October 15, 2018 Issue

This week’s issue contains one of the coolest, neatest, most delightful Talk stories I’ve ever read – Michael Schulman’s “Grasshopper.” It’s about a visit that actor Daniel Radcliffe recently paid to The New Yorker’s offices “to try his own hand at fact-checking.” Radcliffe is currently playing a fact-checker in the Broadway play The Lifespan of a Fact, based on Jim Fingal and John D’Agata’s book of the same name. (I haven’t read this book, but I know of it through a memorable review by Jennifer B. McDonald, published in the Times a few years ago, in which she called D’Agata’s championing of belief over fact “hogwash”: see my post here.)

In Schulman’s piece, Radcliffe reports to the office of New Yorker head fact-checker, Peter Canby. Canby gives him “a soon-to-run review of Oxomoco, a Mexican restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn” to fact-check. I smiled when I read that; I recognized the piece – Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Oxomoco,” which appeared in last week’s New Yorker: see my brief comment here.

My favorite part in “Grasshopper” is Radcliffe’s fact-checking phone call to Oxomoco chef, Justin Bazdarich:

He took a breath. “Moving along: you also serve a beef-tartare tostada? (Correct.) “And that has some fried grasshopper on it?” (Actually, the insect is toasted over a wood fire, Bazdarich said. Radcliffe, his pencil trembling, scribbled “toasted.”) “And is that a whole grasshopper you get with each one, or is it sort of segments?” (Whole, but sometimes they break apart.) “Would it be correct to say that meat is a major theme?” Bazdarich seemed skeptical. Radcliffe, panicking, added, “Don’t worry, it is also made mention of that vegetarians or pescatarians can be very, very happy at your restaurants.”

That passage made me laugh out loud. The sentence that Radcliffe fact-checked, changing “fried” to “toasted,” is the very one I selected in my post last week as the only inspired sentence in the entire issue: “Its garnish of identifiable segments of toasted grasshopper was not for the faint of heart, but it rewarded the brave, with a flavor that went from nutty to bitter to honeyed.”

“Grasshopper” ends brilliantly:

Radcliffe hung up and exhaled. “I just fact-checked a fucking article!” he said. “Nothing I do today will be harder than that.” A few days later, a New Yorker fact checker called Radcliffe to verify the above account. “Very meta,” he said. Everything checked out, except that he had been drinking a cappuccino, not a latte, and he has, in point of fact, been to Mexico.

Move over Ian Frazier’s “Russophilia,” Nick Paumgarten’s “Bong Show,” Mark Singer’s “All-Nighter,” Laura Parker’s “Bee’s Knees,” Robert Sullivan’s “Say Cheese,” make room for another Talk classic – Michael Schulman’s superb “Grasshopper.”

May 11, 2015 Issue

Of the many pleasures in this week’s issue – Richard Brody’s capsule review of Elaine May’s 1976 gangster movie Mikey and Nicky  (“Cassavetes, his head down, his forehead like the prow of a near-wreck, and Falk, with his canny nervousness, blaze a trail of trouble that, in its emotional extremes, distills a lifetime of frustrated energy into a single deadly night”); Peter Canby’s description of sleeping out in Central African Republic’s Dzanga-Ndoki National Park (“I spent a long, cold night on an underinflated air mattress with only a thin sheet covering me, my sleep repeatedly interrupted by trumpeting elephants close by, louder than any Manhattan garbage truck”); Dan Chiasson’s review of Terrance Hayes’s new poetry collection How to Be Drawn (“I have no idea how he works, but the poems give the impression of spontaneity; even if he labors over them, the result is a wild ride without an off switch, an unbroken verbal arc propelled by his accelerating actions of mind”) – the most piquant, for me, is Mark Singer’s superb Talk story, "All-Nighter," an irreverent account of Singer’s attendance at “A Night of Philosophy,” a marathon series of “twenty-minute lectures by academics, mostly French and American, who are addressing such topics as ‘Can You Decide to Believe in God?’ and ‘Must Intellectual Life Be Boring?’ and ‘Will This Be Worthwhile?’” The event causes Singer to question the meaning of “philosophy”:

Does it connote great ideas by celebrated thinkers who, by their elegance of presentation, illuminate for us the most profound questions? Or does it refer to stuff that’s really, really hard to follow, especially when certain brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence, because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile?

That “because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile?” made me smile. I enjoyed “All-Nighter” immensely.