Postscript: Mark Singer 1950 - 2026

Mark Singer (photo by Neilson Barnard)

I see in the Times that Mark Singer has died: “Mark Singer, Longtime Writer for The New Yorker, Dies at 75.” The Times piece rightly says that he “extended the magazine’s franchise of rich reporting and witty prose about offbeat, complicated and quintessentially American characters.” It quotes New Yorker editor David Remnick: “He came out of the tradition of A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell and Calvin Trillin, which is to say he combined meticulous reporting and a very distinctive comic voice, which is extremely rare.” This is well put. 

Singer was also a master of the “Talk of the Town” story. See, for example: 

“Man vs. Mouse” (“He arranged ‘a Maginot Line of glue traps’ and set out a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps. This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out”); 

“Sleight of No Hands” [“Somehow—Jay’s biography, though it comes as close as any source to explaining the how of how, still leaves a reader at the intersection of belief and disbelief—he did magic (specialty: cups-and-balls), played several instruments (dulcimer, trumpet, flute), trick-shot with pistols, demonstrated exquisite ball control at skittles, danced the hornpipe on his leather-encased stumps, married four times, and sired fourteen children (proof, as Jay noted in Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, of ‘one fully operative appendage’)”];

“Bank Shot” [“When he arrived at Eyebeam, the immediate challenge was to center the logo of American Eagle Savings Bank on the cover of Theories of Business Behavior, by Joseph William McGuire (formerly in the collection of the Cloud County Junior College Library, of Concordia, Kansas)”];

“All-Nighter” (“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?”);

“Risky Business” (“ ‘As soon as they started moving the bulls out of the pens into the bucking chutes, I could see Bushwacker go from docile to this’ – he pantomimed a bull pawing the ground – ‘and I thought, This bull knows’ ”).

Singer’s Mr. Personality (1989), one of the most beautiful collections of New Yorker writing ever published, contains twenty-five  of his “Talk” pieces, including such classics as “Yabba-Yabba, Doodle-Doodle” (in which Mr. Blatford memorably says, “You get your change from a change machine, put your dog in the Doggie Washer, do your yabba-yabba, doodle-doodle – you know, whatever you do while you’re waiting in a Laundromat – and then go home with a clean dog”) and “Pigeon Mumblers” (“Some Greenpoint pigeon mumblers who are familiar with Killer’s irascible moods say that if he really put his mind to it, he could probably hatch a baseball”).

In a future post, I’ll consider Singer’s literary legacy in more detail. For now, I just want to pay my respects to him. He's a New Yorker great. 

June 15, 2026 Issue

Nick Paumgarten, in his “Talk” story “Fanboy,” in this week’s issue, describes the musician Kurt Vile:

He was sitting in a corner of Old Rabbit Club, a bar on MacDougal Street, drinking a non-alcoholic beer. He had on a Waylon Jennings T-shirt under a red plaid shirt, and an MF Doom baseball cap that contained a cascade of curly hair that Vile has a tendency to hide behind. A beer-menu lamplight suggested that the color of his Chuck Taylors was lavender. He was hanging out late (a) to make the trip down the turnpike at midnight (“Musicians know, it’s an easy shot late at night—it’s like teleportation”) and (b) to catch another band’s gig at Le Poisson Rouge.

That’s an inspired passage! Four swift, vivid, specific sentences and – voilà! – Vile springs to life. Paumgarten is a great writer.  

March 16, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Sarah Larson’s “Talk of the Town” story “Big Time.” It’s a mini-profile of master rigger Joe Vilardi, who installed Michael Heizer’s new exhibition “Negative Sculpture” at a Gagosian gallery in Chelsea. The show, Larson says, “features ‘Convoluted Line A’ and ‘Convoluted Line B’ (2024), two eighty-seven-and-a-half-foot curved steel troughs that wend through the gallery’s floor like a figure skater’s tracks on ice.” These sculptures weigh more than eighteen tons. That’s nothing for Vilardi. Larson says that he’s worked with “a Who’s Who of colossal sculpture: Heizer and Serra, but also Simone Leigh, Jeff Koons, MOMA. The biggest and heaviest stuff can involve cranes, hydraulic gantries, barges, and police escorts.” 

Vilardi talks about the time he installed a Richard Serra work at Kenyon College:

“The vertical of the sculpture was sixty feet tall—massive. Years of planning, really difficult. A beautiful sculpture. We were all in awe as we were doing it,” Vilardi said. “You’re bringing in steel plates that weighed close to a hundred thousand pounds each, that had to be then stood up and then one leaned against the next. We had five cranes there, balancing these plates, guys up in baskets working the clamps and lining things up and welding. At the end of it, it’s pretty impressive. It’s crazy when you think, Look what we just accomplished. Who are we? We just started out as a bunch of riggers—and riggers are really what we are—and here we are assembling something, a combined weight of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds, sixty feet tall, in the middle of a courtyard of a school, that will be there—it could be there forever.”

Larson’s delightful story reminded me of another New Yorker piece on Michael Heizer’s work – Dana Goodyear’s brilliant “The Earth Mover” (August 29, 2016). Goodyear visits Heizer’s monumental “City,” in Garden Valley, Nevada, and describes it in detail. Here’s a taste:

In every direction, at every angle, wide boulevards disappeared around corners, to unseen destinations, leading me into depressions where the whole world vanished and all that was left was false horizon and blue sky. Fourteen miles of concrete curbs sketched a graceful, loopy line drawing around the mounds and roads. Ravens wheeled, and I startled at a double thud of sonic boom from fighter jets performing exercises overhead. I sat down in a pit; flies came to tickle my hands. It was easy to imagine myself as a pile of bones. Before no other contemporary art work have I felt induced to that peculiar, ancient fear: What hand made this, and what for?

Michael Heizer, City (Photo by Jamie Hawkesworth)

March 2, 2026, Issue

Ben McGrath’s wonderful “Talk” story “Ice Capades,” in this week’s issue, tells about his recent visit to Red Bank, New Jersey, to see a legendary iceboat race called the Van Nostrand Challenge. McGrath talks with some of the iceboaters and observes the scene on the frozen Navesink River:

The fourth running of the Van Nostrand, when it finally transpired, after two days of postponement, featured three boats from the Shrewsbury club and three from New York. All, per the rules, were so-called “A” boats: restored antiques, wooden, with gaffed rigs. From a squinting distance, they resembled Hudson River sloops. Up close, they were more like giant crosses atop machetes. The wind was a fluky northwesterly, gusty at the starting gun, such that a couple of blades levitated briefly, as if launching into flight. Then came the lulls, and a reminder that sailing, even on sherbert, can be a “hurry up and wait” kind of sport. Dan Lawrence’s son, Luke, piloting Ariel, which once belonged to the Roosevelts’ neighbor Archie Rogers, took the first heat, and then the second, obviating the need for a third. No team scores needed this time. The New Yorkers had won, and the cup was going home to Newburgh after a hundred and thirty-five years.

Iceboating is a great subject. McGrath captures it marvelously in just 794 well-chosen words. 

October 13, 2025 Issue

Who is Jane Bua and what does she mean by “quasi-sexual stank face”? I’m quoting from her superb “Talk” story “Shedding,” in this week’s issue. It’s a mini-profile of pop star Charlie Puth, as he prepares for his first jazz residency at the Blue Note Jazz Club. The piece is loaded with vivid details: “A lonely employee “rolling forks into navy-blue napkins by the bar”; Snare hits ringing out “like paintball shots”; Puth’s “wavy brown hair and a crescent-moon scar through one eyebrow (the legacy of a dog bite).”

And this:

At 8 p.m., the band slunk onstage, the house lights cut out, and Puth trotted up in a baggy Elastica T-shirt. He parked at the fake Rhodes, and the set began. At every keys solo and drum rip, he put on a goofy grin or a quasi-sexual stank face.

“Stank face” is interesting; “quasi-sexual stank face” even more so. I’m trying to imagine it. Whatever it looks like, it’s inspired description. More Bua, please. 

September 15, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. No regard for due process – that’s my takeaway from Jonathan Blitzer’s disturbing “Enemies of the State.” It documents the alarming abuse of power of ICE, Border Patrol, and other U.S. officers who are carrying out Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. It’s going to be up to human rights advocates and the courts to stop the abuse. Otherwise, the U.S. is headed the way of Nazi Germany. 

2. I enjoyed Ben McGrath’s Talk story “Dumpster Diving,” especially his description of the plan on how to move the “giant cherry-colored armoire”: 

Their attention turned to a giant cherry-colored armoire that had belonged to a professor now on sabbatical in Malaysia. How to get it to Bay Ridge? Ching had an idea. He could have it trucked with the weekly deliveries to Tandon, which is in downtown Brooklyn. “Then, there is a wonderful Home Depot probably less than a mile away,” he said. “You can rent a U-Haul for nineteen dollars, and it’s good for ninety minutes. So, if you time it just right, early in the morning . . .”

3. Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back,” an account of her visit to this year’s Minnesota State Fair, contains this delicious description:

Many of the most beloved food venders sell a single, time-honored classic: bubbling-hot, batter-fried cheese curds, as sparkly as nuggets of gold, from a stall called the Mouth Trap; the Corn Roast’s deeply burnished cobs, dunked in melted butter; crispy, wispy sweet-onion rings at Danielson’s & Daughters.

April 8, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Robert Sullivan’s delightful “Talk” story “Find a Grave." It’s about three members of Dervish, a band from Ireland’s County Sligo, and their search for the grave of Michael Coleman, a Sligo fiddler. Coleman is buried in St. Raymond’s Cemetery, in the Bronx. The trio rent a vehicle and use GPS to find St. Raymond’s. The process isn’t straightforward. Sullivan writes, “Kelly was busy with his phone. The cemetery offices, he discovered, were closed, and the precise location of Coleman’s grave was inscrutable.” But they persist and eventually find Coleman’s grave. They gather around it and play a tune in Coleman’s honor:

Instruments came out of the car, Morrow starting off with a reel called “Sligo Maid.” Suddenly, his fiddle popped its tuning peg. “That’s Coleman!” Kelly said. Tunes started up again as a plane departed LaGuardia.

Kelly smiled. “This is a big moment for us.”

“It’s practically spiritual,” Mitchell said.

After a while, they packed up their instruments. Clouds had covered the sun. Mitchell put his hands in his pockets and shivered. “It’s cold, lads,” he said.

The piece is practically a prose poem. I love it. Sullivan is a master “Talk” story writer. This is one of his best.

March 4, 2024 Issue

I love these sentences:

1. Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients, though they generally show up as supporting players: foie-gras drippings in a creamy onion dip, or an earthy whiff of white truffle in a garlic-cream soup. At times, this can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—a black-truffle-flecked gelée, draped over a devilled egg en chemise, tasted like nothing much at all, least of all truffles—but when it works, my God, it works. [Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Le B.”]

2. In 2005, Goswick sliced his suit going through the windshield of a car that went off the old Tappan Zee Bridge. [Ben McGrath, “Where’s My Car?”]

3. Once the performance started, the cloud, which you soon forgot about, and others like it (all products, probably, of an offstage cloud-making machine), vividly captured beams of light from above the stage that came down in vertical shafts, suggesting interrogation lamps, the columns of a courthouse, or the bars of a prison cell. [Ian Frazier, “Uncaged Birds”]

All three are from this week’s New Yorker. Which one’s my favorite? Well, all three are great. And I don’t actually have to choose. But if I did, I’d pick Frazier’s surreal “cloud” description – such a surprising, delightful combination of words: “performance,” “cloud,” “off-stage,” “cloud-making machine,” “beams of light,” “vertical shafts,” “interrogation lamps,” “columns of a courthouse,” “bars of a prison cell.” You’d wonder how their combination makes sense. But it does, in the context of Frazier’s excellent Talk story about an opera for the wrongfully convicted. Bravo, Ian Frazier!

Postscript: I see the magazine has a new film critic – Justin Chang. Is this just for this issue, or is it permanent? Chang’s review of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses” intrigues me, particularly its exotic setting (eastern Anatolia). If I get a chance, I’ll check it out.

February 26, 2024 Issue

Art is where you find it. This week Nick Paumgarten finds it in a hotel-room singing session of the vocal trio Tiny Habits. Paumgarten writes,

Still, with a couple of hours to kill, they were determined, or maybe just habituated, to make and post one of their signature short videos. They try to put out two a week. The space was snug, and, sitting cross-legged on the bed together in their socks, they exuded conviviality and ease. Rae and Khan wore parachute-y pants. Mayowa, the shy one, had a head scarf holding back all but a few of his dreadlocks.

Mayowa had chosen “Misty,” the Erroll Garner classic, with lyrics reluctantly furnished by Johnny Burke. First, they listened to Ella Fitzgerald’s version, then got to work arranging it into three parts.

Mayowa often takes the lower register, and Rae the highest, though they seem to weave around one another. On “Misty,” the melody fell to Rae. Sometimes they make a Google Doc, color-coding the parts, but this time they winged it.

Look at me

I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree.

And I feel like I’m clingin’ to a cloud I can’t understand;

I get misty, just holding your hand

Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it.

That last line made me smile. Paumgarten’s account of the session continues for several more delightful paragraphs. It ends with a description of the group making a video of their performance:

They set up an iPhone on some pillows and scrunched together at the foot of the bed. Ten takes later, they still hadn’t got it.

They went at it again, making their singing faces. They nailed it this time, and Rae shouted, “That’s the one!” The process had taken an hour. They tinkered with the reverb, and then got ready to post.

“What’s a misty emoji?” Rae asked. They settled on an umbrella, then titled the vid “misty . . . in manhattan.” It was time to get ready for a big dinner out with their agent.

Paumgarten’s “Misty in Manhattan” is another in his ongoing series of music-related Talk stories: see, for example, “Skin in the Game,” “Banger,” and “Nice Things.”  I enjoy them immensely. 

September 4, 2023 Issue

This week’s issue (“An Archival Issue”) contains an early piece by John McPhee that I was unaware of. Titled “On the Way to Gladstone,” it originally appeared in the July 9, 1966 New Yorker. It’s a “Talk of the Town” story, written from “Talk”’s weird “we” perspective, about the death of a New Jersey bear. McPhee writes, “The bear was shot by a Pottersville farmer. After it had been hit once, with No. 5 shot, it climbed into a tree in the farmer’s front yard. The farmer fired at it enough additional times to knock it out of the tree, dead.” He points out that the loss of this bear reduced the number of bears in New Jersey from twenty-two to twenty-one. 

The piece is slight, but it’s interesting to me because it’s a sort of prequel to McPhee’s great “A Textbook Place for Bears” (The New Yorker, December 27, 1982; included in his wonderful 1985 collection Table of Contents). That piece profiles Patricia McConnell, a biologist who works for the State of New Jersey trapping bears. It’s set in the Kittatinny Mountains where McConnell has a trap line. McPhee reports his experience accompanying McConnell as she checks her bear traps:

She had set snares – a pair of them, about thirty feet apart. And now, making rounds, at a few minutes to six in the morning, June 19, we went down into the woods to see what sort of mischief might have happened near the snares. The site was some distance from the road, and the mountainside fell steeply away. The only sound we heard was the tread of our feet. “There’s no bear here or we’d have heard it by now,” she was saying, but then she drew in her breath and stopped. She stared through the trees in excited disbelief. “This could only happen once,” she said. “We have hit the daily double. A bear in each snare.”

“A Textbook Place for Bears” mentions the Pottersville shooting:

The first wild bear I ever saw was in Vermont, eating raspberries, in 1946. I have since seen others, in remoter places. But I’ve never seen a bear in Princeton, or anywhere near it, and, in fact, was unaware that bears live in New Jersey until one morning about fifteen years ago when an interview I had been granted by Lester MacNamara, the state’s Director of Fish and Game, was interrupted by a ringing telephone. MacNamara was a big man from California with a weathered countenance, and he looked out of place in the confinement of a Trenton office. Relaxed and reminiscing, he had been telling me that he much preferred New Jersey’s wild terrain to the ones of his youth in California. The phone call made him furious. He was learning that a farmer in Pottersville had murdered with a shotgun a treed and frightened bear. MacNamara’s responses were not so much spoken as detonated. When he hung up, he almost broke the phone.

“On the Way to Gladstone” joins what is already a splendid McPhee bear oeuvre, including “A Textbook Place for Bears,” “Under the Snow,” “Direct Eye Contact,” and his classic “The Encircled River.” 

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.”

Best of 2017: Talk

Tom Bachtell, "Michel Houellebecq" (2017)

Here are my favorite “Talk of the Town” stories of 2017:

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Bong Show,” May 15, 2017 (“One object widely admired by the other lampworkers was a pea-green monster truck with big black tires and flames exuding from six tailpipes—every inch of it glass”).

2. Ian Frazier, “Extra Credit,” August 7 & 14, 2017 [“On exhibit were a palm-leaf book the size of a sheaf of paint samples, a big ball of raw rubber from a rubber tree (one of Sri Lanka’s resources), boxes of Ceylon tea (“We have the best, best tea”), a large stone grinder for spices (“Sri Lankan women were strong, back in the day”), her grandmother’s sitar, a replica of a seated Buddha considered to be the fifth-greatest statue in the world, and a statue of the fasting Buddha (“For six years, he ate no food and never opened his eyes”) that was made of welded iron”].

3. Robert Sullivan, “Facing History,” June 19, 2017 (“At Goodfellows, a barbershop on Fourth Avenue, people knew the church but not the tree. ‘In the North? That seems strange,’ a customer said”).

4. Lauren Collins, “Sideline,” June 19, 2017 (“He must have been chewing on his cigarette, because it hung from his mouth like a broken limb”).

5. Tad Friend, “Pulverizer,” June 19, 2017 (“Slugging down the rest of his soda, he continued, ‘I had an acting teacher who told me, “Michael, there are two types of actors: those who act with their ass”—squirmy Richard Dreyfuss types—“and those who act with their balls.” ’ His eyes got moist. ‘On this movie I got down on my knees and prayed before takes, and then just grabbed my balls and tried somehow to be of service’ ”).

6. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Incidents,” June 19, 2017 (“In front of him, a set of stairs led up to a rectangular opening cut into a wall. Beyond the opening was an empty chamber. Lights installed in the walls of the chamber were making it glow different shades—first fuchsia, then baby blue, then electric yellow. Everything outside the chamber also kept changing color, including Turrell”).

7. Nick Paumgarten, “Good Taste,” November 27, 2017 (“His top-of-the-line loudspeaker system, at three hundred and forty thousand dollars (no wonder we settle), is the Imperia: two seven-foot steel towers, each with a couple of huge flared wooden horns, one atop another, along with some smaller aluminum-alloy horns. Between them, on the floor, are the boxed bass horns. The standing horns, fashioned out of Pennsylvania ash, bring to mind an old gramophone, or a morning glory. They make it sound as if the musicians are in the room”).

8. Anna Russell, “Odds and Ends,” November 6, 2017 (“ ‘I like ordinary objects,’ Oldenburg said. ‘If you have one object meet some other object, which claims to be ordinary, then you’d have something even more extraordinary.’ He moved to another shelf. ‘That’s a bottle, that’s a piece of an automobile tire, and this”—he pointed to a brown globule—‘is obviously something coming out of a tube’ ”).

Best of 2016: Talk

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Here are my favorite “Talk of the Town” pieces of 2016 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Laura Parker, “Bee’s Knees,” March 21, 2016 (“She dunked the bee in a tiny bottle containing her special blend of ‘bee shampoo’: a few drops of archival soap and deionized water. She held the bottle up to the light and gave it a firm swirl. One of No. 1’s legs fell off. ‘She’s old, she’s tired—she’s falling apart,’ Doering said”).

2. Ian Frazier, “Body Phrases,” August 22, 2016 (“The tactful steps of dancers trying not to disturb were small and beguiling choreographies in themselves. A soft step-step-step-step, head down, with torso bent; then longer quiet strides in the open, toward the elevator up ahead”).

3. Ian Frazier, “Connected,” January 25, 2016 (“By design, the Link has no flat surfaces on which you can leave, say, an almost-empty Pabst bottle in a wrinkled paper bag. These Superman booths still have the little shelf beside the phone and always will. Their small privacy will still vibrate, occasionally, with the old lonesome pay-phone emotions of our former lives. The Links, savvier about human entanglements, will not”).

4. Mark Singer, “Sleight of No Hands,” February 8 & 15, 2016 [“Somehow—Jay’s biography, though it comes as close as any source to explaining the how of how, still leaves a reader at the intersection of belief and disbelief—he did magic (specialty: cups-and-balls), played several instruments (dulcimer, trumpet, flute), trick-shot with pistols, demonstrated exquisite ball control at skittles, danced the hornpipe on his leather-encased stumps, married four times, and sired fourteen children (proof, as Jay noted in Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, of ‘one fully operative appendage’)”]. 

5. Tad Friend, “The Undead,” November 21, 2016 (“ ‘One reason Gabriel was so excited was because he was going to a hotel with her, away from the kids,’ Muldoon said. ‘The Wellington Monument they ride past is by any reckoning a phallic symbol.’ He nudged his wife. ‘You’re on your own with that one,’ Korelitz said”).

6. Tad Friend, “Framing,” September 5, 2016 (“She passed a Caribbean woman who was pushing an old white woman in a wheelchair and bending low to murmur to her charge. The caregiver’s teeth were widely separated, like a baby’s. ‘I love that woman’s teeth!’ Johnson cried. ‘If we weren’t going to get iced coffee I would go find a way to film her.’ As she walked on, she kept turning to look back”).

7. Mark Singer, “Bank Shot,” September 26, 2016 [“When he arrived at Eyebeam, the immediate challenge was to center the logo of American Eagle Savings Bank on the cover of Theories of Business Behavior, by Joseph William McGuire (formerly in the collection of the Cloud County Junior College Library, of Concordia, Kansas)”].

8. Ian Frazier, “Don’t Tread On Me,” October 3, 2016 (“He ordered a decaf espresso and asked the waiter to top it off with Sambuca. A smell of licorice rose”).

9. Tad Friend, “Out of Character,” August 29, 2016 (“Foster, thirty-five, is the character actor’s character actor: his body a grenade, his face the pin”).

10. Eric Lach, “Fire Starter,” January 18, 2016 (“Hickory will make a house smell like a ski lodge. Cherry is prized for the way it crackles and pops in a fireplace”).

Credit: The above illustration, by Tom Bachtell, is from Laura Parker’s “Bee’s Knees” (The New Yorker, March 21, 2016).

November 10, 2014 Issue

There are four dandy “Talk” stories in this week’s issue: Tad Friend’s "Rembrandt Lighting," Ian Parker’s "Oldies But Goodies," Ian Frazier’s "Tracks," and Mark Singer’s "Showrunning." Friend’s piece is about a visit with the movie director Dan Gilroy, at the Steven Kasher Gallery, in Chelsea, as he sifts through a box of Weegee photographs from the forties. Gilroy uses the collection “to explain how Weegee – connoisseur of the blood-spattered corpse – had inspired his new film, Nightcrawler, about a feral loner who roams Los Angeles, filming scenes of mayhem for the local news.” Friend says Gilroy is “as thin and pale as dental floss, with a sepulchral face and milky-blue eyes.” The story brims with pungent details. At one point, Gilroy looks at the circular stamp (“Credit Photo by Weegee”) on one of the photos and says, “He used a Speed Graphic camera, had a ten-foot focus, and shot with flash to create what he called Rembrandt lighting.” I delight in the way this piece combines so many seemingly incongruous elements – “a human coyote who comes down from the hills to feed,” “a wild-eyed woman resisting being frog-marched by a man in a trenchcoat,” “Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh and Lady Decies, imperious in white furs,” the Metropolitan Opera, a horrific car accident, Marilyn Monroe – in such a concentrated frame. It’s like a surreal, noir prose poem.

Ian Parker’s “Oldies But Goodies” wonderfully describes an encounter with the ninety-three-year-old painter Wayne Thiebaud in an inspired setting – a table at Lady M, “on East Seventy-eighth Street, a minimally decorated boutique-y place selling ‘confectionary delights.’ ’’ The setting is inspired because Thiebaud is famous for his “confections” paintings. Although Parker doesn’t say so, Thiebaud also happens to be the creator of some of the New Yorker’s yummiest “Food Issue” covers. A couple of lines in the piece made me smile: “As Thiebaud put it, there are still days that start with the thought: This morning, I’d like to paint a pie”; “I was interested in the Americanism of gumball machines.” And there’s this arresting sentence, incorporating a Thiebaud quotation: “He also painted crudités, fanned out on a plate, such as ‘you see over and over at everything you go to, that same stuff, in a circle – a Kenneth Noland abstraction.’ ” For me, the best part of “Oldies But Goodies” is the ending, when Parker attentively picks up on a nearby conversation: “At the counter, a woman used the tone of someone choosing between careers to ask for help deciding between a strawberry cake and a banana cake. ‘It depends on whether you like strawberries or bananas,’ the sales assistant replied.” I like this ending because it shows a virtuoso Talk writer artfully using a seemingly stray bit of reality to help make his story.

Ian Frazier's “Tracks” tells about a plan to convert a three-and-a-half-mile section of abandoned railroad tracks in central Queens into a linear park called the QueensWay. It takes the reader on a tour of the site in the company of three proponents of the project (Andrea Crawford, Marc Matsil, and Andy Stone) and a “visitor” (stand-in for Frazier, who in accordance with Talk tradition, refrains from using “I”). One of the hallmarks of Frazier’s style is his superb urban nature description, and in this piece he notes a place “where now the trunk of a large tree grew over a rusted rail like a potbelly over a belt.” Another distinctive feature of Frazier’s writing is the list. In “Tracks” he lists the names of businesses near or under the elevated section of railway at the QueensWay’s southern end: “RC Forklift Co., R & H Industrial Fabricators, Punjabi Brothers Auto Repair, Arco Electrical Contractors, United Propane, Hart Truck Refrigeration, 3 Kings Collision.” There’s poetry in those names! My favorite part of “Tracks” is when, late in the afternoon, after Crawford, Matsil and Stone leave the site, Frazier “found himself walking there alone.” This, to me, is such a Frazierian thing to do – to go back, explore the tracks again by himself, see what impressions he might gather. Sure enough, his contemplation of  “the vaulted spaces beneath the elevated tracks” yields this beautiful detail: “Slabs of rusted corrugated iron wall off the spaces, coils of barbed wire discourage burglars, and curbside ailanthus trees shoot upward until they meet the track overhang, which causes them to curl out over the street.”

Like Frazier, Mark Singer has been writing Talk stories since 1974. He, too, is a master of the form. His Mr. Personality (1989), one of the most beautiful collections of New Yorker writing ever published, contains twenty-five Talk pieces, including such classics as “Yabba-Yabba, Doodle-Doodle” (in which Mr. Blatford memorably says, “You get your change from a change machine, put your dog in the Doggie Washer, do your yabba-yabba, doodle-doodle – you know, whatever you do while you’re waiting in a Laundromat – and then go home with a clean dog”) and “Pigeon Mumblers” (“Some Greenpoint pigeon mumblers who are familiar with Killer’s irascible moods say that if he really put his mind to it, he could probably hatch a baseball”). Singer’s “Showrunning,” in this week’s issue, is about Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist and executive director of the TV series Alpha House. Trudeau, sitting at a table in the “imprecisely named Excellent Dumpling House,” on Lafayette Street, after a day of jury duty, discusses “the difference between spending days alone drawing and being an executive producer responsible for a cast and crew of a hundred and twenty people and one bloodhound (Gil John Bigg’s look-alike best friend).” He tells about a theatre group he formed when he was seven years old:

I just rounded up all the neighborhood kids, and we put on these productions in our basement. I think even then I understood that I really didn’t have the performance gene. But I did have the impresario gene. I wrote the plays, I wrote the music, I did the scenery, I made the tickets, I directed, I manned the light board. For one of my birthdays, I asked for a curtain. My mother got red curtains that divided the basement in half. We packed the basement. There were some bunk beds down there. We turned those into balconies.

That last bit about turning the bunk beds into balconies made me smile.

So there you have it – four great Talk pieces by four great Talk writers. Proof, if proof is needed, that the Talk of the Town story, invented eighty-nine years ago by Harold Ross, is still vibrant.

June 2, 2014 Issue

This week, in his wonderful Talk story “Do Not Cross,” Ian Frazier does with a particular kind of urban barricade what I’ve always dreamed of doing with a certain type of Arctic canoe. He traces it back to its source. Regarding Friedrichs Mfg. Inc.’s crowd-control barricade, Frazier writes,

Art critics sometimes describe objects as being of such overwhelming beauty that it is impossible to look at them without a sharp intake of breath. With Friedrichs Mfg. Inc.’s barricades, the sharp intake of breath may not occur at first glance, or ever, but give these objects a few minutes of contemplation and a minor visitation of the sublime may occur.

I feel that I know exactly what Frazier is talking about, because I’ve experienced that “minor visitation of the sublime” whenever I eye one of Nor-West Canoes Inc.’s wood-and-canvas beauties. They’re a common sight in Nunavut hamlets. The circular logo on their high-curved bows shows a moose head and the words “Canots Nor-West Canoes Inc. Prevost. P.Q. Canada.” I’ve always wanted to visit Prevost, Quebec, and see where they’re manufactured. That’s precisely what Frazier does in his “Do Not Cross.” The “small silver label” on the barricade says “Friedrichs Custom Mfg. Inc., 303 Butterworth St., New Orleans, LA 70121.” Characterizing himself as “the vacationer” (Frazier complies with Talk’s banishment of “I”), he travels to 303 Butterworth Street, New Orleans:

The vacationer followed the Jefferson Highway a long way out, via two buses and some walking. Butterworth Street lies close by the Mississippi River and almost underneath the Huey P. Long Bridge, a structure so vaulting and high that it seems to extend from one white, towering Gulf coast cloud to the next. Low industrial buildings and idling semis and gray mud puddles in the shape of tire tracks compose the scene back on earth. The Friedrichs factory is made of corrugated metal painted white on the street side and not painted on the others. Dim and echoing, it opens its bay doors to the daylight. The vacationer walked in. Not unexpectedly, hundreds of barricades lay or leaned in piles on the factory floor. Nobody seemed to be about.

In a back office, Frazier (“the vacationer”) finds the company’s secretary and talks with her. The whole piece is inspired! Frazier has a knack for finding stories in overlooked places and under-appreciated things. “Do Not Cross” is one of his best. I enjoyed it immensely. It makes me want to jump in my car and drive to Prevost. Maybe this summer I’ll do it.

January 6, 2014 Issue

The first 2014 issue of The New Yorker is here. I scan it for thisness, the quality I most crave when I read. As defined by James Wood, thisness is “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion” (How Fiction Works, 2008). Wood appreciates thisness in fiction; I appreciate it in factual writing. Perusing the current issue, I find only one instance of thisness, but it’s a beauty: Sophie Brickman’s “Armed with an ant’s perspective and a technology titan’s resources, Myhrvold captures the swirling magma of a blueberry’s interior and the translucent reptilian juice sacs of a grapefruit,” in her wonderful Talk story, “Say Cheese.” That “swirling magma of a blueberry’s interior” is marvelously fine, and the “translucent reptilian juice sacs of the grapefruit” is brilliant. The new year is in it’s infancy, but already a “Best of 2014” candidate has emerged – Sophie Brickman’s terrific “Say Cheese.”