The backstory: The first album I remember my parents buying was Michael Jackson’s Thriller, followed not long after by Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. The variety of the music and how relevant it was made them different from all the other vinyl in the record cabinet. I remember being entranced by the politics of “Born in the USA” — he was allowed to say stuff like that in a song?? I don’t remember my parents making any other musical choices that I considered remotely cool.

The photo below was featured in “We Are Alive: Bruce Springsteen at sixty-two,” by David Remnick (July 30, 2012). It shows Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons, “Springsteen’s saxophone player and onstage foil and protector,” on stage in 1984, about the time I was learning the words to “Born in the USA.” 

In the print edition, directly below the photo is an account of Springsteen’s eulogy for Clemons.

While the profile is very much about loss, it’s also about commitment and inspiration. Springsteen is a vibrant artist, in great shape, and fiercely thoughtful and engaged in his work.

Remnick writes, “The ultra-sincere interchange between Springsteen and his fans, which looks treacly to the uninitiated and uninterested, is what distinguishes him and his performances. Forty years on, and an hour before going onstage yet again, he was trying to make sense of that transaction.” You really have to just read the profile; there’s just not a good way to summarize it.

Except for that photo, which captures part of it for me.

That issue was still on my desk, open to that photo, when I came across Bill Wyman’s reflections on Michael Jackson’s legacy (Dec. 24 & 31, 2012).

Michael Jackson would have been 55 this year. There’s less inspiration to find in his life, but there is certainly plenty to reflect on. (This was another of those New Yorker “book reviews” that seems more like an excuse to write an essay.)

I appreciated the broad context, which considers his life as the embodiment of the challenges of being a “crossover artist:” “Jackson had become the biggest black star ever, in part by shedding the conventional images of blackness.” One could understand some of his inexplicable choices in that context, or his strange family situation. Or one could simply look on with sympathy.

But Wyman also reminds us why we care in the first place. “That any aspect of his career had been neglected seems hard to believe, and yet Jackson may be the most underappreciated pop songwriter of his era.”

I certainly underappreciated his music — how could you appreciate it properly, if you weren’t 12 anymore and could understand all the crazy news stories? Part of the weird concoction of feelings that swept the country at his death was relief. We could finally, un-ironically and without guilt, love his music. Just as I did when I was a kid and my parents unwrapped our copy of the best-selling album of all time.

So why has this pair of articles haunted me?

It’s not often that a youthful memory is confronted point-blank with the complex and unexpected things that life does to us, or that we do to ourselves. This could have been a simple morality tale of rock stars making good and bad choices. But Remnick’s poignant images of Springsteen aging and coping with loss, plus Wyman’s sensitive portrait of Jackson, make it a lot more complicated, and a lot more interesting.

JR just completed his first  installation in DC:  A paste-up mural called “I am a man.” It uses imagery from the civil-rights movement, and is by an intersection that was one of the flash points of the movement here in DC. The Washington Post has an interview and photo gallery.

If you’re in town, check it out at 14th and T streets NW.

First, the tone of the whole issue was unaccountably defensive. The cover art, “Crashing the Gate,” was kind of cute and clever, but the attitude seeped into the entire issue in a way that was just distracting. A dear friend who is a professor of contemporary American fiction said it this way:

I admit I was a little disappointed to see this attitude still hanging around; it gets in the way of actually doing cool things in SF when you have to keep backtracking to explain why it’s okay to do anything at all.

Speaking of backtracking, that’s my second complaint. The whole issue felt trapped in the past. Ray Bradbury. Ursula K. LeGuin. Margaret Atwood. Even William Gibson. Trailblazers of the genre to be sure, but…not the life of it today, I hope. The reminiscing by these familiar voices just reminded me why I had grown away from science fiction.

But mostly, I missed the insight I had been seeking most — what does the genre have to offer today?

In writing about science fiction while I was in college, I concluded that it’s a powerful way to take trends that are top-of-mind and extrapolate them into the distant future. The best science fiction not only tells a great tale, it explores the question, “What kind of world are we building?” Whether we actually get to that world isn’t the point. It’s a powerful thought experiment, and a channel for criticism.

For example, in the 1960s, Isaac Asimov was imagining  life on far-away planets, each with a different form of government. He also explored the growing complexity around the intelligence and human-like function of machines. (Hmmm. I suppose you could say the same of Star Trek…)

In the 1990s, Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson’s characters confronted a world where corporations and international governing bodies rendered national governments insignificant. Plots might take us as far as the moon, but distant planets no longer figured in. Stephenson and Gibson also imagined lives lived “jacked in” — online — as much as in the physical world.

So what does tomorrow look like to today’s writers? From the short fiction pieces, I have no idea. And sadly, I’m not particularly inspired to find out. Jennifer Egan’s story “Black Box” was the most arresting of the bunch, but I didn’t find out until just this minute that it was meant to be tweeted. Clever, especially since it fits with the form of the story (but a little less so because the writer doesn’t actually use Twitter). But that plus combating terrorism or strange diseases isn’t really enough to make me run out and buy books.

The only material that stuck with me after closing the magazine was the amazing collection of illustrations by Brendan Monroe that accompanied Egan’s story. I’ll end with one of them, since they seem to me much richer than the words.

Deities can actually own property in India, though the law treats them as minors and they must be represented by an official guardian.

The differences don’t stop there. The center of this piece is the story of a temple that could hold treasure almost beyond imagining — and the general resistance to unlocking the doors that might conceal it.

In spite of the area’s poverty and the immense riches already found in the temple, local sentiment seems to be to leave well enough alone. Halpern also introduces a smaller, parallel story, common in India: A historian shows him a box he inherited. His grandfather had kept his most valuable possessions in it. The historian had not opened the box.

I’ve always considered the urge to open things to be a general human trait. Any five-year-old knows, two minutes into the story, that Pandora will open that box, or that Bluebeard’s wife will unlock the forbidden door.

But maybe the inability to keep things shut isn’t a general trait. After all, the Westerners who created these stories were immigrants and settlers, people who, for one reason or another, couldn’t leave an acre unexplored (or unexploited). Maybe we are culturally  – and, possibly, genetically — predisposed to open boxes.

Just like the tales of Chinese people meeting the challenges of modern life, I love the possibilities this idea opens for a world  that’s different from the one we have today.

Evan Osnos’s piece “The Love Business,” from this spring, is a perfect example why I love these stories. It looks at how a newly mobile, modernizing society grapples with dating: “…for vast numbers of people, the collision of love, choice and money was a bewildering new problem.” We learn that Chinese can search for a match by blood type, that the new ability to own real estate has skewed the marriage market, and that many dating sites offer rigorous anti-counterfeiting options.

Osnos closes the piece with one of the four hundred thousand young Beijing men caught up in this mess. His name is Wang. He’s the first in his family to migrate to the city. You just have to root for him when he shares “fragile news” about a budding romance.

I similarly enjoyed watching Chinese tourists take a bus tour of Europe (“‘We flew all the way here, let’s make the most of it.’”) and seeing the growing Chinese interest in wine. (“Translating the full Western culture of wine into Chinese has produced erratic results.”)

In all these tales, millions of people respond to rapid change with a blend of tradition and entrepreneurship that’s constantly surprising.

But let’s go back to cars. My favorite “China meets the new century” piece is “Wheels of Fortune,” which Peter Hessler wrote in 2007. His opening line: “The first accident wasn’t my fault.”

Millions of adults are getting behind the wheel for the first time in their lives, and the results are somewhat predictable. But not entirely. My favorite innovation: The way ad hoc juries form at the site of a crash, determining fault and compensation on the spot.

Maybe that’s why I am so drawn to these Letters — they inspire hope of a chance that someone will figure out better ways to handle modern life than we’ve managed here.

In the original piece, “The English Wars,” Joan Acocella wrote about a recent entry in the class-laden war between the prescriptivists (“One must use this word this way!!”) and descriptivists (“But here’s how people actually use this word!”). She closes by telling us that both sides are moving toward the center. But she apparently based her conclusion on a pair of misreadings.

She looks at two essays that open the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, bastion of prescriptivism. She characterizes John R. Rickford’s essay as “prescriptivism — no doubt about it.” And she places Steven Pinker’s essay on the other side of the divide: “So the prescriptivists are witch-hunters, Red-baiters.” She goes on to call the AHD self-contradictory and cowardly. Ouch.

I don’t own that particular dictionary, and even if I had, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to double-check her reading of it.

So I’m glad I saw what followed in the letters. Pinker’s response is withering. He says he started from the premise that there are rules, “My goal was to…distinguish bogus rules of usage from defensible ones.” And he’s not particularly nice about her missing of his intended point: “It is like reading an explanation of global warming and mounting an indignant defense of greenhouses. Acocella shoehorns her misunderstanding into the hoary narrative…”

As if that weren’t enough, Rickford’s response appeared in the next issue. He objected to his essay being called prescriptivist: “But the ‘systematic rules and restrictions’ that I referred to in my essay were descriptive…meant to counter the common misconception that variation in vernacular and other varieties of everyday language is random or unsystematic.”

The combination of those two objections might sum up to the same point Acocella was trying to make, but that can’t excuse her fundamental errors. It’s like a math student subtracted instead of adding, but then reversed the signs and came up with the right answer anyway. One can’t argue with his correctness, but one also can’t have much confidence in his math skills.

I said last week that I like when New Yorker critics use a selection of books or other artifacts to make original comments on the broader cultural moment. Of course, stepping into the broader critical role raises the bar for the writer to neutrally and accurately read the material from which she builds her arguments. Acocella lost my confidence on this one.

For the April 9 issue, R. Kikuo Johnson drew a series of people wearing hoodies.

Whatever we end up thinking about the Trayvon Martin case, I’ll remain impressed with the quick and creative response through illustration.


I totally fell for the little old guru who didn’t like the chairs he tried, drawn by Christoph Abbrederis,  May 21 issue. I’m small, too, so chairs designed for 6-foot-tall guys leave my feet swinging in the air or my back a foot from the back of the chair. In the guru’s case, however, only a bed of nails would do…


The May 28 issue featured an oddly compelling alien workday by Philippe Petit-Roulet. A blob-ish humanoid appears to arrive at work, sit in a cube, go to a meeting.

He confronts some kind of machine I couldn’t decipher, and flees home exhausted. (If you know what that was, explain??)


Finally, the Science Fiction issue on June 4 & 11 featured a creepy story about a robot that got set up, by Otto Steiniger. Poor little guy! The series stood out to me for the complexity of its story and its striking use of color; both are still unusual in Spots.

Let’s start with covers that caught my attention:

March 19. This one by Ivan Brunetti is just…sweet. Young couple, partly painted apartment, picnic on the floor. Just the right amount of detail, like the blue tape and can of spackle.

It reminded me of a friend telling me about just such a picnic that he and his wife had on the floor of their first house in Park Slope — takeout and champagne.

And, it’s called “Warmth.” Awww.

April 23. Frank Viva’s cover “The Joys of the Outdoors” perfectly captures my experience of spring. Budding leaves, delicate cherry blossoms, crisp air, the hint of longer days. So much to savor.

Alas, I suffer from spring allergies. So for me, all this loveliness comes with itchy eyes and non-stop sneezing. In early spring, I wake up every morning wondering if this is the day I’ll need to start popping pills.

May 7. Embedded in this cover by Chris Ware are a deceptive number of potential stories.

I saw commentary on the trend of stay-at-home dads and their struggles fitting into what has been a mom-focused world. Eric read it more specifically as a mom hoping for the company of other moms and being disappointed.

And it’s another story when you see the title: “Mother’s Day.”

June 25. Finally, “June Brides” by Gayle Kabaker, which is my  favorite of the lot.

I’m a sucker for a color palette of grey-blues and deep reds or oranges (as you might know if you’ve walked in the front door of my home). And I love the rough textures and blocky shapes against the intricacy of the lace and the bouquet.

But it’s not just a lovely image. It also exemplifies how the best New Yorker covers provide a prominent platform for artists to use their work to comment on the events of the day.

Some of you have noticed my long blogging silence. This spring and summer, my life was taken over by several big projects that all hit at once. I’m almost recovered! And to mark my re-entry into New Yorker-land, I wanted to share a bit about one of the projects.

I’ve written about the installation as a whole elsewhere. In short, the installation explored the interface between the digital and physical worlds. As part of it, I incorporated my favorite New Yorker articles about digital communications.

The selections were meant to represent the whole range of formats in the magazine:

Cover, “Loading,” was the only option for this collection. It’s part of the anniversary series of Eustace Tilley, so it combines a longstanding magazine tradition with modern apps. Plus, I love cover art that I know the name of without looking.

Talk of the Town: “Life and Letters,” about the slow decline of the writing letters. I wrote about this when it was published in January, and it fit nicely in an installation that is somewhat nostalgic about physical communications.

Personal History: “Follow that cab!“ about a GPS-enabled hunt for a lost iPad. Again, this caught my fancy when it was published, and I figured a short, amusing piece might actually get read as people wandered by.

Shouts & Murmurs: “God’s blog.” I am not a fan of Shouts & Murmurs; I rarely make it through, which is saying something since they’re usually a page and a half long. But I loved how this one captured the tone of online discussion, right down to spam about discount designer shoes.

The Romance Department: “Looking for Someone,” in which we get the world of online dating in both historical and contemporary context, one of the things that the New Yorker does best. The best bit was too far down in the article to make it onto the wall,  in which Nick Paumgarten characterizes each dating site as though it were a person trying to get dates. (This is the one article that I am sure actually got read on the wall, by a friend who was annoyed that it cut off before the end!)

A Critic at Large: “The information,” is a good example of what I think of as a faux-review, a piece that purports to be, say, a book review, in which the critic mostly makes his own arguments. I wrote about this one earlier, too, in the post “Books that explain why books no longer matter.” Again, I thought the mixed feelings about the digital world were perfect for the installation.

I was pleased with how easy it was to come up with this mix of formats and angles, and thought it showed the New Yorker‘s work to good advantage. Are there any others you would have included?

Caro has written extensively about LBJ, and all of it is in what I think of as my historical blind spot — that awkward period that was too recent to covered in high school history, but still before I was born. I learned more about Renaissance Italy than about the presidential assassination that shaped the political scene of my childhood.

But I gather that even for those who lived that day, this is fresh perspective. The Week has a nice summary of five revelations from the excerpt, including that LBJ thought his career was over. I guess so much attention goes to the charismatic, martyred president that not much thought gets spared for the guy who took his place.

Caro’s real-time recounting of events is realistically disorienting. Of that day in 1963 in Dallas, a Secret Service agent said, “We didn’t really know what was happening.” The governor had been shot, as well as the president, and the Secret Service didn’t know if other officials were  targets, too. It brought back my own memories of Sept. 11, 2001. We know so well now that four planes were taken, it’s easy to forget that for a while, we thought it could be a lot more.

And the way Caro brought together different narrative threads really worked for me. I had to feel bad for the guy who used to be “Master of the Senate” and thought he had ruined his career with bad decisions. But even though I felt for him, I was taken aback by some of his actions and words that morning.

I was left with a vivid picture of a real person, and I’m still not quite sure what to think of him.