September 22, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The Maira Kalman cover is brilliant! Titled “Stéphane Mallarmé with Shawl,” it shows the poet all in gray, wearing a vivid red-and-white patterned scarf and an opulent pink bowtie. Kalman is one of the preeminent colorists of our time. It’s great to see her still doing New Yorker covers.

2. One of my favorite “Talk of the Town” writers is Robert Sullivan. He relates (as I do) to quirky individuals who do things solely for their own sake. His “Manhattan's Springs,” in this week’s issue, is a perfect example of his own idiosyncratic work. It’s about a Brooklyn-based photographer named Stanley Greenberg, who walks through upper Manhattan and the Bronx, posting copies of James Reuel Smith’s photos of old springs and wells near the spots where they originally existed. Sullivan writes,

On a recent summer day, Greenberg moved through the Bronx with the brisk authority of a biker who has little time for automobiles, methodically checking the map on his phone, pulling copies of Smith’s photos from his backpack, watching for construction sheds. “The city will take the photos down, and so will landlords, but they seem to last longest on these sheds,” he said. Many of the photographs have already disappeared, though a friend recently spotted one that had been posted in June, at Broadway and 108th Street, outside a closed bagel shop. “I don’t care,” Greenberg said. “I just want to post them all.”

It's a curious project, charting the disappearance of old water sources. Greenberg has a deep sense of transience. So does Sullivan. I enjoyed this piece immensely.

3. Another enjoyable piece is Lauren Collins’ “The Unicode.” It’s a profile of a giant clothing company based in Tokyo called Uniqlo. Until I read this piece, I’d never heard of it. Collins visits the company’s headquarters. She visits a newly renovated Uniqlo store in the Tokyo neighborhood of Asakusa. She visits the Uniqlo store in Paris. She visits the Uniqlo offices in London, where she talks with Uniqlo’s creative director Clare Waight Keller. She attends an event at Tate Modern, in London, in which people around the world vie to design a Uniqlo shirt. In Paris, she meets and talks with Uniqlo’s founder, Tadashi Yanai, who still serves as its C.E.O., and who is now the second-richest man in Japan. It’s quite a tour! My favorite part is Collins’ description of Uniqlo’s factory:

The employees were working on a batch of women’s chocolate-brown 3D Knit Soufflé Yarn Skirts (size M) and forest-green 3D Knit polo shirts (size XL). After the machines pumped out the items, the clothes were sent, ten at a time, to be examined for flaws. At an inspection station, a woman in pigtails and a surgical mask was in the process of checking a green polo. She draped it over two upright illuminated cones—think lightsabres mounted on a lazy Susan—scrutinizing the fabric for snags and holes. As we watched, a chimelike tune filled the room. “Five minutes until break,” Tomoya said. 

Collins is excellent at conveying the culture of complex corporations. Her “House Perfect” (The New Yorker, October 3, 2011), a portrait of IKEA, is masterly. “The Unicode” is every bit as good. 

4. Yet another absorbing piece in this week’s issue is D. T. Max’s “The Behemoth.” It tells about Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, an immense unfinished church in Barcelona, begun in 1882, and the amazing construction work currently underway to complete it. The Sagrada Família is an unusual church. Max describes it as "a head-spinning mixture of morphing geometrical forms, many inspired by nature. Its conical Art Nouveau pinnacles have the lumpy beauty of sandcastles." He visits the construction site and describes the activity. He’s guided by Jordi Faulí, the project’s ninth and current chief architect. The two of them ride rickety construction elevators, crawl through small passageways, climb vertical catwalks. The views are stunning. Here’s a sample:

Suddenly, we were standing inside the Mary tower, which is four hundred and fifty-two feet tall. Its walls were white—the color of purity—and the interior was brightly illuminated by eight hundred triangular windows of translucent white glass. The windows, Faulí later explained, were a scaled-up version of ones Gaudí had made for the sacristy, a section of Sagrada Família for which the architect had made a complete model.

The tower was a cone that narrowed to a point as it ascended. At the center of its circular base was a glimmering white hyperboloid, a gigantic stone object that looked like a cooling tower at a nuclear power plant. The hyperboloid had no top or bottom—it was a skylight that opened onto the nave below. Through this aperture, sunlight could filter all the way down to the church floor.

“The Behemoth” is a fascinating tour of an astonishing architectural work of art. I devoured it.

5. Beautiful architecture is also the subject of Adam Gopnik’s “Making a Move,” a tour of Philadelphia’s new Calder Gardens. Gopnik writes,

As one enters and descends, the space unfolds in a purposefully whimsical range of materials. Volcanic-seeming black rock lines a catacomblike stairway, punctuated by a single glass window framing a lone Calder. Tiered seats lead down into a viewing area that doubles as an amphitheatre for lectures or performances. Though buried, the sometimes monumental forms of the exhibition space rise convexly, lifting upward, while light from the Parkway pours in through floor-to-ceiling windows. Even underground, one feels enlarged, not entombed. And there’s nothing tomblike about the constant rumble of traffic from the boulevard outside.

Uniqlo factory, Sagrada Família, Calder Gardens – all transfixing places you can visit vicariously in this week’s splendid New Yorker. 

March 21, 2016 Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. Among its many pleasures – Maira Kalman’s color-drenched cover (“Spring Forward”), Laura Parker’s delightful Talk story "Bee's Knees" (“She dunked the bee in a tiny bottle containing her special blend of ‘bee shampoo’: a few drops of archival soap and deionized water”), Lizzie Widdicombe’s superb "Barbie Boy" (“At ground level, herds of strange footwear scurried around: silver Adidas sneakers with wings sprouting from the ankles, fuzzy ones with tails and tiger stripes, high-tops with green Teddy bears for tongues”), four excellent reviews (Peter Schjeldahl’s "Laughter and Anger," Dan Chiasson’s "The Tenderness Trap," Jill Lepore’s "After the Fact," and “James Wood’s "Floating Island") – the most piquant, for me, is Judith Thurman’s brilliant "The Empire's New Clothes," a profile of China’s first homegrown master couturier, Guo Pei. Thurman’s lines are as textured as the clothes she describes:

Guo’s Paris début proved to be more of a dessert course than an entrée. There were dresses for a thé dansant, dainty and frosted, in a macaron palette. Sabrina might have worn them. A chiffon poet’s blouse with embroidered cuffs was paired with the only trousers on the runway. Tabards were a theme, gorgeously bejewelled, but they seemed extraneous to the clothes they decorated, and one of them looked like a lobster bib. The first number that Guo sent out, however, announced what she can do when she pulls out all the stops. It was a strapless gown of distressed guipure—with scorched edges, stiffened and gilded—that looked like a giant sea sponge. Salt crystals glistened in its pores. It had the idiosyncratic “hand” of a great artisan.

Normally, I’m allergic to displays of wealth. But Guo’s gown of distressed guipure is something else. A ravishing Pari Dukovic photo of it illustrates Thurman’s piece. I’m glad to have seen it. 

November 4, 2013 Issue

This week’s issue – The Food Issue – brims with wonderful, sensual, tactile writing, e.g., “the cymbal clang of heat” that occurs when a flake of Trinidad Scorpion Butch T chili pepper hits the tongue (Lauren Collins, “Fire-Eaters”); Spanish gooseneck barnacles that look like “tiny dinosaur claws” (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Toro”); air that is “warm and moist and pungent with the scent of soured milk, like the cleavage of a nursing mother on a warm day” (Rebecca Mead, “Just Add Sugar”); “the beery, yeast-release aroma that spreads around the kitchen, the slowly exuding I’m-on-the-way smell of the rising loaf, and the intensifying fresh-bred smell that comes from the oven as it bakes” (Adam Gopnik, “Bread and Women”); “air of rosemary so delicate and light that it’s almost invisible; you know it’s there by the burst of flavor on your tongue” (Jane Kramer, “Post-Modena”); “a dish of raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts, meant to be slurped together in one viscous spoonful” that – “quiver on quiver on quiver – was almost impossible to swallow, but it rewarded you with a briny, primal rush” (Dana Goodyear, “Beastly Appetites”).

That “quiver on quiver on quiver” is inspired!

All five pieces are admirable for the subjective, experiential approach their authors take to their material. Collins, Mead, Gopnik, Goodyear, and Kramer not only observe; they participate. Here, for example, is Collins, sampling one of the “superhots” she describes, a Trinidad Scorpion Butch T (no less):

Taylor took a knife and whittled off a flake no larger than a clove. I put it in my mouth and chewed. The capsaicin hit loud and fast, a cymbal clang of heat. My face flushed. My eyes glassed over and I started pacing the kitchen, as though I could walk off the burn. It took twenty minutes and a can of Dr Pepper to banish the sensation of having sort of tinnitus of the mouth.

Of the five features, I think my favorite is Gopnik’s “Bread and Women.” It’s the most richly sensuous (e.g., a fresh-baked loaf of his wife’s bread is “braided like the blonde hair of a Swedish child”; broissants “crumble, with a spray of soft crumbs, under the lightest touch”; “real bagels, as produced in the Montreal bakeries, with a large hole, a bright sesame glow, and a sweet, firm bite”).

My least favorite is Goodyear’s “Beastly Appetite.” Reading about eating cod sperm, cut-in-half live lobster, horse tartare, scorpions on toast, yak sausage, and other “new things” is almost gag-inducing. I couldn’t read it fast enough and be done with it. Gross!

And – one more cavil - please, New Yorker, next year, return to using Wayne Thiebaud for The Food Issue cover. Ivan Brunetti’s liney, textureless, Pac-Man-like cartoon is an anemic substitute for Thiebaud’s gorgeous, creamy, thick-painted creations. (Googling Thiebaud’s name, I see he’s age 92; perhaps he’s no longer painting? But, as a replacement, Brunetti is so obviously not the answer. Only sensualists need apply. Maybe Maira Kalman? See the scrumptious bowl of tomato bisque soup in her The Principles of Uncertainty).

April 25, 2011 Issue

Amidst all the hectic dunking, fracking, handbag marketing, and neuronal computation going on in this week’s issue, I’d like to pause a moment to celebrate the bonnet-wearing bunny on the delicious pink-yellow-and-white Maira Kalman front cover. Of the many great New Yorker cover illustrators, Kalman is the most brilliant colorist. This week’s cover, titled “Everywhere I Go I See Hats,” is ravishing. Kalman produced my all-time favorite New Yorker cover – the March 14, 2005, “Just Duckie,” showing a blue-billed duck comfortably nesting on a woman’s reed-like green hair. Kalman is a genius – right up there with Matisse, in my humble opinion. I see she currently has a show at the Jewish Museum [“Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)”]. If I lived in New York, I’d definitely check it out.