The New Yorker & Me: Rachel Carson

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Galchen, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Showing posts with label Rachel Carson. Show all posts

Sunday, December 7, 2025

The Netflix Documentary "The New Yorker at 100" Is Excellent!

The documentary “The New Yorker at 100” is currently streaming on Netflix. I watched it last night. It’s excellent. It artfully interweaves key publishing moments in the magazine’s vast history – John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind” – with segments on what the current staff is up to, including production of the magnificent “100th Anniversary Issue” (February 17 & 24, 2025). As an avid New Yorker fan, I was thrilled to get a look inside the magazine’s offices and see the editorial process in action. I enjoyed the whole thing immensely. Highly recommended.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Six New Yorker Writers On The Guardian's "100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books" List

I’m pleased to see that the Guardian’s recent “The 100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books” (see www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/14/100-greatest-non-fiction-books) includes six works originally published in The New Yorker:

1. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (The New Yorker, September 25, October 2, 9, 16, 1965)
2. Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (The New Yorker, December 18, 1995)
3. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (The New Yorker, June 16, 23, 30, 1962)
4. Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (The New Yorker, December 8, 1975)
5. Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (The New Yorker, March 13, 20, 1989)
6. Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory (The New Yorker, January 3, March 27, June 12, July 31, September 18, 1948; January 1, April 9, December 10, 1949; February 11, April 15, June 17, 1950)

Of course, as a long-time New Yorkerphile, I can think of plenty of other New Yorker non-fiction writings worthy of “Top 100” status. For example:

Ian Frazier’s Great Plains
John Updike’s Hugging the Shore
John McPhee’s Coming into the Country
Pauline Kael’s Deeper Into Movies
John Hersey’s Hiroshima
Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould’s Secret
A. J. Liebling’s Between Meals
Roger Angell’s The Summer Game
Henry Louis Gates’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man
Anthony Bailey’s Along the Edge of the Forest
Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe
Whitney Balliett’s Ecstasy at the Onion
Kenneth Tynan’s Show People
The Journals of John Cheever
Calvin Trillin's American Stories
Alec Wilkinson's The Riverkeeper

And that’s just for starters. But let’s not worry about who’s not on the list. Six extraordinary New Yorker writers are there, grouped with the likes of Plato, Freud, Darwin, Gandhi, Thoreau, and Twain. It’s a tremendous honor, and is objective proof, if any is needed, of The New Yorker’s greatness. Three cheers for Bettelheim, Capote, Carson, Gourevitch, Malcolm, and Nabokov!

Credit: The above photo of Janet Malcolm is by Kevin Sturman, and appears on the jacket flap of Malcolm’s Iphigenia In Forest Hills.