March 30, 2026 Issue

For those of us hoping for regime change in Cuba, Jon Lee Anderson’s report, in this week’s New Yorker, is discouraging. He seems to say that even though the situation in Cuba has never been more dire, the Cuban people blame Trump, not their own rotten Communist government. Anderson says, “During my visit, everyone I talked to was worried about the country’s vulnerability, but few were worried about whether the government would survive.” His point that “Cuba has been through hard times before. The mythos of the Revolution is built around the people’s ability to endure” is true. My son-in-law Dayan, who is Cuban, says the same thing: “We’ve been through this before.” He’s quite fatalistic. He doesn’t see any change coming out of it. Is he right? Anderson seems to think so. He says, 

Even if negotiations with the U.S. yield an agreement to hold elections, Cuba has no organized political opposition that could run against the Communist Party, let alone take over the country. As a friend in Havana pointed out, there is no local equivalent of María Corina Machado, the opposition leader who helped encourage the intervention in Venezuela. The best-known dissidents are dead, imprisoned, or in exile, too far removed from recent politics to be taken seriously. The likelier scenario is that the next ruler will come from within the existing power structure—which, my friend suggested, means that little will change.

It’s too bad. What a waste of a golden opportunity to overthrow the bastards.

Postscript: Rossana Warren’s poem “Coots,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. I love that “Jagged surface of the city reservoir.” And “It would snow soon, / we walked fast, night was spreading its cloak, / the western skyline sparkled its broken glass, / and the birds in their tuxedos tightened their rings / so the water rippled glossily / out around them, catching glints” is inspired! I’m going to pay more attention to her work. She appears to be a sharp observer of nature. 

October 6, 2025, Issue

Maybe, just maybe, the rotten Communist government in Cuba is about to crumble. The country is living a nightmare right now. No food. No medicine. No gas. Disintegrating electrical grid. The tourist industry is in free fall. Sugar production, which was once among the highest in the world, is so bad that the country now has to import sugar. Most alarming is the mass exodus of people. Jon Lee Anderson, in this week’s New Yorker, reports,

The exodus began in 2021, when anti-government rallies filled the streets, protesting oppressive policies and the lack of medicine and food. Castro had died five years before, but the Communist Party retained its grip on power, and it put down the protests harshly, jailing and beating hundreds of demonstrators. Since then, an estimated eighteen per cent of Cubans—as many as two million residents—have left. This represents the largest outflux in the sixty-six-year span of the tumultuous Revolution.

The government is ripe for overthrow. But this has been said many times before. Is this time any different? Anderson, who visited the country recently, senses it might be. He writes,

Critics have been predicting that the regime in Havana is about to collapse since the demise of the Soviet Union, thirty-five years ago. During my recent visit, though, the situation felt unusually tenuous. It is as if the convergence of penury, incapacity, and decline has finally become impossible to ignore. Cuba has many chronic problems, but the essential one is that its economy doesn’t provide for its people. After Fidel Castro stepped down as President, in 2008, he made a rare admission of his government’s inability to run the economy: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” Castro had been in office for forty-nine years. His brother Raúl succeeded him for nine years more, and an acolyte of theirs named Miguel Díaz-Canel has led for the past six. None of them has been able to reverse the slide.

I hope Anderson is right. One of the most beautiful islands in the world, populated by an incredibly resourceful, resilient, spirited people – Cuba is shackled by a horrible, oppressive system of government. It’s not going to be easy to get free of it. But that is what Cubans have to do – rise up and overthrow the bastards who control them. They did it before; they can do it again. 

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. 

August 17, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. My eyes devour the thick luscious texture of Wayne Thiebaud’s “Two Scoops” – certainly my choice for best cover of the year (so far).

2. My favorite part of Peter Hessler’s absorbing “How China Controlled the Virus” is the first section in which he describes trailing a robot on his bicycle. Here’s a sample:

Now I waited with the robot, looking around at the silent dormitories. Finally, three students approached from different directions, masked and holding cell phones. Each of them entered a code on a touch screen at the back of the robot, and a compartment popped open, revealing a package inside.

3. Pick of the Issue is Jon Lee Anderson’s “Wanderlust,” an account of his 1978 trip to Nunivak, Alaska, to collect musk-ox wool (qiviut). Here’s his description of his arrival on the island:

The only other passengers were residents returning from a wedding on the mainland. When we landed, they offered me a lift into Mekoryuk, so I climbed into the back of their pickup truck and rode on a dirt track into town.

Anderson hikes across Nunivak’s interior (tundra, muskeg, lakes) to a place called Musk Ox Hill; shoots salmon (“A minute later, a big pink salmon—a humpy,’ they called it—poked its bulging back and head from the water, and I pulled the trigger. The fish thrashed and then turned dead on its side. When I pulled it from the water, I saw that my lucky shot had hit it cleanly in the head”); encounters musk oxen:

As I made my way toward them, one of the musk oxen, a hulking bull, appeared in my path. He was clearly scouting for trouble, and though he couldn’t see me or smell me, he’d heard me, and he was taking off fast back toward the others. I moved cautiously, hopping from tussock to tussock, keeping myself downwind of the bull. By the time I was sixty feet from the group, I was close enough to see their sunstruck hair, the qiviut sweeping off their massive shoulders and into the wind. I waited, hoping that they’d move, so that I could check their resting spot. To rouse them, I attempted some birdcalls: one that I hoped would sound like a kookaburra, and one like an owl. The oxen lay there, oblivious. A stork on a nearby slope strutted about scornfully.

The piece reminded me of my own Arctic travels. I enjoyed it immensely.

October 3, 2016, Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Jon Lee Anderson’s “The Cuba Play” is one of 2016’s most absorbing reporting pieces. It tells the story of Obama’s Cuba project, beginning with a remarkable scene – Obama on stage at La Cerveceria, on Havana Harbor, speaking directly to the Cuban people about entrepreneurship – then cutting to Anderson’s interview with Obama (“A few weeks later, in the Oval Office, I asked Obama about the reaction”), then moving into a remarkable reconstruction of the string of events leading to the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations, including the famous handshake between Obama and Raúl Castro at Nelson Mendela’s funeral (“Castro wore an expression of flustered delight”), secret negotiations in Ottawa, the transfer of a vial of sperm of a Cuban spy, and a covert letter from Pope Francis to Obama. Anderson has discussed some of these events before in his “News Desk” posts on newyorker.com. But in “The Cuba Play,” he masterfully draws it all together, combining it with fascinating quotations from his personal interviews with Obama and other key players. If you consider the opening with Cuba one of Obama's major accomplishments, as I do, you’ll surely appreciate Anderson’s great “The Cuba Play.”

2.  I relish descriptions of scent. There are two dandies in this week’s issue: Jiayang Fan’s “Just then, the chocolate fondue arrived, halting the conversation with its exhalation of cinnamon and coconut” (“Tables For Two: Ladybird”), and Ian Frazier’s “He ordered a decaf espresso and asked the waiter to top it off with Sambuca. A smell of licorice rose” (“Don’t Tread On Me”).

3. I’m not crazy about pop music, but Hua Hsu’s “Word of Mouth,” on Bon Iver’s digitally manipulated sound, impinged my consciousness with this inspired line: “Speech synthesizers often make a song sound as though someone were running a leaky fluorescent highlighter across its lyrics.”

July 20, 2015 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that most absorbed me is Jon Lee Anderson’s "Opening For Business." I’m fond of Cuba. It’s the source of some of my most pleasurable travel memories. I haven’t been there since 2011. I’m curious to know what’s happening there as a result of the announcement last December that the United States and Cuba agreed to normalize relations. Anderson’s excellent 

piece informs me:

To a visitor, Havana appears much the same as it has for decades––people at loose ends, distressed buildings—but there has been an explosion of small private enterprises and, with them, pockets of encouraging prosperity. For the first time since the sixties, when Castro declared a “revolutionary offensive” to “eliminate all manifestations of private trade,” Cubans are being allowed to take charge of their material lives. People are better dressed; there are more cars on the road; and everywhere there are new restaurants and bars and hostels, where Cubans rent rooms to foreign visitors. In early April, Airbnb announced the launch of Cuban operations; by month’s end, Governor Andrew Cuomo had flown in with a planeload of New York business executives for a trade summit, and an N.B.A. good-will delegation had set up training camps for Cuban athletes. On May 5th, the U.S. Treasury Department lifted restrictions on ferry services from Florida; the same day, Jet Blue said that it planned to begin flying between Havana and New York.

Tourism has surged nearly twenty per cent this year, and hotel lobbies in Havana are noisy with troubadours singing “Guantanamera” and odes to Che Guevara; buses and luridly painted old Chevys trundle sightseers around the city. There are Europeans, Canadians, Brazilians; one morning, I saw a group of elderly Chinese visitors dressed in safari clothing exploring the grounds of La Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s home.

Increasingly, there are also Americans, mostly sixty-somethings on “cultural tours” but also college students and hipsters from New York and Los Angeles. People in Havana joke that the latest accessory for an evening out is an American friend. The city’s harbor is being refurbished to accommodate U.S. cruise ships….

Havana’s night life, once moribund, is alive again. In a former peanut-oil factory, La Fábrica de Arte Cubano hosts dancers, filmmakers, painters, photographers, and musicians. Across town, the Las Vegas Cabaret features a transvestite show. Havana, long a Soviet-style culinary wasteland, is now a fine place to go out for Spanish, Italian, Iranian, Turkish, Swedish, or Chinese, in restaurants frequented by foreigners but also by newly moneyed Cubans….

The best parts of “Opening For Business,” for me, are the first-person sentences, e.g., “One day this spring, as I rode through the city in a taxi, a glossy black BMW raced past, and a policeman at the next intersection gave the driver a deferential salute”; “In Havana, I met a successful Miami night-club owner who is converting his family’s old home into a boutique hotel.” They personalize the piece, converting fact into experience.

“Opening For Business” is an illuminating report on the shifting identity of the “new Cuba.” I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: The most inspired sentence in this week’s issue is Shauna Lyon’s “But, after a bout of wrestling, a forkful of sweet crab meat was finally dipped into a sauce of toasted garlic slivers and rich guajillo-chili-infused oil, and there was peace” ("Tables For Two: Rosie's").

April 7, 2014 Issue

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

March 10, 2014 Issue

There are two excellent political pieces in this week’s issue – Peter Hessler’s “Revolution On Trial” and Jon Lee Anderson’s “The Comandante’s Canal.” What makes them excellent is their high quotient of personal experience.

Hessler’s piece, a report on the current Egyptian situation, is drenched in experienced reality: his visit to the tense Police Academy courtroom, where members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including former President Mohamed Morsi, are on trial (“I was sitting next to the cage, and after a while Mohamed el-Beltagy, one of the accused, began gesturing to me through the bars”); his escape from gunfire at a protest rally in Mohandiseen (“I was running on a bad foot – I had injured a ligament a few weeks before – and I slowed to a walk once I though we were out of range. But then I heard bird shot ripping through the leaves of a tree overhead, so I started running again”).

Anderson’s “The Comandante’s Canal,” about Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s plan to build a transoceanic canal, also features vivid experiential moments. Though not as existentially edgy as Hessler’s brush with gunfire, they make their point. For example, in a passage that serves to illustrate the vast economic gap between many impoverished Nicaraguans and the wily canal planners, Anderson writes,

In December, driving with a Nicaraguan companion along a dirt road in the backcountry, I stopped to offer a lift to an elderly woman, whose burnished skin suggested indigenous blood. She was wearing a long traditional dress, and she was moving slowly, with the help of a walking stick. When I asked if she wanted a ride, she thanked me, and said, “Some alms would be better, son.” I dug into my pocket for a hundred-cordoba note, worth about four American dollars. She looked at it bemusedly, and asked, “What is it?” Shocked, my companion tried to explain what paper money was. She looked quizzical, and kept on walking.

Passages like these, the basic stuff of reality, are what kept me reading Anderson’s and Hessler’s pieces. They stick to specifics and avoid abstractions. In this they're exceptional because, as Orwell pointed out, the whole tendency of political writing is “away from concreteness” (“Politics and the English Language”).

Postscript: A special shout-out to Richard Brody, editor of “Goings On About Town” ’s “Movies” department, for his inclusion of Pauline Kael’s Grand Hotel capsule review in this week’s issue. Kael is one of the all-time New Yorker greats. It’s a pleasure to see her work still appearing in the magazine.

August 27, 2012 Issue

Summertime and the living is easy, right? Not necessarily at The New Yorker. Mixed in with the magazine’s articles about mosquitoes, TED conferences, strength competitions, scavenger hunts, and modern violins, are gritty, gruesome war reports – four of them this summer, including this week’s “The War Within” by Jon Lee Anderson. The other three are William Finnegan’s “The Kingpins” (July 2, 2012), Dexter Filkins’s “After America” (July 9 & 16, 2012), and Jon Lee Anderson’s “A History of Violence" (July 23, 2012). Encountering them is like coming face to face with the mouth of hell. Assassination, decapitation, castration, torture, mass murder, maiming, starvation, atrocity – it’s all there, the real truth about human experience, expressed in crisp, clear, matter-of-fact prose. I force myself to read it, and even though it’s perverse to consider it the way I do other non-war New Yorker writings, i.e., formally, in terms of writing as pure writing, I find myself admiring certain turns of phrase, descriptions, details, etc. For example, Anderson’s “The War Within,” in this week’s issue, contains this vivid description of a rebel leader at his base in a commandeered school:

Abu Anas wore a black Polo shirt and holstered pistol when he received me in his office. With lilac-colored walls and salmon-pink curtains, the office was a difficult place in which to give the impression of ferocity, but Abu Anas had made a concerted effort. On a desk, he had laid a Koran and another holy book, and a sword with a battered golden scabbard, engraved with Koranic inscriptions. Behind him hung a black flag, like the one that flew on the mosque.

And I admire the bravery of these reporters. Their willingness to travel in dangerous places and meet volatile individuals is amazing. I worry that we’re going to lose one or more of them. Why do they do it? Like Goya, they appear to have a fascination with life’s extremes. John Updike said of Goya, “he relentlessly bared the nightmare beneath the world’s surface” (“An Obstinate Survivor,” The New Yorker, November 3, 2003). That’s what Anderson, Filkins, and Finnegan do – bare the nightmare beneath the world’s surface. If we ignore the truth of their brute reality, we do so at our peril. 

July 23, 2012 Issue

“No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams wrote, introducing his long poem Paterson. I enjoy writing that follows this dictum. This week’s New Yorker brims with things, e.g., Charlie Watts’s “carefully cut gray suit, a violet shirt, and brown tasseled loafers” (Alec Wilkinson’s “Tag Team”), the “old bicycle sprouting bundles of bamboo fishing baskets” on display in a museum in Hanoi’s old market district (Jane Kramer’s “A Reporter at Odds”), the torturous Apollon’s Wheels barbell that caused Brian Shaw to “tweak” his left biceps at this year’s Arnold Strongman Classic (Burkhard Bilger’s “The Strongest Man in the World”), and the intimidating “field hockey stick, decorated with bright racing stripes” wielded by Brigadier Mahana Bashir, commander of an S.P.L.A. training camp in the Nuba Mountains (Jon Lee Anderson’s “A History of Violence”). My favorite “thing” in this week’s issue is the unbroken white clay pipe with the “irregular tooth marks” at the base of the stem that the conceptual landscape artist Matthew Jensen found “half buried near a park trail in Riverdale.” It’s mentioned in Ian Frazier’s dandy little Talk story about Jensen (“Lost and Found”). Looking at those tooth marks sparks Frazier’s imagination, inspiring him to write this wonderful line: “Suddenly, the face of the snaggletoothed smoker seemed to materialize, the café faded out, and a landscape of old New York sprang up magically all around.” 

May 9, 2011 Issue

A New Yorker without a book review is like a pastrami sandwich without hot mustard, a mojito without mint, tiramisù without the cognac. The book review is a key ingredient of the magazine’s “signature mix”; when it’s absent, as it is this week, I feel cheated. But I soon get over it, usually when I find myself immersed in an inspired feature, as I did this week, in Jon Lee Anderson’s “Sons of the Revolution.” What a terrific piece of reportage! Anderson seems to thrive on chaos. He has a knack of making contact with articulate, English-speaking individuals who are directly impacted on a survival level by the events he’s covering, e.g., Nadia François, in earthquake-ravaged Port-au-Prince (“Neighbor’s Keeper,” The New Yorker, February 8, 2010), and binding their experiences into his narrative core. In “Sons of the Revolution,” the central figure is Osama ben Sadik, a volunteer ambulance driver, who, during the time Anderson is with him, suffers the tragic loss of his oldest son, Muhannad, in the war with Qaddafi’s soldiers. Anderson’s style could be described as first-person descriptive analysis. It’s tremendously effective; it puts you right in the thick of things. Yet, it also pulls back now and then and gives you a glimpse of the big picture. For example, in “Sons of the Revolution,” he says, “As Qaddafi’s Army advanced, a number of Libyans told me that, if Benghazi fell, they would retreat to the Green Mountains, east of the city, to fight a guerrilla war.” Anderson uses his mention of “Green Mountains” to trace the chain of events that led to Qaddafi’s dictatorship. It must be tremendously difficult for a foreign correspondent to find his or her focus in such a welter of information, much of it conflicting, that a revolution or a war or a natural disaster throws up. But Anderson always seems to pull it off. His “Sons of the Revolution” goes straight into my personal anthology of great reportage literature.

March 28, 2011 Issue

The best thing in this week’s issue is the color-drenched 1941 photo of Helena Rubinstein, wearing a flame-red dress, dripping with jewels, seated in a sumptuous purple armchair. Unfortunately, the article that accompanies the photo – Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Color of Money” – is a dud. Ostensibly a book review, it’s actually another one of Gladwell’s business morality tales. But in this one, the moral Gladwell teases out of a review of Ruth Brandon’s Ugly Beauty is that “Sometimes beauty is just business.” Thank you, Malcolm, for that illuminating aperçu.

Sometimes baseball is just business, too - most of the time, actually. Which is why I took a pass on reading Ben McGrath’s “King of Walks.” Having absolutely no interest in Spanx, I merely skim-read Alexandra Jacob’s “Smooth Moves.” Then I turned expectantly to Lauren Collins’s “Sole Mate.” I loved Collins’s “Angle of Vision” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010). Alas, “Sole Mate” is not nearly as good, and I think I know why. Its subject, the shoe designer Christian Louboutin, does not appear to attract Collins’s admiration the way the paraglider/photographer George Steinmetz does in “Angle of Vision.” There’s nothing in “Sole Mate” that even comes close to matching the inspiration of some of the passages in “Angle of Vision.” This one, for example: “Their parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow, reminded me of horseshoe crabs. In the fading light, the sand turned from the color of paprika to a blood-orange shade and then to an iridescent purple, like eyeshadow, eventually deepening to a chocolaty brown.”

The only other piece in this week’s issue that had potential to be interesting was Evan Osnos’s “Aftershocks.” While it’s gracefully written and contains many absorbing facts about the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan’s northeast coast last month, it fails to put a human face on the victims. Compare it with Jon Lee Anderson’s gritty “Neighbors’ Keeper” (The New Yorker, February 8, 2010), a report on conditions in Haiti six days after it was struck by an earthquake. Anderson places Nadia François, who walks miles from her town in a ravine in search of supplies, at the center of his piece. We see the devastation of the landscape and the suffering of the people at ground level, as Anderson follows François’ desperate quest for aid. Osnos, in his piece, doesn’t get close enough to the trauma. And in fairness to him, there was the risk of radiation exposure if he got too close to the disaster zone. Whatever the reason, his piece feels weirdly detached. I think the problem is that Osnos gives us his Tokyo experience, when what we're expecting is a detailed description of life in the cities and villages hit by the tsunami.

Second Thoughts: I’m feeling guilty. I was too hard on Osnos’s “Aftershocks.” The passage in which Osnos and a friend are driving through Tokyo at night and are stopped at a red light “as an aftershock rippled through the car” is amazing.