September 24, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The newyorker.com version of Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Sofreh” features six images by my favorite New Yorker photographer, William Mebane, including a wonderful portrait of Sofreh’s chef and owner, Nasim Alikhani, that is sure to make my 2018 “Top Ten Photos” list.

2. Great to see illustrator Angie Wang back in the magazine (see “Goings On About Town: Modern Dance” by Brian Seibert). Her portrait of the singer Nellie McKay, in the December 13, 2010 issue, is one of my all-time favorites.

3. Neima Jahromi, in her “Bar Tab: Apothéke,” mentions an alluring drink called the Devil’s Playground (gin, absinthe, local dragon fruit, prickly pear) I’d love to taste.

4. What’s the most interesting line in this week’s issue? Three contenders: (1) “His late-July set for the Australian radio station Triple J’s ‘Mix Up’ series is a sauntering, slow-burn disco workout, highlighted by a reëdited version of the Jimmy Castor Bunch’s eternally goofy ‘Troglodyte (Cave Man)’ ” (Michaelangelo Matos, “Night Life: Tim Sweeney”); (2) In a saffron vesper, mixed with gin, vodka, and Lillet, it’s too intense—like taking a glug from a perfume bottle in your grandmother’s bathroom—but in desserts it’s more subtle, an intoxicating footnote” (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Sofreh”); (3) “The picture has time in it, the residue of innumerable side-to-side shifts of scrutiny” (Peter Schjeldahl, “Only See”). And the winner is: Hannah Goldfield for that inspired “like taking a glug from a perfume bottle in your grandmother’s bathroom.”

September 17, 2018 Issue

In this week’s issue, Anna Russell scores another Talk triumph, her third this year. The others are “Caffeinated” (March 19) and “Leafy Greens” (July 9 & 16). In her new piece, “Reunion,” she accompanies virtuoso cellist Matt Haimovitz on his way to a repair shop to pick up his beloved Matteo, a rare, multimillion-dollar cello, which Haimovitz has owned and played for thirty years. Matteo required fixing because fifteen months earlier, Haimovitz accidentally dropped it while teaching a student. Russell writes, 

He had played it for thirty years, until, fifteen months earlier, while giving a lesson to a promising Canadian student, he dropped it, and the cello’s neck snapped. Since then, the instrument had been undergoing extensive repairs by a team of five luthiers at Reed Yeboah Fine Violins, near Columbus Circle. Now the shop had called to say that Matteo was ready for release.

The piece builds suspense: Will the rebuilt cello sound the same as the original? At first the answer appears to be no:

Haimovitz sat down and played a few hoarse scales, before launching into a jaunty tune, the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. He ended on a long note, and then sat in silence. “Hmm,” he said.

But then a new bow is provided and Haimovitz plays the cello again: 

He leaned in, listening. “Yeah,” he said. He played a mournful tune, Philip Glass’s “Overture,” and came up smiling: “Very cool!” Everyone applauded.

The ending is inspired:

Afterward, flushed, Haimovitz was more circumspect. While playing, he said, he couldn’t help thinking about the old Matteo. “There were moments where it was, like, I’m missing certain things, where’s that?” But then something changed. “Gradually, the vibration felt the same.” He accepted a glass of prosecco. “It’s a process,” he said.

September 10, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Emily Witt’s “What Is New?,” a profile of photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The newyorker.com version’s tagline says, “For three decades, the photographer has explored the fragility of the political consensus on which his personal utopia depends.” Maybe that’s true, although, to me, his explorations are as much hedonistic as they are political. The print version’s succinct “The life and art of Wolfgang Tillmans” is preferable. But I do like that “personal utopia.” It conveys Tillmans's cocoon-like cosmopolitan world – the Panorama Bar, his Berlin studio, galleries such as Nairobi’s GoDown Arts Centre – all superbly described by Witt. Here’s her depiction of his studio:

The space occupies an entire floor of a building originally intended as a department store, designed by the Bauhaus architect Max Taut. It has unfinished concrete floors and long rows of windows. Tillmans cultivates a small wilderness of houseplants—sculptural cacti, papyrus, greenish-purple-leafed begonias, delicate ferns—which he grows from cuttings that he gets from friends and collects on his travels. Walls are decorated with maps, exhibition posters, and protest signs, shelves are lined with records and books. Tillmans takes still-lifes, and I was reminded of one composed from half-smoked packs of Gauloises, decks of Post-it notes, and tape dispensers scattered between computer monitors and plants. He encourages a careful selection of visual clutter, which, he said, “keeps it interesting for the assistants and myself.”

Witt also gets at Tillmans’s creative process. My favourite passage is her description of his “casual, and barely noticeable, often in motion” way of taking pictures:

In Berlin, he took photographs of a building under renovation across the street from his studio, and of his friends dancing at Clausen’s fortieth birthday party. In Kenya, I saw Tillmans reach around a driver’s head to take a photograph through the driver’s-side window of people assembling wheelbarrows. After a radio interview at Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, he took a portrait of the host, Khainga O’Okwemba. As we were walking out of the building, he photographed a pink wastebasket in the corner of someone’s office, a spider plant placed underneath the stairs, and a sign declaring the corporation “a corruption-free zone.” In New York, three months later, walking north from the Whitney Museum to the David Zwirner gallery, in Chelsea, where Tillmans has a show this fall, he led me along the West Side Highway. As we walked past construction sites, open-bed trucks loaded with building material, and construction workers sawing amid showers of sparks, he took photographs. I saw the things that I have mentioned, but what he might have been seeing in that moment would not be revealed until it became a photograph, if it became one at all. “People are so unable to talk about what makes a picture, because technically they’re all the same, they’re all pigment on paper, and we are using the same cameras,” Tillmans told me. “The reason why a photograph I take can be recognized is literally beyond words.”

That “but what he might have been seeing in that moment would not be revealed until it became a photograph” is excellent, a variation on Garry Winogrand’s inspired “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” 

September 3, 2018 Issue

Simon Schama is a superb word-painter. His “Blue as Can Be,” in this week’s issue, contains a bravura passage that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker writing. Inspired by his tour of Harvard’s Forbes Pigment Collection, he writes,

Gazing at Vincent posed against his poisoned teal, his jacket edged with the bright-blue trim of his imagination, I thought of the laborers behind all those Forbes pigments: the women who rinsed, kneaded, sieved, and dried the pulverized lapis lazuli that Giovanni Bellini used for the Virgin’s ultramarine robe; who stood waist-deep in horse manure, the vapors of which hastened the flaking of lead that produced the “lead white” used by Frans Hals and Rembrandt to capture folds of linen and lace. I thought of van Gogh claiming to recognize more than twenty black pigments in the portraiture of Frans Hals, the best of them created from charred bones. And of the bright pigments made in grim captivity: the North African slaves and the forzado convicts condemned to work in the mercury mines of Almaden so that the Spanish crown could sell cinnabar; the Caribbean slaves who grew and harvested indigo; the inmates of the Amsterdam House of Correction, rasping away at brazilwood.

Schama’s brilliant piece not only celebrates paint; it reminds us that paint is a product, sourced in rocks, roots, oxides, and, yes, even horse manure and charred bones.

August 27, 2018 Issue

Calvin Tomkins, in his absorbing “Painterly Virtues,” a profile of painter Alex Katz, in this week’s issue, says, “Many of Katz’s best paintings capture the light and the atmosphere of a specific time of day—none more hauntingly than his 1982 image of an adolescent girl, alone, in ‘Tracy on the Raft at 7:30.’ ” I don’t know about that. The use of “specific” to describe a Katz is surprising. He’s among the least specific painters I know of. Looking at “Tracy on the Raft at 7:30,” I see an image denuded of detail. Everything in it is massively simplified: the girl in her two-piece red-and-white bathing suit looks like a mannequin; an immense swath of slate green paint represents foliage; there’s a glimpse of sage green sky; the raft is a bar of white and a bar of grey; water is a bar of slate green with sage green splotches indicating reflections of sky. It’s the title that provides the specificity, not the painting. “Tracy on the Raft at 7:30” is an abstractionist’s idea of representation. As Tomkins says, Katz’s work was never realistic. “The faces of his subjects are smooth and unblemished, almost generic, and the background details, when they exist, are minimal.”

Alex Katz, "Tracy on the Raft at 7:30" (1982)

I relish details. Katz’s pared-down style isn’t entirely to my taste. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Tomkins’s piece immensely, especially his account of watching Katz paint:

Moving deliberately, Katz climbed five steps to the top of a creaky wheeled platform and started applying ultramarine to the upper-right section of the canvas, using a housepainter’s six-inch-wide brush. The paint went on easily, in smooth, unhurried strokes, back and forth and diagonally. One of his rules is “no noodling,” which means no fussy brushwork. He came down, moved the platform a few feet to the left, and climbed up again to do the next part. Every now and then he paused to consult the smaller sketch, which he had with him on the platform, or the warmup canvas. He kept going back over the painted areas, to adjust the tone. “I’m not sure the blue is right,” he said, at one point. “We’ll see when the black comes into play.” It took him about half an hour to finish the sky. Occasionally, between trips up and down the steps, he paused to wipe up drops of paint that had fallen beyond the brown paper he’d laid on the studio’s faded but immaculate linoleum floor.

Tomkins’s recent series of artist profiles, including “Somewhere Different” (on Peter Doig), “Troubling Pictures” (on Dana Schutz), and “Into the Unknown” (on Chris Ofili), are among the most pleasurable New Yorker pieces of the last five years. “Painterly Virtues” is a wonderful addition to the collection.

August 20, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nicholas Schmidle’s “Rocket Man,” an extraordinary profile of an extraordinary man – Virgin Galactic’s ace pilot, Mark Stucky. Schmidle puts us squarely there, in the cockpit of SpaceShipTwo, with Stucky and his co-pilot, Dave Mackay, as they fly into space:

Ten seconds into the burn, SpaceShipTwo was supersonic. Stucky began trimming the h-stabs, steadily increasing the vehicle’s pitch until it reached sixty-eight degrees. He and Mackay were travelling at Mach 1.8—about twice as fast as a Tomahawk cruise missile. Outside the vehicle, the light was draining from the sky, turning it a deep, muddy blue.

He describes what Stucky sees:

The Earth’s bright-blue surface filled his porthole. It was a stupendous sight: the outer edge of the atmosphere was dancing with wispy tendrils. The spaceship was now at eighty-four thousand feet—higher than he’d ever been. He could now testify to the awesome power of the “overview effect.”

He shows us Stucky’s poised reaction to an in-flight emergency (Schmidle calls it “a vertiginous surprise”): 

Hurriedly, Stucky attempted to right the ship by blasting thrusters of high-pressure air, which was stored in the wings and was used to orient the vehicle in low-gravity environments. Then he instructed Mackay to unlock and raise the feather. As it went up, the spaceship righted itself, just as it had on Stucky’s harrowing glide flight seven years earlier. The same innovation that had contributed to the 2014 crash was, when properly deployed, a godsend.

That 2014 crash haunts Schmidle’s piece. He describes it magnificently:

WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo zoomed off the runway. They flew about a hundred and fifty miles northeast, alongside a craggy mountain range streaked with purple and green mineral deposits. After reaching Death Valley, and still ascending, they looped back toward the release point. Stucky, in mission control, was watching the cockpit video and listening over the radio as Siebold and Alsbury ran through their checklists.

Alsbury: “Seat belts and shoulder harnesses?”

Siebold: “Snug.”

Alsbury: “Rocket burn timer?”

Siebold: “Set and verified.”

Alsbury: “Stick?”

Siebold: “Stick is forward.”

The pilots flooded their masks with oxygen, in case of an emergency. Neither was wearing a pressure suit.

Alsbury armed the release switch, and the spaceship dropped from WhiteKnightTwo. He fired the rocket. “Good light,” Siebold said, his voice reedy from the onset of g-forces. A moment later, following Stucky’s protocol, Alsbury announced their airspeed: Mach 0.8. They were in the transonic zone. Everything was going well.

“Yeehaw!” Siebold cried out.

Then Alsbury did something inexplicable. “Unlocking,” he said. He began reaching for a lever that controlled the locks on the feather.

Stucky hoped that he’d either misheard Alsbury or failed to notice that the spaceship had passed the transonic zone. He checked the Machmeter on the main display screen, and saw that the speed was still below Mach 1. His body seized: without the locks in place, aerodynamic forces would push the feather up, creating a tremendous amount of drag and shredding the spaceship in midair.

He lunged at the call button, intending to scream, “Don’t!”

Siebold grunted in agony. The audio feed stopped, and the video froze mid-frame. An engineer looked up from his console and gave Stucky a searching look.

Stucky said, “They’re gone.”

“Rocket Man” begins and ends with Stucky’s successful piloting of SpaceShipTwo into space. In between, it chronicles his personal history and how he became involved in Virgin Galactic’s amazing quest to make commercial space travel a reality. It brims with fascinating details – the way SpaceShipTwo is “attached like a marsupial to the belly of a mother ship, WhiteKnightTwo”; the labor-intensive construction of SpaceShipTwo’s frame (“you had to bind together sheets of honeycombed carbon by applying resin, cut the sheets into shapes with laser-guided precision, and bake each piece in a Celotex oven”); the technique suggested by Virgin Galactic’s flight doctor for avoiding passing out while experiencing extreme gravitational forces: “‘Pretend like you’re squeezing a walnut down there,’ she said, referring to my glutinal muscles.”

Schmidle's “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011) and “In the Crosshairs” (June 3, 2013) are New Yorker masterpieces. Now he's produced a third - “Rocket Man.” He's become one of the magazine's best writers.

Updike's Exquisite Word Paint (Contra Christine Smallwood)

Christine Smallwood, in her “State of Affairs” (Bookforum, Summer 2018), says of John Updike, “He could describe a barn well enough, but to what end?” If you have to ask that about Updike, chances are you’re not going to appreciate his art. For Updike, things are interesting in themselves. Like Dürer and Vermeer, artists he admired immensely, he describes the physical world in close avid detail: 

Shed needles from the larches had collected in streaks and puddles on the tarpaper and formed rusty ochre drifts along the wooden balustrade and the grooved aluminum base of the sliding glass doors.

The lilac leaves, flourishing, flowerless, had reached the height of Nancy’s window and, heart-shaped, brushed her screen.

Her brown eyes, gazing, each held in miniature the square skylight above them.

Treading lightly upon the rime-whitened grass, ice to his bare soles, he finally located, southward above the barn ridge with its twin scrolled lightning rods, a constellation gigantic and familiar: Orion.

He was sitting on the brittle grass, his feet in their papery slippers stinging. 

He called; she held still in answer, and appeared, closer approached, younger than he had remembered, smoother, more finely made – the silken skin translucent to her blood, the straight-boned nose faintly paler at the bridge, the brown irises warmed by gold and set tilted in the dainty shelving of her lids, quick lenses subtler than clouds, minutely shuttling as she spoke. 

These lines are all from Updike’s Couples (1968), a novel that Smallwood calls smug, pompous, and silly. She doesn’t get Updike’s writing. His art is the art of description. Claudia Roth Pierpont, in her “The Book of Laughter” (The New Yorker, October 7, 2013), calls him “a painter in words.” This seems exactly right.

Andrew O'Hagan's Brilliant "The Tower"

For me, one of this year’s literary highlights is Andrew O’Hagan’s “The Tower” (London Review of Books, June 7, 2018), a massive report on the Grenfell Tower fire that killed seventy-two people. O’Hagan is a superb writer. His The Atlantic Ocean (2013) is one of my favorite essay collections. His The Secret Life (2017) was one of the best books of 2017. His “Imaginary Spaces” (The New Yorker, March 28, 2016) was one of the best New Yorker pieces of 2016 (see here).

“The Tower” has a fascinating dialectical structure, evincing a deep distrust of simplistic black-and-white narrative.

Divided into seven sections, it describes what happened, sketches the lives of some of the victims and survivors, considers various causes of the disaster, meets with activists, attends the memorial service for the victims, covers the rabid finger-pointing, political fallout, and scapegoating of the council that owned the tower – all the while weaving its own compelling narrative around “the complications of truth.” O’Hagan writes,

In an effort to politicise this, activists and media observers, both engaged on a prolonged mission to simplify, speak of the council as if it were the only organisation involved, and speak of the ‘cladding’ as if it were the only issue. Yet, of all the organisations, the council was the only one happy to spend (rather than to make) money. It was the least involved in nuts and bolts decisions about the refurbishment, as we have seen, and all the big decisions came quite appropriately from the TMO, which commissioned the project; from Rydon, the builders; from Artelia UK, the project managers; from Studio E Architects, the principal designers; and IBI Group, which acted as planning consultants. These organisations between them made the tower what it became in the early hours of 14 June, when fire escaped from a kitchen and was funnelled rapidly upwards through the wide cavities and across the unstopped boundaries between the flats, combusting the Celotex insulation which in turn combusted the Reynobond aluminium panels. (The insulation was made by Saint Gobain UK and the panels were made by Arconic.) This pile of names will no doubt irritate the simplifiers during the several years it takes for the inquiry to provide an answer. But their existence supplies us with one answer now: the tower’s vulnerability lay in a network of negligence that was beyond the capacity of any one man, and beyond the failings of any one material. Some truths are just too long to put in a headline.

He says of the media,

And journalism, hour by hour and day by day, showed by its feasting on half-baked items that it had lost the power to treat reality fairly. You saw it everywhere. Channel 4 News, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, Sky News, the New York Times: from the middle of that night, they began to turn the fire into the story they wanted it to be. Reality wasn’t good enough, the tragedy wasn’t bad enough, it had to be augmented, it had to be blown up, facts couldn’t be gleaned quickly enough, and stories went without investigation, research, tact or even checking. In a world of perpetual commentary in which everyone and anyone is allowed their own facts, accusation stands as evidence.

O’Hagan’s “The Tower” is one of the most damning indictments of rushing to judgment I’ve ever read. 

"Not Parasitic, But Primary": On the Art of Criticism (Contra Brody and Robbins)

Garry Winogrand, "Gas Pumps, Santa Fe, New Mexico" (1955)

Michael Robbins, in his Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music (2017), says, “Criticism is parasitic literature.” Richard Brody said the same thing a few years ago: “Criticism is a parasitical operation” (“How To Be A Critic,” newyorker.com, August 22, 2012). I can see why they think so: critical writing is a response to other people’s work. The critic appropriates the work of another in a work of his own. But I object to likening this process to that of a parasite. Great critics don’t suck life out of their subjects; they breathe it into them. For me, criticism isn’t parasitic; it’s symbiotic. T. J. Clark analyses Picasso’s The Blue Room as a vision of space (“Space is intimate. The rug heads off abruptly into infinity, but the sheet on the unmade bed laps over it and leaps toward us and asks to be touched”) and I see it with new eyes. James Wood writes, “Saving the dead – that is the paradoxically impossible project of Austerlitz,” thereby providing a key to Sebald’s broody masterpiece. Geoff Dyer reads a Garry Winogrand photo of seemingly nothing (it’s a picture of gas pumps near Santa Fe, New Mexico), noting “the red and white of Coke machine and T-shirt; the Mobil gas pumps and lights; the red-lettered ‘HUNTER’ against the white background of the billboard; and, framed by blue sky, the ‘LISTERINE’ sign in the stripey colours of toothpaste,” and suddenly I’m marvelling at Winogrand’s ingenious eye for colour. I could list dozens of such examples – criticism that is as creative and original and stimulating as the work it examines. Laura Kipnis speaks for me when she says (quoting A. O. Scott), “Criticism is an art in its own right. Wait, not just an art, one that may supersede all other arts! It’s larger and more encompassing – ‘not parasitic, but primary’ ” (“Critical Condition,” Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2016). 

August 6 & 13, 2018 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue I enjoyed most is David Kortava’s “Bar Tab: Mehanata,” a vivid account of what it’s like to don a “vintage Eastern Bloc military overcoat,” step inside a “glass-walled ice cage,” and attempt to knock back six shots of vodka in two minutes. Kortava writes,

After downing four shots each, the financier and his associates egressed the cage, divested themselves of their ideologically laden attire, and stumbled over to some stripper poles, where they permitted themselves to dance, clumsily and with inane delight, to “Celebration,” by Kool & the Gang. Nearby, a graffiti portrait of Karl Marx had no choice but to take in the scene. 

July 30, 2018 Issue

If you enjoy reading ekphrasis, as I do, you’ll surely appreciate Zadie Smith’s “Promiscuous Painting,” in this week’s issue, a consideration of Henry Taylor’s paintings, including his brilliant Cicely and Miles Visit the 
Obamas (2017), which Smith describes as follows:

Yet to speak of this painting as I have—conceptually—is to pass over the difference between thinking with language and thinking in images, and no narrative explanation of the relation between these two pictures is as compelling as the horizontal line that marks the credenza in the photograph and the edge of the White House gardens in the painting, or the verticality of the white man in the photo’s top-right corner—with his squared-off shoulders—and his painterly analogue: a blue flagpole, with its crossbar and absence of flag. Taylor thinks primarily in colors, shapes, and lines—he has a spatial, tonal genius. Form responds to form: the negative space around Cicely and Miles in the photograph suggests the exact proportions of the White House, yet in the transition the abstract sometimes becomes figured, and vice versa, as if the border between these things didn’t matter. A burst of reflected light in the photo decides the height and placement of the windows in the painting, while two round signs at the movie première—one for Coca-Cola, the other for “Orange”—which can have no figurative echo in the painting, turn up anyhow on the White House façade as abstraction: a red sphere and an orange sphere, tracking the walls of what, in reality, now belonged to Trump. Like two suns setting at the same time.

This is very beautiful, and what makes it beautiful is the color, shape, and line that Smith blends into her analysis (e.g., “the horizontal line that marks the credenza in the photograph and the edge of the White House gardens in the painting”; “the verticality of the white man in the photo’s top-right corner—with his squared-off shoulders—and his painterly analogue: a blue flagpole, with its crossbar and absence of flag”; “a red sphere and an orange sphere, tracking the walls of what, in reality, now belonged to Trump”). The whole passage is inspired! I devoured it.

“Promiscuous Painting” is the latest in a trio of recent New Yorker art pieces by Smith. The others are “A Bird of Few Words” (June 19, 2017) and “Through the Portal” (May 7, 2018). I’ve enjoyed them all immensely.  

July 23, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. David S. Allee’s radiant “Naumburg Orchestral Concerts” night shot for “Goings On About Town” is transfixing. And what makes it transfixing is that raccoon sitting in a tree fork, looking at Allee as he takes the picture. Allee is a superb photographer. I admired his “Domino Sugar Factory” series immensely: see Jessie Wender, “Inside the Domino Sugar Factory,” newyorker.com, May 19, 2014.

David S. Allee, "Naumburg Orchestral Concerts" (2018)

2. And let’s give a huzzah for Neima Jahromi’s excellent “Bar Tab: Gilligan’s at Soho Grand,” containing this sparkling line: “On a recent afternoon, the nautical-jungle atmosphere was buoyed by a waitress in a blue-and-white Breton shirt, who issued a muted Tarzan yell as she strode by with a bottle of brut.”

  

3. “Talk of the Town” ’s new illustrator, João Fazenda, debuts this week with three images, including a dandy double portrait of Catherine O’Hara and Martin Short. It’s too early to say whether Fazenda is as good as Tom Bachtell. Bachtell is a master. He illustrated “Talk” for over twenty years. I’m going to miss him.

João Fazenda, "Catherine O'Hara and Martin Short" (2018)

4. The passage in Sam Wasson’s Talk story “Yes, And” in which Eugene Levy impersonates a “lugubrious rabbi” and says, “What a place to lose a cow,” made me laugh. The whole piece is terrific. It’s spurred my interest in Wasson’s writing. I think I’ll take a look at his Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. (2011).

5. I found David Remnick’s “Left Wing of the Possible” a refreshing change from the magazine’s usual Trump-bashing. Yes, the bastard deserves it. But it’s also important to spotlight politicians who offer a positive alternative to him. That’s what Remnick does in his absorbing piece, profiling twenty-eight-year-old democratic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, Remnick says, is “almost certain to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.” In the Democratic primary, she soundly defeated the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, on a platform of “Medicare for all, a tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, and criminal-justice reform.” I like the cut of her jib. I hope she wins.

6. I’ve previously commented on the connection between “journey” and “journalism.” They both share the same sematic root, “jour,” which is French for “day” – a day’s travel, the record of a day’s experience. But the connection is more than just sematic. The best journalism, for me, involves travel – an excursion of some sort. Such a piece is Jiayang Fan’s “Delivering Modernity,” a report on how Chinese tech companies like JD.com are transforming rural China. Fan visits a JD depot in Xinhuang, in the far west of Hunan Province.  She accompanies a JD courier as he makes deliveries to nearby villages (“We got stuck behind a truckload of squealing pigs whose rickety pen threatened to spill them onto our windshield”), visits a restaurant in Xinhuang (“I asked the proprietor, an aproned woman in her forties, if there was a menu, and she nodded, moving to the back of the room, past baskets of unwashed leafy vegetables. She yanked open a refrigerator door to display plastic containers of pig intestines, ears, and other offal. A pig’s head rolled slightly on the bottom shelf”), visits JD headquarters in Beijing (“Outside, in the parking lot, the company tests its fleet of self-driving cars”), talks with JD’s founder and C.E.O., Liu Qiangdong (“Fashion is among the company’s fastest-growing areas, and when Liu extended his hand I glimpsed a watch by Audemars Piguet, which recently partnered with JD to launch its first online boutique”), watches a drone arrive at a JD landing pad (“As it drew closer, the first thing I could make out was a red box under the belly of the drone. A minute later, I saw three spinning propellers, which seemed improbably small for the size of their load, like the wings of a bumblebee”), visits a training center for drone pilots (“The screens displayed animations of quadcopters that looked vaguely drunk as they wove through the sky toward landing pads”), and accompanies a “white-glove courier” on his rounds (“Shang makes his deliveries in a small electric car painted with bursts of JD red”). Drones, squealing pigs, expensive watches, self-driving cars, white-glove couriers – just some of the ingredients of Fan’s absorbing piece. I enjoyed it enormously. 

7. John Lanchester is a brilliant critical writer. I enjoy reading his arguments. In his “Doesn’t Add Up,” he takes on three recent economics books, contending that they “overreach,” i.e., extend their theories further than they usefully go. For example, he says of Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, “There is something thrilling about the intellectual audacity of thinking that you can explain ninety per cent of behavior in a society with one mental tool.” I relish Lanchester’s succinctness (e.g., “Our motives are often not what they seem: true. This explains everything: not true”). “Doesn’t Add Up” shows him in bracingly sharp form.