A New Yorker thread
George Saunders’ short story “Puppy,” which appears in the May 28th issue, is represented by this old adage perfectly. And it just about killed me.
There are two narratives driving this piece. The first revolves around a middle-class mother and her two “well-loved” (not spoiled!) kids, who are looking to adopt a puppy. […]

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A New Yorker Thread
Colm Tóibín is the author of five novels, including The Master, which won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His new collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons, was released in the U.S. in January. Visit his website.
***
Colm Tóibín’s prose is heavy with ache. I mean this in a good way. Reading […]

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A New Yorker Thread
Issue: April 2, 2007
In Shouts and Murmurs, David Owen wrote a commentary titled “Passing.” In his piece, he talks about how, at the age of twenty-four, he went back to high school. He enrolled, with his literary agent posing as his mother, attended classes, dressed the part, the whole shebang. Needless to […]

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“PLAYDATE” by Kate Walbert
published by The New Yorker
March 26, 2007
So I’m not a mother, which is essentially what this piece is about, but I still found it riotously funny in (hopefully) all the right places, and the viewpoint character’s sarcasm and wit work perfectly within the frame of the story. Also, the descriptions Walbert chose […]

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I’ve subscribed to the New Yorker since August of last year, and was only recently turned onto the Oxford American, so I come to both magazines from a relatively new place, and hopefully, a fresh perspective. Or maybe it’s a perspective that exits, but hasn’t been voiced. Or maybe I’m just late to the game. […]

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The Allure of Anonymity, a New Yorker thread…
UPDATE: The New Yorker threads will now focus on stories and articles pertinent to creative writing and the fiction community. There are other blogs that cover the journalism side of the magazine, such as John Bucher’s New Yorker Comment. In changing the focus, I hope to make the […]

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In Talk of the Town’s “Party Talk,” David Remnick, explores the “what if Al Gore was President” results that were parodied on Saturday Night Live. While it was a funny spoof, mentioning things like, “Although Social Security had been repaired, the cost had been high: the budget surplus was ‘down to a perilously low eleven […]

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This is the Anniversary issue of The New Yorker, which covers two weeks. Therefore, there will be no New Yorker thread next week. However! The Showcase returns next Friday with Short Stories, so stay tuned for that!
First up is James Surowiecki with “Troubled Waters Over Oil.” This is a startling article that confirms what […]

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The topic of global warming is all the rage these days. It might seem annoying, but really, it’s about time this subject is getting serious attention. Back with another look is Elizabeth Kolbert, in her comment “Hot Topic,”where she tells us just who is jumping on the reality bandwagon. Those included: The Intergovernmental Panel on […]

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In the Critic’s Notebook: The Third Man by David Denby profiles “An Unreasonable Man,” a documentary of Ralph Nader. The film, he says, takes “us through his exhilarating early years of civic activity, in which a man who never stopped thinking improved the way we drive, eat, shop, breathe, and take medicine.” But it also […]

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In the Darnedest Things Department: Band of Brothers by Nick Paumgarten takes a look at The Naked Brothers, a band comprised of the Wolff brothers—twelve-year-old Nat, and nine-year-old Alex.
Nat is the singer, songwriter, and piano man, while Alex primarily plays the drums, but writes a few songs, too. His latest is called “Three is Enough,” […]

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Mr. Green by Elizabeth Kolbert is a profile of guru environmentalist Amory Lovins. Lovins is the founder and C.E.O. of the Rocky Mountain Institute, whose goal is to foster “the efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, just, prosperous, and life-sustaining.” He argues that the United States can cut its […]

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The Starting Gate by Jeffrey Goldberg takes a look ahead at the 2008 Democratic Presidential contenders. Among those alleged to be running—Illinois Senator Barack Obama, John Edwards, the 2004 Vice Presidential nominee, and Hillary Clinton.
Goldberg examines their outlooks on foreign policy and says this: “John Edwards…has become the candidate of troop withdrawal… Hillary Clinton…is a […]

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The Fiction Issue: December 25, 2006 & January 1, 2007:
The Past Conditional: A Personal History by Julian Barnes, (the author of the novel Arthur and George) is a fascinating look at how religion has influenced his, and his family’s, life. Barnes opens with the line: I don’t believe in God, but I miss […]

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Elizabeth Kolbert’s comments in “Hot and Cold”, illustrate how futile trying to pass, or even enacting, environmental legislation can be. In Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, a suit described as “one of the most important environmental cases ever,” eleven states, three cities, and thirteen environmental groups are attempting to force Bush to impose limits on […]

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In The Talk of the Town: “The Ghostwriter”by Jeffrey Toobin.
Toobin introduces Pablo Fenjives, the man hired to ghostwrite O.J. Simpson’s book “If I Did It,” the hypothetical account of the Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman murders. Luckily, HarperCollins, the imprint behind the project, pulled the plug. But Fenjives still thinks: “It’s going to […]

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From The Financial Page: “Deal Sweeteners” by James Surowiecki takes a look at the problems with government price fixing for domestic sugar, and quotas and tariffs on imported sugar. Surowiecki points out that sugar prices in the United States are at least twice as high as the world’s average, which has, in turn, led businesses […]

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First up, on the Financial Page: “Elective Economics” by James Surowiecki, is a look at how the economy is affected by a change in political power. Before the midterm elections this year, Dick Cheney and the Republicans warned that if the Democrats took control of Congress, the “economy would sustain a major hit.” But what […]

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Check out:
“Downpaging” by Ian Frazier, a sarcastic and hilarious anecdote on the state of the new release hard-cover novel market. He starts with this quote from “Ten Sure Ways to Trim Your Budget” which appeared in “the News.”
“Check books out of the library instead of buying them… New releases of hard-cover novels cost $25 and […]

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The Talk of the Town’s “Dirty Wikitricks” by Nick Paumgarten is a fascinating look at Wikipedia, the internet’s predominant encyclopedia. Fascinating for me, anyway, because I had no idea that the site’s entries are written and edited by readers. Now that’s an exercise in the democratic process! Which is exactly the problem it seems, as […]

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In “Millions for Millions,” Connie Bruck introduces readers to Muhammad Yunus, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, and the godfather of microcredit. In 1974, during the famine in Bangladesh, Yunus, then a professor of Economics at Chittagong University, traveled to a neighboring village to talk to the poor. “He experimented with ways of helping them—initially, […]

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Joyce Carol Oates gets slammed by a reader in The Mail for basing her story “Landfill” (October 9, 2006) on the John Fiocco, Jr. case. Fiocco, a freshman at College of New Jersey, disappeared on March 25, 2006. His body was found about a month later in a landfill. The reader claims “Oates could just […]

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“On Reading a Newspaper for the First Time as an Adult” by Sharon Olds is packed with breath-taking images. Take this, for example:
“…the crackly
rustle and the feathery grease remind me that
what I am doing is what my then husband
did, that sitting waltz with the paper,
undressing its layers, blowsing it,
opening and closing its delicate bellows,
folding till […]

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In Talk of the Town “Skulduggery,” Tad Friend tells the story of Del Close’s skull. Close, an improv-comedy “guru” who taught Bill Murray and Mike Myers, died in 1999 of emphysema. In his will, he requested his skull be donated to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, “so that he could play Yorick in ‘Hamlet.’”
Charna Halpern, his longtime […]

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This week’s fiction is “Other People’s Deaths” by Lore Segal. Because I’m fascinated by the prevalent phenomenon of people adopting other’s tragedies as their own, this story captured me. When Ilka’s husband, James, dies suddenly in a car accident, their friends and co-workers (never mind James was on the verge of getting fired from his) […]

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I love Martin Espada’s poem “Return”, which ends with:
“Forty years later, I stand in the hallway.
The dim angel of public housing is too exhausted
to welcome me. My hand presses
against the door at apartment 14-F
like an octopus stuck to aquarium glass;
blood drums behind my ears.
Listen to every door: there is a war on television.”
Also, Anthony Lane […]

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“I sometimes wonder what goes on in my head when I make stupid investment decisions,” says John Cassidy, author of “Mind Games: What Neuroeconomics Tells us About Money and the Brain”. So does Peter Sokol-Hessner, a graduate student at New York University who is working on a research project using imaging technology to explore […]

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Following the articles on war and terrorism is Cate Kennedy’s gem of a short story, “Black Ice”. It is a poignant and disturbing look at country folk versus city transplants, the practical lifestyle versus the materialistic. The viewpoint character is a young boy who kills rabbits for his neighbor to feed to his dogs. The […]

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“Kansas”, a short story by Antonya Nelson, explores how place can define people. “Wichita was just that size, big enough for lesbians and psychoanalysis, small enough for impractical, coincidental cross-pollination.” Indeed, the characters in Nelson’s story embody this split-personality, toeing the line between the exotic and the mundane.
In The Talk of the Town’s “No Mercy”, […]

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Margaret Atwood’s poem “Secrecy” is gripping, with lines like:
“Secrecy flows through you,
a different kind of blood.”
and:
“It blooms in you,
a poppy made of ink.”
I’m still pondering that last one.
Also of interest, “The Risk Pool” by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. In his article, he explores dependency ratios and how […]

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