

9. Douglas Preston’s “The Day the Earth Died,” April 8, 2019 (“He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass”).

10. John Seabrook’s “Machine Hands,” April 15, 2019 (“It was only at the very end of the eight-second window that the Pitzer wheel dropped down and—in a blur of motion that recalled Doctor Octopus, the Spider-Man villain, attacking one of his victims—the claws grabbed and picked the ripe berries in a fraction of a second, pop-pop-pop, and deposited them, apparently unbruised, on a shelf at the top of the machine’s chassis. Then the robots moved on to the next plant in that row”).