April 8, 2013 Issue

My April 8^th New Yorker is looking pretty battered. It’s been rolled up and stuffed in my backpack for three weeks while I roamed around northern Italy. I read it on my April 15 flight to Florence. It’s a rich, absorbing issue. Six pieces stand out:

1. Sarah Stillman’s “Up in the Air,” a Talk story about a “drone party” (“Druce’s drone, equipped with sonar, did not take flight but wobbled on the pavement like a drunken Jabberwock”);

2. Mark Singer’s “Thar She Blows,” a Talk piece about the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibit “Whales: Giants of the Deep” (“Three days before the exhibition opened, Professor Pou Temara, a specialist in Maori language and culture at the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, New Zealand, chanted a Maori blessing in a low monotone as he led a procession past displays of toothed and toothless whale skulls …”);

3. Jeremy Denk’s “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” a Personal History piece about Denk’s “piano student” experiences (“I couldn’t believe that, twenty years later, in this land of traffic lights and strip malls, we were both still carrying the memory of those two minutes of Bach”);

4. Hisham Matar’s “The Return,” an account of Matar’s return to Libya and his search for information regarding his father’s disappearance (“I remember the high eucalyptus trees in the front garden, their big and vivid shadows on the earth, black claws on the cars”);

5. Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The Bad-Boy Brand,” a profile of Vice Media and its hip C.E.O., Shane Smith (“We took a water taxi through the canals, past crumbling buildings and water-stained walls, and arrived at San Marco just as the floodwaters were rising. The area was swarming with tourists, and a narrow pathway of raised wooden planks was threaded precariously through the square. As the waters rose, the tourists crossed the square on the planks, shuffling in a long, two-person-wide line, like animals boarding Noah’s Ark”);

6. James Wood’s “Youth In Revolt,” a review of Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (“But it manifests itself as a pure explosion of now: it catches us in its mobile, flashing present, which is the living reality it conjures on the page at the moment we are reading”).

Of these six, my favorite is Widdicombe’s “The Bad-Boy Brand.” The last section, describing Smith and his crew wading through flooded Piazza San Marco (“The water was filthy, and occasionally a dead pigeon floated past”), is brilliant. Widdicombe’s “Rush” (September 13, 2012) was last year’s best Talk story. Her superb “The Bad-Boy Brand” may well be this year’s best feature. 

February 6, 2012 Issue

Until I read Ian Frazier's great "Out of the Bronx," in this week's issue, the term "private-equity firm" was, for me, just an empty abstraction, like "hedge fund," "leveraged buyout," and all those other financial gimmicks investors use to line their pockets. Frazier's piece turned the abstract into the pungent and the particular. Now I associate "private equity firm" with the destruction of the "warm, gingerbready smell" of fresh-baked cookies. "Out of the Bronx" is about, among other things, the downfall of the Bronx-based Stella D'oro bakery as a result of being taken over by a greedy, ruthless private-equity firm named Brynwood Partners. The piece is noteworthy because many of the crucial details are noticed not by Frazier's eyes, but by his nose. Consider, for example, this amazing description:

The baking cookie smell entered check-cashing places and barbershops and bodegas, it crossed the razor wire into the M.T.A. yards and maintenance sheds west of Broadway, it occupied the loud channel of the Major Deegan Expressway, just to the east; kids dozing in the back seats of their parents' cars sniffed the air and knew they were almost home. The smell competed with the acridity of hot wax and detergent chemicals at Nice Guys Car Wash, just across the street from the factory, and domesticated the beer fumes and late-night atmosphere at Stack's Tavern, a shamrock-bedecked bar between 234th and 236th Streets, where a bartender told me, "Sure, I remember the smell - fresh-baked cookies. Nuttin' wrong with that!"

That "kids dozing in the back seats of their parents' car sniffed the air and knew they were almost home" is inspired! The whole passage is beautifully rhythmed; it reminds me of Joyce's cadences in his great "snow was general all over Ireland" paragraph at the end of "The Dead." Aromatic details are powerfully evocative, yet so few writers include them in their descriptions. Frazier is an excellent "nose" writer. His description, in Travels In Siberia (2010), of the smell of Russia is unforgettable: "I breathed it deeply. Yes, it was all there - the tea bags, the cucumber peels, the wet cement, the chilly air, the currant jam. About the only point of similarity between this smell and the one I'd just left in Nome was the overtone of diesel exhaust."

A different smell - the smell of freshly baked cookies - permeates "Out of the Bronx." I breathed it deeply. Whenever I see or hear "private-equity firm," I'll remember the cookie smell. I'll remember what Brynwood Partners did to Stella D'oro.

Postscript: Another brilliant piece in this week's issue is Jeremy Denk's "Flight of the Concord." Written in the first-person present, it's a miracle of description - miraculous in the sense that it provides a fascinating glimpse of a pianist's inner thoughts, his inscape, as he proceeds, take after take, through innumerable technical and interpretative problems, to record Charles Ives's "Concord" Sonata. Reading it is rapture.