December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 6 & 13, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Lawrence Wright’s "Five Hostages" is written in the third person – my least favorite perspective. Nevertheless, the piece totally absorbed me. It’s about five Americans kidnapped in Syria and their families’ fight to save them. It’s beautifully structured. But it has a political aspect I’m not sure I agree with. It’s rough on Obama for the “ineffectiveness” of his policy on terrorist kidnappings. But it wasn’t Obama who put these five people in harm’s way. They voluntarily assumed the grave risk of being kidnapped and murdered when they crossed into Syria. My take-away from this powerful piece is two-fold: (1) ISIS is one of the most barbaric terrorist groups the world has ever seen; (2) outsiders who venture into Syria should do so without illusion; they’re risking their lives.

2. Laura Miller, in her enjoyable "The System," a review of Don Winslow’s novel The Cartel, says of Winslow’s previous novel The Power of the Dog, “But none of it is a laughing matter.” Then, in the next line, she says, “Scratch that. Some of The Power of the Dog is funny.” Her sudden reversal made me smile. It’s an example of a critic winging it. Pauline Kael would approve.

3. And now here’s a collage of my favorite lines in this week’s issue:

The fibrousness of the paper and the uniqueness of each painstaking ridge turn the impassive gray or black surfaces of Park’s canvases into unexpected terrain (“Goings On About Town: Art: Park Seo-bo”) | The film’s good cheer seems less infectious than enforced; the cinematic embrace is stifling, and the good vibes feel overdone, like a present-tense trip of instant nostalgia (Richard Brody, “Goings On About Town: Movies: A Poem Is a Naked Person”) | Hitchcock’s ultimate point evokes cosmic terror: innocence is merely a trick of paperwork, whereas guilt is the human condition (Richard Brody, “Goings On About Town: Movies: The Wrong Man”) | Once he’d been spotted, a glass of marmalade-colored Languedoc in hand, the music writers made quick work of a plate of prosciutto and calculated an intricate split of their bill (Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: The Four Horsemen”) | By the time a late-night June rainstorm appears, and the subway’s lesser, more beige lines are being contemplated, Murphy has migrated from a table to the bar, where the bartender is pouring a quietly effervescent rosé out of a not so quiet magnum (Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: The Four Horsemen”) | The distillery is in a brick building with the warm smell of a country club’s oak locker room (Emma Allen, “Bar Tab: Kings County Distillery”) | His breakfast companion, who had been enjoying the gentle intensity of his company—the Concorde doesn’t take an article in British English, he said; he was certain that left-handers were overrepresented in the pilot population; he loves the B and C gates of Heathrow’s Terminal 5; flying back from Vancouver in winter, you can see the Northern Lights almost every night; when a B.A. pilot shows up for work, his iPad must be charged to at least seventy-five per cent—was suddenly put in mind of an ancient activity of her own, going on dates in restaurants that had televisions (Lauren Collins, “Bird’s-Eye View”) | Out on the runway, a queue was forming: a Middle East Airlines A320, bound for Beirut; a KLM 737, heading back to Amsterdam; the state aircraft of the United Arab Emirates, a private 747, half snow goose, half tapir, its snout sniffing the sky (Lauren Collins, “Bird’s-Eye View”) | Schick’s interpretation, which he has been honing for forty years, is a sinuous audiovisual ballet in which hard-hitting, rat-a-tat drum solos intermingle with subtle, whispery sounds, as of a tapped gong or a brushed gourd (Alex Ross, “Outsiders”) | In the course of four movements, this evanescent material acquired mass: droplets of melody and harmony precipitated from the air (Alex Ross, “Outsiders”)