February 16 & 23, 2026 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Helen Rosner, in “Tables for Two,” manages (with help from “a very fancy friend”) to snag a reservation at the “mega-swank” steak house The Eighty-Six in the West Village. She has a blast. First, she has an apple-wood-smoked Martini, “theatrically poured tableside atop a stalagmite of ice grown, science-fair-style, from hyper-chilled water.” She says it was “excellent, and potent as hell.” I mentally sipped it right along with her. Then she has a steak dinner, which she delectably describes as follows:

The exterior, salted and peppered, crackled from a hard sear; the inside was tender pink from edge to edge. The sauces I’d ordered alongside were hardly necessary: an eggy, vinegar-tart béarnaise, and a wiggly, wobbly gelée-adjacent steak sauce made with veal demi-glace. I dipped my fries into them, at least, and enjoyed a whole phalanx of steak-house sides: garlicky spinach; butter-laden mashed potatoes; a strikingly photogenic creamed-corn potpie with a swirly croissant top; snappy green and yellow long beans, dressed in a sharp lemon vinaigrette that sliced through the density of the rest of the food.

That “I dipped my fries into them” made me smile (and salivate). It’s exactly what I’d do.

2. Rebecca Mead’s “The Landscape Artist,” a profile of British artist Andy Goldsworthy, is excellent. See my post yesterday.

3. One of the best New Yorker book reviews I’ve read recently is Hannah Goldfield’s “Daily Bread.” It’s a survey of food diaries – a genre or subgenre I’ve not paid any attention to. But I will now, as a result of reading Goldfield’s illuminating piece. She mentions three books I think I’ll check out: Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries; Ruth Reichl’s My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life; and Tamar Adler’s Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day. 

4. I enjoyed Zachary Fine’s “Monster Mash” – a review of Pierre Huyghe’s “Liminals,” showing in Berlin, at Halle am Berghain. Fine calls “Liminals” “an absolutely terrifying work of art.” But he doesn’t stop there. He asks why: “Why is this so terrifying?” That question is a sign of a true critic. He’s not content with just stating his response. He digs into the underlying reasons for it. Fine’s answer made me smile. “Well, first of all,” he says, “there’s the missing face.” I also like Fine’s mindfulness of beauty. In the concluding lines of his piece, he writes, “But the film persuades with its frightening beauty: the shimmering flesh-colored rocks, the throbbing soundtrack, the smoothness of the creature’s skin. It’s all too human, but not.” 

Rebecca Mead's "The Landscape Artist"

Photo by Nicholas J.R. White, from Rebecca Mead's "The Landscape Artist"

Rebecca Mead’s “The Landscape Artist,” in the February 16 & 23 New Yorker, profiles British landscape sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. Mead visits him at his home in Penpont, Scotland. She hikes with him and a party of visitors to the site of his 1989 stone wall called “Give and Take Wall.” She goes on an outing with him to view the site where he intends to install a project called “Gravestones.” And she tours some graveyards with him. 

It’s an absorbing, beautifully written piece. But as I read it, I found myself resisting its charms. One thing that put me off was Mead’s mention that Goldsworthy used ten thousand cattails to create one of the works in his “Fifty Years” exhibition at Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy. Maybe I’m overreacting, but the removal of ten thousand cattails from their fragile natural habitat (marshes, bogs, wetlands) strikes me as appallingly destructive. What’s the point of it? This question touches on the other aspect of Mead’s piece that bugs me – the lack of any clear rationale for what Goldsworthy is doing. Mead mentions “the sheer beauty of some of Goldsworthy’s work.” Okay, but what if your idea of beauty is a landscape unblemished by any manmade objects? What if you prefer, as I do, natural beauty?

Mead’s piece is illustrated by a wonderful photo of Goldsworthy sitting on a green-gold grassy hillside (see above). The photo is by Nicholas J.R. White. Under the photo, there’s a caption that says, “Goldsworthy, near hilltop where his work ‘Gravestones’ will be installed.” I look at the photo and think what a pity, because here’s what Goldsworthy has in mind for that hill: “four stone walls, each about four feet tall and eighty feet wide, surrounding a space filled with displaced stones from cemeteries throughout the county of Dumfries and Galloway.” This is Goldsworthy’s idea of beauty. Is it valid? I’m not sure. 

I thought about Goldsworthy’s stone walls as Lorna and I cycled the back roads of Tavira, Portugal. The roads are lined with ancient stone walls. Many of them are cased in white plaster. Here and there, the plaster has cracked open. You can see the old ochre stones inside. These walls are phenomenal to look at – their form, composition, color, and texture. My eyes devour them. I constantly stopped to take pictures of them. Each one is different. To me, they are found works of art. The impulse to photograph them and describe them in words is, to me, understandable. If I were a painter, I’d want to paint them. And if I were a sculptor like Goldsworthy, I’d want to try my hand at building my own stone walls. 

There was a day when these Portuguese stone walls were new. In the centuries since they were first built, they’ve crumbled and eroded. Time and weather have worn them down. They’ve melded with their natural surroundings. The landscape has absorbed them. I recall the phrase “part of nature, part of us” from my readings of Helen Vendler’s book of the same name. It refers, if I remember correctly, to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It’s an excellent description of those old Portuguese walls. It applies to Goldsworthy’s art, too. Mead, in her piece, mentions how Goldsworthy’s “Give and Take Wall” had a “dense covering of moss.” Nature is taking it back. Time and weather are doing their work. Transience is all.  

Taking a Break

Portugal, 2024 (Photo by Lorna MacDougall)

Tomorrow Lorna and I head back to our old haunt Tavira, on the south coast of Portugal, to do some cycling. We’ll be gone three weeks. I’ll take the February 16 & 23 New Yorker with me, and post my review when I return. It appears to be a particularly rich issue. I'm especially interested in the piece by Rebecca Mead on the landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about March 14. 

November 18, 2024 Issue

I’m suffering from chronic Trumpitis. I’m desperate for relief. Rebecca Mead’s “Color Instinct,” in this week’s issue, provides it. What a wonderful piece! It profiles British artist Jadé Fadojutimi, who is an extraordinary colorist. Mead writes, “Fadojutimi’s swirling images seem to capture a state of mind as much as they do a state of nature—they are always energetic, and sometimes ecstatic, blooming into color and motion and light.” Mead visits Fadojutimi in her London studio and is allowed to watch her paint:

Wearing gloves, Fadojutimi seized a dish of neon-pink paint in her left hand and a sponge in her right. She swept the color boldly across the canvas, then called for a bucket of water, into which she dipped two sponges, squeezing their contents over the paint she’d just applied, to create washes of color. With a round brush, she added punches of deep purple to the pink, then took up a flat brush, scraping all the pigment into a hard, tight arc before squeezing water on it again. She then seized a fine brush, applying busy patches of teal; climbing on a step stool, she added lines that clambered up the canvas.

Mead notes that “Fadojutimi often uses oil pastels and pigment sticks to push aside liquid paint on the canvas, creating wormy, convoluted lines that give the color an increased dimensionality.”

My favorite part of “Color Instinct” is the opening paragraph – a vivid description of Fadojutimi’s studio:

The studio of Jadé Fadojutimi, the British artist, is in a warehouse in South East London, with long skylights set into a corrugated-metal roof that reverberates loudly during the city’s frequent autumnal rains. At eight and a half thousand square feet, the space initially appears overwhelming, but at its center Fadojutimi, who is thirty-one, has created a small zone of intimacy. A pair of antique couches—one upholstered in emerald damask, the other in ruby—sit back-to-back, offering opposite vantage points on a dozen or so exuberantly colorful paintings propped against the walls. Some of the canvases are completed; others are works in progress. Vintage armchairs are positioned around a pair of coffee tables, each of which is strewn with the detritus of millennial life: iPads, rolling papers, bowls of fruit, vape pens, books, empty wine bottles, cooling mugs of herbal tea. Nestled in the corner of one couch is a plush panda bear, apparently well loved, its fur tinged with a rogue splash of citrine paint. Scores of potted plants encircle the seating area—spiky snake plants, opulent grasses, thick-leaved rubber plants—and a towering ficus tree filters the light from the skylights overhead.

That detail about the “plush panda bear ... its fur tinged with a rogue splash of citrine paint” is delightful. The whole piece is delightful. I enjoyed it immensely.  

P.S. A special shout-out to Alice Mann for her sublime portrait of Fadojutimi in her studio. Definitely a candidate for best New Yorker photo of the year.

Photo by Alice Mann, from Rebecca Mead's "Color Instinct"

2023 Year in Review

Photo by David Guttenfelder, from Luke Mogelson's "Trapped in the Trenches")

I always like to start these things with a drink. What’ll it be this year? Hannah Goldfield, in her wonderful “Tables For Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023), mentions “stealing sips of a friend’s orange-blossom Negroni, a cold and viscous concoction that lingered on my tongue and in my memory (I can taste it now!), the intoxicating, floral perfume of the orange-blossom water achieving thrilling alchemy with the herbal gin, bitter Aperol, and sweet vermouth.” Yes, I’ll have one of those, please. Okay, let’s roll. 

Highlight #1: Two pieces by Luke Mogelson – “Trapped in the Trenches” (January 2 & 9, 2023) and “Underworld” (May 29, 2023) – evoke the Ukraine War with a specificity that puts us squarely there: 

In the grainy, green world of the phosphor screen, the stars gleamed like bioluminescent plankton. Herring and Rambo moved deliberately between the black silhouettes of trees, many of which had been splintered and contorted by artillery. I was looking at a tilled field to our left when a shimmering tail arced overhead, collided with another streaking light, and radiantly detonated. Herring said that it was a Russian missile intercepted by an anti-aircraft weapon. [“Trapped in the Trenches]

Highlight #2: Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Talk to Me” (September 11, 2023), an account of her visit with a team of scientists attempting to use artificial intelligence to speak with sperm whales. In an unforgettable scene, she witnesses the birth of a baby sperm whale:

Suddenly, someone yelled out, “Red!” A burst of scarlet spread through the water, like a great banner unfurling. No one knew what was going on. Had the pilot whales stealthily attacked? Was one of the whales in the group injured? The crowding increased until the whales were practically on top of one another.

Then a new head appeared among them. “Holy fucking shit!” Gruber exclaimed.

“Oh, my God!” Gero cried. He ran to the front of the boat, clutching his hair in amazement. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The head belonged to a newborn calf, which was about twelve feet long and weighed maybe a ton. In all his years of studying sperm whales, Gero had never watched one being born. He wasn’t sure anyone ever had.

Highlight #3: Burkhard Bilger’s “Crossover Artist” (April 3, 2023), a profile of neuroscientist/musician David Sulzer that brims with inspired passages, including this beauty: 

A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. In West Africa, musicians attach gourds to their xylophones and harps to rattle along as they play. Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure.

Highlight #4: Hannah Goldfield’s new “On and Off the Menu” column in the magazine’s “Critics” section. Goldfield is one of my favorite writers. It’s great to see her get more space for her delectable food writing. Here’s a sample from her “Upper Crust” (October 27, 2023):

For anything else, you’ll find me at Modern. Not long ago, my husband and I and our two small children met my parents there for lunch. It was the first visit for my kids, and cramming together into a familiar, dimly lit booth felt like passing down a primal ritual. New Haven is not a slice town; you get a whole pie and savor it sitting down. My father pointed out a server who he guessed had been working there almost as long as he’d been a regular, at least thirty years. I burned the roof of my mouth on my first bite, then tried to soothe it with gulps from an icy pitcher of Foxon Park white birch beer, a sweet, slightly earthy local soda you’ll find at any New Haven pizzeria. After a few slices, my hands were covered in soot.

Highlight #5: Helen Rosner’s “Tables For Two” columns. Rosner is a ravishing describer. Her “Tables For Two: Sailor” (December 4, 2023) is one of my favorite pieces of the year. Here’s a taste:

Slicing into the sphere of wrapped radicchio leaves, I discovered an interior of fragrant rice studded with firm, creamy borlotti beans. Taking a bite of this mixture, bathed in a wine sauce—which was rich and emulsified and, I learned later, vegan—was like sinking into a quicksand of warmth and flavor. The leaves of the radicchio imparted a lingering hint of bitterness, a scalpel through the savory roundness of everything else. This is the dish, I thought to myself—the dish of the restaurant, perhaps the dish of the year.

Other top picks of the year:

Rebecca Mead, “Dutch Treat,” February 27, 2023 (“Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream”);

Jill Lepore, “Pay Dirt,” March 20, 2023 (“There are more than two hundred mail-order seed companies in the United States, and, if you’ve ever ordered from any of them, chances are that your mail has been swollen with catalogues, their covers of radicchio red, marigold yellow, and zinnia pink peeking out from beneath the annual drab-gray crop of tax documents and the daily, dreary drizzle of bills, solicitations, and credit-card offers”).

Lauren Collins, “Pins and Needles,” March 27, 2023 (“You could hear his ski-parka opera coats rustling through the narrow corridors. There were murmurs of appreciation for a trapezoidal satin T-shirt that Demna said took three months to make, and for a clementine-colored day suit with edges that looked like they could draw blood, shown with a slick black fruit-bowl hat”);

Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Thomas Wågström’s Pictures of the Living and the Lifeless,” April 26, 2023 (“All photographs are about transience. This lies in the very nature of photography, since everything in the world is continually changing, and what a photo depicts vanishes the next instant, or becomes something else. One could say that all photography is about loss. But one could also say the opposite: photographs salvage something from time, as from a burning house”);

Jackson Arn, “Early Bloomer,” May 8, 2023 (“With O’Keeffe’s works on paper, however, scrutiny is like oxygen. These are images so dense with detail that the poster treatment would ruin them. ‘No. 12 Special’ (1916) is like a glossary of the footprints that charcoal can leave on paper: thin, slashing lines; plump, leisurely ones; smears pressed into the grain of the page with a rag or a fingertip. No matter how carefully you study these grace notes, you never forget the melodious whole: a bouquet of spirals dragging their tails behind them, refusing to be decoded”);

Adam Gopnik, “Postscript: Bruce McCall,” May 15, 2023 (“In what used to be called a ‘biting’ vein, he blended a wild surrealist sensibility—founded on an impeccable illustrator’s technique, always manifesting visions, dreams, impossibilities in scrupulous hyper-realism—with a sharp, sometimes caustic tone, beautifully underlit by melancholia”); 

Burkhard Bilger, “Soul Survivors,” June 5, 2023 (“His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter”);

Ed Caesar, “Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom,” June 14, 2023 (“I wonder why, then, on hearing the news of his death last night, I found myself momentarily overcome. Perhaps because I met McCarthy first in a peculiarly receptive period, and perhaps because the provenance of my relationship with his writing leads me back through the decades of my own life. And perhaps because, looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of his voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished”);

Robert Sullivan, “Not a Shark,” July 31, 2023 (“A waft of trash came up from under the pier, and a gaggle of high schoolers walked out onto the pier to take pictures of the orange sky. ‘It’s the end of the world,’ one of them shouted—then he spotted WasteShark. ‘Wait, are you guys monitoring something?’ ”);

Sam Knight, “Hive Mind,” August 28, 2023 (“I touched the glass. The hive thrummed. The smell of honey rolled across the pasture”);

Rachel Syme, “The Suitor,” September 25, 2023 (“She glided down the center aisle, wearing a beaded, sheer white garment that looked like a tuxedo jacket whose hem was melting to the floor. Two men in swim caps carried the train of the dress. From far away, the piece shimmered as if made of shaved ice”);

Nick Rudick, “Watching the Southern Tip of Manhattan Change, for Forty Years,” September 30, 2023 (“Mensch includes a vista of the cheese grater, here cutting a lonely path into the sky far above more modest buildings, jutting upward from the city like the handle of a sledgehammer”); 

Ben McGrath, “Dystopian Slime,” October 9, 2023 (“A stray horn, a searchlight upwind, a marine radio hissing intermittently about bridge traffic: sometimes, amid this dystopian sublime, it was difficult to distinguish the choreography from the merely urban”);

John McPhee, “Under the Carpet Bag” (October 16, 2023 (“And now, in 1964, at Camp Don Bosco, in Missouri, I was walking up a dirt road with Bill Bradley and Ed Macauley. The road consisted of deep parallel ruts with a grassy hump in the middle. Bradley was in one rut, Macauley in the other, and I was up on the hump between them. I am smaller than most people—about as small as Andrew Carnegie, James Madison, Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Actually, I was five feet seven at my zenith and have lately condensed. The hump was a good foot higher than the ruts. Nonetheless, the three of us in outline formed the letter M”);

Amanda Petrusich, “Horny on Main,” October 23, 2003 (“My favorite track on the new album is 'How to Stay with You.' It’s got a wiggly, nineteen-seventies feel, with a skronky keyboard line and unexpected bits of saxophone. Sivan’s voice is a little deeper here, with a hint of night-after grit”);

Zachary Fine, “The Man Who Changed Portraiture,” November 3, 2023 (“The linen cuff on van der Mersch’s right hand is done in four touches, max. Even when you’re standing ten feet back from the canvas, you can peel off individual brushstrokes with your eyes. They’re just floating there, like little spears of light”);

James Wood, “Trysts Tropiques,” November 13, 2023 (“Eng can write with lyrical generosity and beautiful tact: moths are seen at night ‘flaking around the lamps’; elsewhere, also at nighttime, ‘a weak spill of light drew me to the sitting room.’ Shadowy emotions are delicately figured: ‘His eyes, so blue and penetrating, were dusked by some emotion I could not decipher.’ Lesley’s account of her affair with Arthur has a lovely, drifting, dreamlike quality—the adulterers almost afloat on their new passion, watched over by the hanging painted doors of Arthur’s house on Armenian Street”);

Rachel Aviv, “Personal Statement,” November 27, 2023 (“She seemed uniquely incurious when I read her lines from her journal”);

Ed Caesar, "Speed," December 25, 2023 ("We did a warmup lap in Sports Mode—or Baby Mode, as Roys called it—hitting 155 m.p.h. Then he switched to something called F5 Mode. Before the final, short straightaway, he asked me if I was ready. When he hit the accelerator, it was like being strapped to a surface-to-air missile. Each gear change provoked the car to ever more noise and aggression. We hit 170 m.p.h., then braked to make the final turn. I stifled the urge to scream, but not to curse").

And now, with my last few drops of that superb Negroni, I want to propose a toast: Here’s to the greatest magazine in the world! New Yorker without end, amen! 

Credits: (1) Illustration by Sophy Hollington, from Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Talk to Me”; (2) Photo by Cole Wilson, from Hannah Goldfield’s “Upper Crust”; (3) Illustration by Nolan Pelletier, from Jill Lepore’s “Pay Dirt”; (4) Georgia O’Keeffe, “Untitled (Abstraction/Portrait of Paul Strand” (1917); (5) Photo by Alice Zoo, from Sam Knight’s “Hive Mind”; (6) Illustration by Roche Cruchon, from Amanda Petrusich’s “Horny on Main.”

The Rijksamuseum's "Vermeer": 3 Reviews

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft (circa 1660)

I want to compare three reviews of the Rijksamuseum’s recent blockbuster Vermeer show (February 10 – June 4, 2023) that brought together an unprecedented twenty-eight Vermeers: Rebecca Mead’s “Dutch Treat” (The New Yorker, February 27, 2023); Julian Bell’s “Insider Outside” (London Review of Books, May 18, 2023); and Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s “Life Made Light” (The New York Review of Books, July 20, 2023).

Mead, in her piece, points out that the show is “organized thematically—Vermeer’s use of musical instruments; Vermeer’s depiction of gentleman callers—with works from differing periods placed together to show them to their best effect, like artfully rumpled drapery.”

She comments on several of the paintings, including Mistress and Maid, A Lady Writing, View of Delft, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Girl with the Red Hat, Lacemaker, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, and The Milkmaid.

She says of Mistress and Maid and A Lady Writing,

The two paintings have thematic and stylistic commonalities. Each shows a fair-haired woman, finely dressed in a yellow satin jacket and seated at a table, with a pen in her right hand and a sheet of paper at the ready. Each displays Vermeer’s uncanny command of optical effects, with a dissolving focus on the fur trim of the jacket and a sheeny light reflected from a pearl earring. A blue tablecloth is rucked up in almost identical disarray, a circumstance that would be nothing but an annoyance to an actual letter writer—who doesn’t prefer to lay paper on a smooth surface?—but which reminds a viewer that these are carefully staged scenes, with the folds of those draperies as deliberately arranged as the garments of a Renaissance Madonna. It is peculiarly moving to see these two works, which were painted within two years of each other, in juxtaposition. A viewer can take in one, and then the other, with a turn of the head no greater than that of the woman represented in either painting. Between them, these works consumed perhaps a year of Vermeer’s labor—a scrupulous rendering of bourgeois appurtenances and a faithful imagining of internal lives, which might better be described as an act of devotion. 

Note Mead’s reference to Vermeer’s “uncanny command of optical effects” and his “scrupulous rendering of bourgeois appurtenances.” These are two aspects of Vermeer’s art that I admire immensely. She also points out something new to me – that these paintings “are carefully staged scenes, with the folds of those draperies as deliberately arranged as the garments of a Renaissance Madonna.” Call me naïve, but until I read this, it never occurred to me that Vermeer staged the subjects of his paintings. 

Another painting that Mead comments on is View of Delft – one of my favorite Vermeers. She writes,

Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream. But the painting also conveys the sensation of atmospheric humidity. In a catalogue essay, Pieter Roelofs, one of the show’s curators and the head of paintings and sculpture at the museum, points out that Vermeer hangs this sky with low cumulus clouds of a sort that were almost never represented by his contemporaries. In this canvas, as in “The Little Street,” with its weeping brickwork and stained whitewash, Vermeer paints dampness as well as light.

That first line is exquisite, beautifully expressing my own view of Vermeer as a master painter of light.

Was Vermeer a trickster? Mead thinks so. She says of his superb The Milkmaid,

“The Milkmaid” is an exploration of minimalism, three hundred years avant la lettre. A recent analysis of the painting’s surface revealed that Vermeer painted over a row of jugs that once hung behind the milkmaid’s head, leaving a bare wall with the tonal nuances of a Morandi. The wall’s surface is rendered with infinite care, its nails and holes painted in sharp relief. The graduation of shadow and light contributes to the sense of verisimilitude, though Vermeer adjusts optics for the sake of art by painting the jigsaw piece of wall between the jug and the milkmaid’s arm a brighter hue, the better to accentuate her gesture. The eye is tricked into believing that it sees the world reproduced; what it actually sees is the world enhanced.

Vermeer as an enhancer of reality, adjusting optics for the sake of art – that’s a view of him that I struggle with. Rightly or wrongly, I associate him with accuracy. “Pray for the grace of accuracy / Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination / stealing like the tide across a map / to his girl solid with yearning,” Robert Lowell wrote in his great poem “Epilogue.” To me, Vermeer is a consummate describer. That implies accuracy. I find accuracy and enhancement hard to reconcile.

Let’s consider another review – Julian Bell’s “Insider Outside.” It begins where Mead’s piece ends, with a look at one of Vermeer’s walls. This time it’s the wall in Young Woman Standing at a Virginal. Bell writes,

Nothing could be more positive than that clean, firm whitewashed wall. Creamy dabs and droplets, heavy with bright lead carbonate, have come down here and there on the more convoluted surfaces, on the gilt frame and the musician’s satin skirts. But the flat planes are immutable blocks of tone and no mark suggests that their outlines could alter. What are we to know of the objects to which they belong? Only their interactions with light.

I love that last line. Any critic praising Vermeer for his skill at painting light gets my vote. It may not be the most original approach to Vermeer’s art, but, for me, it’s the surest and most compelling. 

Bell also considers another established perspective on Vermeer – the photo-like accuracy of his work. He says, “His art seems to record appearance as tonally as a photosensitive sheet, with as little reliance on contours, and the question of how much he relied on lens technologies has been a constant of subsequent scholarship.” He quotes Kenneth Clark’s praise of View of Delft: “the nearest which painting has ever come to a coloured photograph.” But Bell dissents. He says, when you see the actual paintings hanging in the Rijksmuseum, you “discover how different in fact they are from photographs:

There in the opening gallery stands View of Delft, and there in its middle band – the town buildings sandwiched between thin air and yielding water – the oils are caked and burly. Gritty earth-colour gouts lay down the masonries of brick, mortar, slate and limestone. Facing Vermeer’s home town, we encounter the tension posed by his single-figure interiors: between the concrete fact and its not-hereness. This is the testament of an insider who needs to stand outside, who requires a far bank from which to grasp his own city’s substance. The morning river may be still and the figures on its foreshore few, small and faceless, yet there is a zeal to the gunky highlights that stud the sunlit roofs, a kind of staccato fury.

This is a valuable observation, emphasizing the texture of Vermeer’s painting. Simon Schama made a similar point in his excellent “Through a Glass Brightly” (included in his 2004 collection Hang-Ups), a review of a Vermeer show at the National Gallery in 1995. Looking at View of Delft, he says, “The texture of the red-tiled roofs at left, for example, was made more dense by mixing sand into the pigment, almost as if Vermeer was as much rebuilder as image-maker.”

My favorite lines in Bell’s piece occur in his consideration of the infrared images of The Milkmaid. He writes,

They show cluttered shelves behind the serving woman, which were afterwards smoothed out to leave a bare wall. To isolate in this way the central mystery of the milk jug’s dark mouth, its dazzling descending trickle, was a potent decision. 

That “central mystery of the milk jug’s dark mouth, its dazzling descending trickle” is inspired.

What to make of Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s “Life Made Light”? I find it the least satisfying of the three reviews under consideration. Yeazell considers the Rijksmuseum show in terms of its organization and crowd management. But, amazingly and disappointingly, she doesn’t discuss (or describe) any of the paintings on display. She considers several theories on Vermeer’s art, some of them pretty far out, if you ask me, e.g., that Vermeer’s figures can be divided into “extroverts” and “introverts,” that the Jesuits “provided the chief inspiration for his treatment of light as a spiritual phenomenon,” that there’s a “suggestive analogy between the remoteness of Petrarch’s beloved Laura and the various strategies Vermeer devises for rendering his own objects of desire at once alluring and unobtainable.” Did Vermeer even read Petrarch? She doesn’t say.

Yeazell also considers a theory that seems to me to have been around forever – that Vermeer used a camera obscura. She concludes, “no definitive evidence has emerged to link Vermeer to such an instrument.” There, you’d think (and hope) that would finally settle it. But no, a few paragraphs later, she undermines her conclusion, buying into Gregor J. M. Weber’s “informed speculation” that “the local Jesuits probably did serve as the conduit for Vermeer’s knowledge of the camera obscura.”

So where does that leave us? It leaves me savoring that wonderful Rebecca Mead description of View of Delft: “Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream.”

Mid-Year Top Ten (2023)

Photo by Maxim Dondyuk, from Luke Mogelson's "Underworld"

Time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

1. Luke Mogelson, “Underworld,” May 29, 2023 (“On the Zero Line, there was only enough water for drinking, not for washing, and the men’s cracked fingernails and thickly calloused palms were so encrusted with dirt that it seemed to have become part of them”);

2. Luke Mogelson, “Trapped in the Trenches,” January 2 & 9, 2023 ("In the grainy, green world of the phosphor screen, the stars gleamed like bioluminescent plankton. Herring and Rambo moved deliberately between the black silhouettes of trees, many of which had been splintered and contorted by artillery. I was looking at a tilled field to our left when a shimmering tail arced overhead, collided with another streaking light, and radiantly detonated. Herring said that it was a Russian missile intercepted by an anti-aircraft weapon"); 

3. Burkhard Bilger, “Soul Survivors,” June 5, 2023 (“His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter”);

4. Burkhard Bilger, “Crossover Artist,” April 3, 2023 (“A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. In West Africa, musicians attach gourds to their xylophones and harps to rattle along as they play. Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure”);

5. Jackson Arn, “Early Bloomer,” May 8, 2023 (“With O’Keeffe’s works on paper, however, scrutiny is like oxygen. These are images so dense with detail that the poster treatment would ruin them. ‘No. 12 Special’ (1916) is like a glossary of the footprints that charcoal can leave on paper: thin, slashing lines; plump, leisurely ones; smears pressed into the grain of the page with a rag or a fingertip. No matter how carefully you study these grace notes, you never forget the melodious whole: a bouquet of spirals dragging their tails behind them, refusing to be decoded”);

6. Jill Lepore, “Pay Dirt,” March 20, 2023 (“There are more than two hundred mail-order seed companies in the United States, and, if you’ve ever ordered from any of them, chances are that your mail has been swollen with catalogues, their covers of radicchio red, marigold yellow, and zinnia pink peeking out from beneath the annual drab-gray crop of tax documents and the daily, dreary drizzle of bills, solicitations, and credit-card offers”).

7. Lauren Collins, “Pins and Needles,” March 27, 2023 (“The most memorable looks were the most demotic: shrunken puffers, blasted-out jeans, a leather gown spliced from old handbags, a series of hooded sweatshirts paired with tap pants so paltry that you could almost feel the goosebumps on the models’ scraggy legs”).

8. Rebecca Mead, “Dutch Treat,” February 27, 2023 (“Perhaps she is thinking of neither love nor work, and is instead reflecting on how the slow, perpetual flow of milk serves as an endless measure of time—just as it appears to us now, as we regard her in her reverie”);

9. Merve Emrie, “Marvellous Things,” March 6, 2023 (“But the sheer loveliness and good humor of the vignettes transform each sliver of Mr. Palomar’s life into an expansive state of being. The rhythm of the waves, a flock of starlings, the blue veins in cheese, sunlight rippling on the sea—they hold a beauty and a mystery that Mr. Palomar contemplates with such intensity that he turns them into little universes of meaning unto themselves”);

10. Helen Shaw, “Out of Focus,” February 27, 2023 (“His pieces gleam with a baked Southern California palette: jacaranda light, golf-course-green carpeting, and the parents’ burnished, teak-dark tans”). 

Best Cover

Mark Ulriksen's "About Time" (April 10, 2023)

Best "Talk of the Town" Story

Nick Paumgarten, “Ein Berliner,” June 12, 2023 ("The party that night began at ten, which meant more like midnight. Oontz, oontz, oontz, oontz. The projections of Marquardt’s portraits flashed on the walls, apparently to the beat but in random sequences. The revellers seemed unsure whether to watch or to dance. In the hall, Mosbeck, the gallerist, pulled on cotton gloves and rehung one of the eighties prints, which had been knocked off the wall by the heavy thud of the kick drum. Marquardt, now in a black skirt (Auch die Nacht ist Dunkel), took in the scene and said, “I am happy.” Then he went with Paetke to hang out by the entrance, as though he were working his own party. 'Ja, I am at the door,' he said. 'Maybe this is the normal situation' ”).

Best Illustration

Keith Negley's illustration for Idrees Kahloon's "Border Control" (June 12, 2023)

Best "Goings On About Town" Note

Johanna Fateman, “At the Galleries: Helen Frankenthaler,” April 3, 2023 ("The show proves that Frankenthaler, who died in 2011, at the age of eighty-three, was still at the height of her powers in her sixties—a mercurial colorist moving between pours and the palette knife, translucent washes and clotted impasto. The oceanic drama of the eight-foot-wide “Poseidon,” from 1990, is achieved with layered pools of thinned-out acrylic color in aqua and fog. A flat brush loaded with orange has been dragged across the surface, leaving a fiery trail").

Best Photo

Ross Landenberger's photo for Charles Bethea's "Special Sauce" (April 17, 2023)

Top Five newyorker.com Posts

1. Karl Ove Knausgaard's “Thomas Wågström’s Pictures of the Living and the Lifeless," April 26, 2023 ("All photographs are about transience. This lies in the very nature of photography, since everything in the world is continually changing, and what a photo depicts vanishes the next instant, or becomes something else. One could say that all photography is about loss. But one could also say the opposite: photographs salvage something from time, as from a burning house");

2. Ed Caesar, “Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom,” June 14, 2023 ("I wonder why, then, on hearing the news of his death last night, I found myself momentarily overcome. Perhaps because I met McCarthy first in a peculiarly receptive period, and perhaps because the provenance of my relationship with his writing leads me back through the decades of my own life. And perhaps because, looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of his voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished");

3. Jackson Arn, “The World-Changing Trees of Vincent Van Gogh,” June 5, 2023 ("It’s hard to study one of van Gogh’s motifs without misrepresenting him. He wasn’t really obsessed with cypresses or irises or sunflowers; he was obsessed with the world and burned through it, one object at a time. He kept painting and drawing. The world kept fluttering away");

4. Rivka Galchen, “What Is a Weed?,” May 26, 2023 ("The weed tasted like carrot? Like okra? Like broccoli, almost precisely");

5. Luke Mogelson, “Revisiting Portland’s ‘Summer of Rage,’ ” June 20, 2023 ("The diluted tones, high contrasts, and red-pupilled figures in “Protest City” combine to create a throwback aesthetic that also feels familiar. Dundon was initiated into photography as a high schooler, in the nineteen-nineties, by taking pictures of his friends skateboarding. Many people who grew up around that time will notice, in his work, the influence of skate magazines like Thrasher or Big Brother. This shows in Dundon’s raw, unflattering style of composition but also in his specific preoccupations: wanton vandalism, cheap tattoos, explicit graffiti—abrasions and abandon. This is not just the world of far-left activism. It is the world of wild, angry—and mostly white—urban and suburban youth").

Best Sentence

“No. 12 Special,” from 1916, is like a glossary of charcoal’s capabilities: thin, slashing lines; plump, leisurely ones; smears pressed into the grain of the page with a rag or a fingertip. – Jackson Arn, “Art: ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time’ ” (May 15, 2023)

Best Paragraph

It was pitch-black in the cellar. Even when three of us sat with our knees drawn up, the fourth person could fit only by standing next to the ladder. In the claustrophobic space, I could feel Herring debating what to do. He was lighting a cigarette when a loud whooshing noise, like a cascade of water, roared toward us. “Down!” Herring barked, though there was nowhere farther down to go. I bowed my head and pressed my palms into the dirt floor, which quaked as three successive impacts left a ringing in my ears. – Luke Mogelson, “Trapped in the Trenches” (January 2 & 9, 2023)

Best Detail

You could hear his ski-parka opera coats rustling through the narrow corridors. – Lauren Collins, “Pins and Needles” (March 27, 2023)

Best Description

Gin tends not to agree with me, and yet I couldn’t help but steal sips of a friend’s orange-blossom Negroni, a cold and viscous concoction that lingered on my tongue and in my memory (I can taste it now!), the intoxicating, floral perfume of the orange-blossom water achieving thrilling alchemy with the herbal gin, bitter Aperol, and sweet vermouth. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023)

Best Question

How much is too much? Try “Babylon,” the latest film from Damien Chazelle. Within five minutes, we realize that excess is in the air—and, indeed, all over the camera lens, in the form of elephant dung. The ensuing half hour, an excursion into the orgiastic, brings us a woman peeing onto the bloated belly of a partygoer, alpine hills of cocaine, and a dwarf using a giant phallus as a pogo stick. Still to come: a movie producer walking around in the desert, at night, with his head stuck in a toilet seat, and, by way of a bonne bouche, toward the end of the feast, a guy who consumes live rats. Happy now? – Anthony Lane, “Top of the Heap” (January 2 & 9, 2023)

Seven Memorable Lines

1. The courthouse has a way of visiting indignities on all but the robed. – Ben McGrath, “Upstairs, Downstairs” (April 17, 2023)

2. They’ll be red-fleshed and globe-shaped and fist-size and grubby and hairy, and I usually roast them. – Jill Lepore, “Pay Dirt” (March 20, 2023) 

3. Action and description were everything. – Ed Caesar, “Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom” (June 14, 2023)

4. She knows just how to get her characters through the doorway and into a scene—all that they have to do, in order to sign their own moral death warrants, is start talking.  – James Wood, “Desperately Normal” (February 13 & 20, 2023) 

5. Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream. – Rebecca Mead, “Dutch Treat” (February 27, 2023)

6. Plucking out a puckered leathery lime and eating it whole, sticky and sour, left me feeling as lucky as if I’d found the baby in a king cake. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023)

7. O’Keeffe is nobody’s idea of a comedian, but the Strand trio could almost be a prank: the great black-and-white photographer gets thrown into a smeary rainbow dunk tank. – Jackson Arn, “Early Bloomer” (May 8, 2023)

February 27, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rebecca Mead’s excellent “Dutch Treat,” a review of Rijksmuseum’s landmark Vermeer exhibition. Mead writes, “The Rijksmuseum has corralled enough Vermeers to make the most hard-hearted of robber barons swoon—twenty-eight paintings, out of an acknowledged thirty-six or thirty-seven surviving works by the artist, who may have produced no more than fifty in his short lifetime.” She says that the exhibition “gathers more Vermeers in one place than Vermeer himself ever had the opportunity to see.” 

One of the Vermeers on display is the magnificent View of Delft (c. 1660). Proust thought this “the most beautiful painting in the world.” Mead describes it wonderfully:

The latter work, a cityscape in which the red-roofed town appears as a horizontal sliver between glimmering water below and a wide swath of sky above, inspired the rediscovery, beginning in the eighteen-sixties, of Vermeer, whose reputation had languished in the preceding two centuries. Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream. But the painting also conveys the sensation of atmospheric humidity. In a catalogue essay, Pieter Roelofs, one of the show’s curators and the head of paintings and sculpture at the museum, points out that Vermeer hangs this sky with low cumulus clouds of a sort that were almost never represented by his contemporaries. In this canvas, as in “The Little Street,” with its weeping brickwork and stained whitewash, Vermeer paints dampness as well as light.

That “Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream” is superb! The entire review is superb! I enjoyed it immensely.

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft (c. 1660)

April 25 & May 2, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rebecca Mead’s absorbing “Norwegian Wood,” an account of her trip to Brumunddal, Norway, to see eighteen-story Mjøstårnet, the world’s tallest all-timber tower. Mead puts us squarely there, inside Mjøstårnet:

The material from which the tower had been built was evident, though, in the airy ground-floor lobby and restaurant, where wooden dining tables and chairs were arrayed on bare wooden floorboards, wooden pendant lampshades dangled on long cords, and large bamboo palms in pots were clustered at the base of a curved wooden staircase that rose to a mezzanine. Large columns supporting the building, as well as angled braces cutting across the restaurant’s walls of windows, were formed from massive glulam blocks, the thickest of which were almost five feet by two feet, like pieces from a monstrous Jenga set. Riding a glass-walled elevator to my room, on the eleventh floor, I noticed that the elevator shaft was built from similar chunky blocks.

Those glulam blocks are what give Mjøstårnet its strength and stability. “Glulam” is short for “glued laminated timber.” Mead writes, 

Glulam is manufactured at industrial scale from the spruce and pine forests that cover about a third of Norway’s landmass, including the slopes around Brumunddal, from which the timber for Mjøstårnet was harvested.

She also visits several other innovative all-wood structures, including a seven-story timber office building in Oslo. She says of it,

The tower’s base was occupied by a cafeteria. In its concrete floor, blond-wood furnishings, and floor-to-ceiling windows partly obscured by massive trusses made with blocks of glulam, I could see a wooden-architecture vernacular emerging: airy spaces formed by pale wood beams and columns that had visibly been slotted and joined together. The wooden surfaces had been treated only minimally, to prevent the kind of yellowing that Norwegians associate with old-timey country cabins—the “Norwegian wood” of the Beatles song. Instead, the palette was a globally fashionable greige and cream.

My favourite passage in Mead’s piece is her description of her Mjøstårnet hotel room:

I put my bag down on a blond-wood coffee table by the window, and settled into a low swivel chair, its comfortable backrest fashioned from bent-wood strips. In December, Brumunddal enjoys less than six hours of daylight; had I sat there long enough, I could have watched the sun rise and set with only the barest swivel to adjust my line of sight. The room was quiet and, despite the lowering skies, it was light. With its minimal, tasteful furnishings—a narrow blond-wood desk; a double bed made up with white linens and a crimson blanket—it had the virtuous feel of a spa. I had no desire to go elsewhere….

“Norwegian Wood” is double bliss: great subject; wonderful writing. I enjoyed it immensely.

Best of the Decade: Alternate List

Photo by Marcin Gala, from Burkhard Bilger's "In Deep"

I had fun doing “Best of the Decade.” But skimming the crème de la crème off ten years’ worth of New Yorker reporting pieces wasn’t easy. Narrowing the list to just twelve was agony. I was forced to discard many wonderful articles, including some personal favorites. To atone for my ruthless selection process, I’ve decided to compile a second list – twelve more excellent pieces that could easily have made the first list, if there’d been room. Here are my picks, with a choice quotation from each in brackets:

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Deadhead,” November 26, 2012 (“In the pavilion, the tapers had set up a cityscape of microphone stands, like minarets, and through them there was the sight of Jerry Garcia, fat and hunched, virtually immobile in a haze of his own cigarette smoke”). 

2. Burkhard Bilger, “In Deep,” April 21, 2014 (“One passage led back to the beginning of the sump, another to the loop behind them, a third to a dead end they’d explored earlier. That left one unexplored passage. It took them up a short corridor, along a rising slope of terraced mustard-colored flowstone, and into a small domed chamber. There was an air bell at the top about the size of a car trunk, so they swam up and took off their helmets and neoprene hoods to talk. They seemed to be at a dead end. They were cold, tired, and disoriented, and their air ration had nearly run out. There was no choice but to head back”). 

3. Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016 (“I walked into the site, through smooth gray-brown gravel mounds, serene and raked as Zen gardens, graded to the angle of repose, so that no rocks slide. Like blast shields, the mounds blocked the view; their shapes, which can be seen in whole only from the air, form a coded alphabet of charm stone, dog bone, cross, and adze. A ramp sloped up to the east, to the top of a bulwark, against which leaned massive ceramic stelae”).

4. William Finnegan, “Silver or Lead,” May 31, 2010 (“To check out La Familia’s claim to be driving cristal addiction from Michoacán, I went to Zamora, a midsized city in the northwestern corner of the state. La Familia was doing some vivid social messaging there. Two days before my arrival, and some weeks earlier, groups of flagellants had appeared on the roads around Zamora—men with their shirts pulled up or off and their backs whipped raw. The men chanted and carried placards denouncing themselves as thieves and rapists. Some of the placards were signed ‘La Familia’ ”).

5. Aleksandar Hemon, “Mapping Home,” December 5, 2011 (“I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage—during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements”).

6. Peter Schjeldahl, “The Flip Side,” November 29, 2010 (“But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his pictures’ smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color”).

7. Geoff Dyer, “Poles Apart,” April 18, 2011 (“The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites. It was like rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight”).

8. Alexandra Schwartz, “Bounty Hunters,” November 25, 2019 (“You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart”).

9. Dexter Filkins, “Atonement,” October 29 & November 5, 2012 (“Lobello might not have felt that he needed to apologize, but he was haunted by what had happened, traumatized, maybe even ruined. He wanted to know that the survivors understood why he had done what he had, even if it was not entirely defensible. And he wanted them to know that he felt their suffering in his own. Lobello did not quite say it, but when I left his apartment I felt that what he was really looking for was absolution”).

10. Rebecca Mead, “Sole Cycle,” March 23, 2015 (“Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped”).

11. Gabrielle Hamilton, “The Lamb Roast,” January 17, 2011 (“Then the sun started to set and we lit the paper-bag luminarias, and the lambs were crisp-skinned and sticky, and the root beer was frigid, and it caught, like an emotion, in the back of my throat”).

12. Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running,” July 11 & 18, 2016 (“A birthday cake appeared, and then—a hallucinatory moment—another Icelandic actress sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ in a perfect impression of Marilyn singing it to J.F.K., sexy sibilant by erotic syllable: ‘Happy biiirthday, Misstah Prez-uh-dent . . .’ The crowd cheered in pleasure and recognition. We live on one planet, indivisible”).

First Person Perfect

Photo by Alice Zoo, from Rebecca Mead's "Going for the Cold"

There’s a type of narrative sentence I find irresistible. Example: “One day, I went to Athens and met Joe Corn, a senior wildlife biologist for SCWDS, who has trapped and studied thousands of wild hogs” (Ian Frazier, “Hogs Wild”). Now, that might strike you as fairly mundane. You were probably expecting something with a bit more pizazz. But pizazz is not what this kind of sentence is about. Here’s another one: “Later that day, I crowded, together with what seemed like the entire remaining population of Reykjavik, into Ingólfstorg square to watch the Iceland-Austria match” (Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running”). That’s a shade more exotic than Frazier’s “wild hogs” line, but it still has the three main ingredients I relish: first-person pronoun (“I”), active verb (“crowded”), and specific nouns (“Reykjavik,” “Ingólfstorg square,” “Iceland-Austria match”). Often one or more of the nouns is a place name. As a means of jump-starting an account of an interesting experience, such sentences are unbeatable. I read them and think, Let’s go! Here are a few examples from recent New Yorker pieces:

Not long after sunrise on a gray Halloween morning, I joined the members of the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association for a celebratory swim and breakfast. – Rebecca Mead, “Going for the Cold”

A little after midnight, while Hunter was still in jail, I swung by Thirty-eighth and Chicago, where people were still congregating. – Luke Mogelson, “The Uprising”

On a cool Monday morning in May, I met Fidel at the Church of the Good Shepherd, an austere gray stone building with red doors on the corner of Fourth Avenue and the Bay Ridge Parkway. – Jonathan Blitzer, “Higher Calling”

One crisp, bright morning in February, I walked along a brook just outside the center of Davos, toward the headquarters of the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research. – James Somers, “Cold War”

In November, just before the first snows shut down access to the Whites, I made a final trip to the Schulman Grove. – Alex Ross, “The Bristlecones Speak”